The Adventures of Little Red Riding Hood
Presented by the Yale Children’s Theater through May 1 at Dwight Hall, 67 High Street, on the Yale campus. Produced by Ethan Jefferson and Kyle vanLeer. Written and directed by Deborah Garcia and Cassandra Kildow. Performed by Bianca Rodriguez (Little Red), Cooper Wilhelm (Wolf, Emily Howell (Hansel), Jessica Norton (Gretel), Joie Chen (Pigglesworth), Katelynn Clement (Piggy Sue), Dylan Morris (Pork Chop) and Deborah Garcia (Witch).
More genuinely troupe-like than a lot of the clicquey Yale undergrad theater groups, the Yale Children’s Theater has always had a finely calibrated anti-indulgence meter, which is what really sets them apart from a lot of their thespian classmates.
The YCT’s mission is to entertain children. They do this cleverly, with a careful guise of casualness, inspiring their young audiences to find the joy in theater. Their openness and friendliness is their hallmark. Each actor has a page of their own in the program, where they can put a game or puzzle. The cast sticks around after the curtain call to sign autographs and engage with the audience. These are wonderful traditions, and I’ve seen how well my own children respond to them.
I’ve seen at least half a dozen YCT shows in recent years. The Adventures of Little Red Riding Hood is one of the goofier ones, and they can get pretty goofy.
An appearance by Hansel & Gretel in the show’s first scene had me checking my program for the show’s title, but “Little Red” (who is off to grandma’s alone because “Mom is really busy writing legal briefs”) shows up soon after, pursued by a “wolf” in a lounge jacket and fur-eared fedora. In his anguished flight, Little Red finds herself aiding the three little pigs: Pigglesworth (the clever one), Piggy Sue (the vain girly one: “Don’t forget to moisturize!”) and Pork Chop (a calculator-punching geek who, when the wolf fails to huff and puff a brick house to smithereens, deems it “a victory for science!”). The wolf’s desire to devour Little Red turns out to be a misunderstand, and other acts of violence are similarly understated or lessened—fitting, considering that the show is performed in Dwight Hall, a venue associated with peace and social justice activities for over a century. Instead, there’s a dance-off between the good guys (“Dancing in the Streets”) and baddies (“The Monster Mash).
The staging is frantic, but clear. I once saw a Yale Children’s Theater show where Sherlock Holmes was conjecturing how a villain whom he had yet to catch pulled off a crime; while the detective spoke, the crime was reenacted in flashback. When Holmes wondered aloud how he might apprehend the fiend, a small child (sitting on the floor just a few feet from the actors, in the groundlings-type area that forms at all small-theater kids’ shows) started screaming, over and over “He’s right there! He’s over there!” Some staging techniques which are very effective in other genres of theater don’t fly at all in kids’ shows. Chaotic romps like this, however, are surefire.
Cosmic touches of Sondheim’s Into the Woods notwithstanding, this is definitely for very young audiences—my eight-year-old told me “Daddy, I think I’m getting too old for this” while my six-year-old hung on every word.
The final performances of Little Red Riding Hood (as the program calls it; on the website it’s just Little Red) are today, May 1 at 11 a.m. and 1 p.m. A nice follow-up activity might be the May Day celebration on New Haven Green, where local children’s theater impresario Roger Uilhlein will be tossing kids around on a mattress, certified clown/magician The Amazing Andy will perform, and there will be a May Pole ritual.