Viva el gato en sombrero! Apparently, Memphis audiences just can’t
get enough of that Seussical stuff, which is something of a
miracle when you consider that when it debuted in 2000, the ambitious
Dr. Seuss musical nearly transformed the world’s most famous feline
into rank road kill in a red-and-white-striped hippie hat. The original
production was conceived on a massive scale and combined characters,
locations, and plot elements from more than a dozen or so of Theodor
Geisel’s most beloved stories. And it didn’t survive too long on
Broadway, either. Reviewers trashed it and called it a snore; some
viewers thrashed it and thought it a bore. It was badmouthed and
trashmouthed and called consonantal. It couldn’t even be saved by Ms.
Rosie O’Donnell.
The most common diagnosis provided for the show’s critical and
commercial failure was that Seussical, while colorful,
thoughtfully scored, and based on tried-and-true source material, was
also an unfocused mess, crammed with too much Seussishness for anyone’s
comfort. Although his imagination could be baroque, Geisel was
essentially a minimalist. The original Cat in the Hat was
written as an exercise for young readers and only uses 236 mostly
monosyllabic words, so it’s not hard to imagine how Dr. Seuss’ simple,
delightfully strange imagery was swallowed whole by the glitz and
sizzle of a Broadway megamusical.
The show has since been recut, re-arranged, and turned into a
serviceable, not entirely uncharming little one-act focusing almost
entirely on the stories Horton Hears a Who! and Horton
Hatches the Egg, with brief forays into Yertle the
Turtle, How the Grinch Stole Christmas!, Green Eggs
and Ham, and I Had Trouble Getting to Solla Sollew.
There’s a lot to like about POTS’ Seussical and perhaps even
a lot to love. But there’s plenty to loathe too, especially if you’re a
purist and don’t want anybody messing with the shape of your childhood
memories.
Andrew Moore provides a hangdog take on Horton, the philosophical
pachyderm who can save an entire planet full of microscopic people but
can’t save himself from being conned into hatching an egg for a
brightly painted bird that would rather have fun. Kim Baker is even
more beguiling and tragic as Gertrude McFuzz, a less than fancy bird
who loves Horton but can never seem to catch his eye. As the Sour
Kangaroo who’s out to prove Horton a fool, Jennifer Henry makes the
most of Seussical‘s gospel-tinged score. Courtney Oliver, POTS’
able Jane-of-all-trades, has lovingly remounted director Gary John La
Rosa’s frenetic, whimsically theatrical staging.
On the other hand, it’s more than a little disconcerting that the
Wickersham Brothers are costumed as though they were part of a gay
minstrel show, in broadly stereotypical black leather pants, bar vests,
and motorcycle hats. Just as I started to think I might be a
dirty-minded so-and-so reading more into the costuming than was
actually there, out came the banana-shaped microphones. Adults will
giggle, and the kids will only see it as fun. But c’mon, people. What
happens in Tuna, Texas, really should stay in Tuna, Texas.
On this rare occasion, Rebecca Powell’s costumes are never much to
get excited about. The colors pop out against Bruce Bergner’s
magnificent white-on-white set, but the nonrepresentational outfits are
seldom Seussesque and never quite imaginative enough to spark the
imagination.
Bergner’s icy set reflects every color of the spectrum and is
another matter entirely. Using nothing but a jagged squiggle of a stair
unit, a pair of dangerously angled ladders, and a tree made from an
upside-down ceiling fan, Bergner forces the imaginations wide open with
austere silliness and a dash of horror.
And what of the Cat in the Hat? A manic, rubber-faced Eric Duhon
gets everything just about right. But this isn’t really the Cat’s show.
Even as a narrator he seems superfluous: a dangling, vaguely menacing
trademark bouncing and prancing across the stage.
Through January 11th at Circuit
Playhouse