Category: Theater

The Shoplifters is a quick, entertaining comedy set in an overstuffed back store room of a contemporary big box store. From the first scene, our sympathies are torn between the world-weary, savvy-enough Alma (confident Jane Houdyshell) and the idealistic apprentice security guard Dom (overwound Adi Stein) who has detained her for stealing a ribeye steak. Swimming in a uniform two sizes too big for him and suffering from a nut allergy, Stein’s frantic attempt to assert his authority is fun to watch.

Alma and Dom are mirrored in their respective pragmatism and frenzy by the dour Otto (Michael Russotto filling in for Delaney Williams), a senior security guard who’s just had a “you can’t fire me, I quit” conversation, and the leporine Phyllis (skittish Jenna Sokolowski), who has been recruited by Alma into her bit of Robin Hood larceny. Newly-hatched thief Phyllis finds a surprising number of places to conceal heisted baking ingredients on her slender frame.

We’re asked to consider “Who stole the American dream?” and the piece does give us something to chew on in that respect, inviting us to join the 99%; as a counterbalance, the play touches on the depersonalization of all economic transactions. Is it OK to steal if and only if you don’t see the person you’re stealing from?

At its heart, the work is an updating of that fine series of Looney Tunes featuring the sheepdog chasing the wolf all day and punching out when the whistle blows at the end of the shift.

Unfortunately, the script calls for a series of choppy scenes, all set in that store room and separated from one another by only a moment or two. And a momentum-breaking intermission is needed largely to do a little cleanup and to precisely position a key prop.

• The Shoplifters, written and directed by Morris Panych, Arena Stage Kreeger Theater, Washington

Qui Nguyen’s comedy of coming-out, She Kills Monsters, blurbs as a run-of-the-mill satire about geeky teenagers and their barely out of adolescence high school teachers, but it is uplifted by some exceptional stagecraft. Agnes, a milquetoast English instructor (the resourceful Maggie Irwin¹), comes across a Dungeons and Dragons scenario written by her younger sister Tilly (the commanding Rebecca Hausman), who has died too young in a car crash. To discover the withdrawn sister she never really knew, Agnes tumbles into the role-playing world of D&D, and much of the early comedy flows from this fish-out-of-water situation: when asked her affiliation alignment,² Agnes offers, “Well, I’m a Democrat.” On her quest for the lost soul of Athens (well, Ohio), Tilly’s characters appear in live action, dragging Agnes along with them.

It’s the outstanding fight choreography, designed by Casey Kaleba, that transforms this play. Working on a multi-level set by Ethan Sinnott inspired by Avalon Hill’s hexes, and in a in-the-round seating configuration in the Atlas’s Sprenger black box (with its sometimes unforgiving acoustics), Kaleba and stage director Randy Baker deliver lots of multiple simultaneous fights, good sight lines, a variety of weapons, and safety for all.

The play’s a hilarious smashup of pop culture references from the 1990s and places you can see from there. (Did Louis E. Davis’s evil, rams-horned Orcus just riff on Quantum Leap?) Naturally, in this estrogen-powered adventure (Orcus is the token guy on the quest), delicate fairies like Farrah (gymnastically executed by Emma Lou Hébert) turn out to be wicked badasses. And the final set piece, a dance-off between Agnes’s crew and a band of evil cheerleaders that escalates from Wham! (“Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go”) through the Spice Girls into En Vogue territory (“My Lovin’ [You’re Never Gonna Get It]”), is quite wonderful and fizzy fun.

• She Kills Monsters, by Qui Nguyen, directed by Randy Baker, fight choreography by Casey Kaleba, Rorschach Theatre, Atlas Performing Arts Center Paul Sprenger Theatre, Washington

And “Volcano Girls” for the curtain call!

¹ Thanks, Leta!
² Thanks, Brett!

Strong ensemble work in this somewhat vexing musical of art and perception by Stephen Sondheim: individual voices, well blended, especially in “Putting It Together.” The comic breaks are effective, particular Paul Scanlan’s salty Boatman in the first act and George’s (Claybourne Elder) “duet” of the two dogs in the park.

There’s a thoughtful conversation about permanence in the scene between George and his mother, Old Lady (Donna Migliaccio): what is merely “pretty” is subject to alteration; the perceiving eye is necessary to transform something, anything into being beautiful, and hence into something that lasts.

Nothing in Act 2 can match the majestic finale of the first (“Sunday”), and so the second half feels like a few comments on the first. But the vocal pianissimos, always harder to execute well than they seem, are well done.

• Sunday in the Park with George, music and lyrics by Stephen Sondheim, book by James Lapine, directed by Matthew Gardiner, Signature Theatre, Arlington

OTC and I both liked the nice touch of giving Jon Kalbfleisch’s orchestra its call via photographs projected with George’s chromolume screens.

Kathleen Akerley serves up another tasty, savory omelette of ideas, one so packed with themes that it would seem to spill off the plate.

What we seem to to have here is the story of six men, partners and paraprofessionals in a law firm, who escape the city to form an agrarian residence in the deep woods, a commune ruled by group votes and a collective job jar. I write “seem to have here” because one of the play’s emphases is the stretch between appearance and reality: one of the characters spends considerable effort to repaint their new home’s tables with a marbleized finish; at times, sounds are naturalistic and at others overamplified. And a seventh actor, sinister Jonathon Church, appears as multiple characters to disrupt the equilibrium of the group, threatening unusual rent increases and police inquiries. Is this a story of six guys who ran off to live in a treehouse, or a six rabbits in an experimental hutch? (The lawyers have taken on new nature-themed names, as in a monastic community, and one of them, Fiver/Fiber? [would that the web site had given us character names] brings to mind Watership Down.) The idea of the malevolent external manipulator is reinforced by various plot points involving the house’s dumb waiter (Mr. Pinter, your check is waiting for you).

Or is this a murder mystery, involving the death of a distinctly weird young lady (the flexible Kira Burri), with interrogations from Church as a police detective that read like questions in the monthly puzzle book’s logic problem? Burri is an oracular young lady who remains warm while dead and capable of moving about at will. Or, perhaps, is it an investigation of what it means to form and maintain a community? Does it naturally settle into layers in which some members are more equal than others (the play’s animal imagery is quite strong— Ravens, Mallards—and we hear echoes of Animal Farm throughout)? How does a flock of birds maintain its shape? How many make a group, and how many of them become a swarm?

Closely linked to this line of thought is the concept of the dictator who rises from the collective to become Brother No. 1, the Southeast Asian despot Pol Pot of the work’s title. Like Colonel Kurtz of Apocalypse Now (lurking in an image of a Willard-like submerged hippopotamus that powers an anecdote about an office copy machine), what drives a visionary community leader like charismatic Michael Glenn’s Frog to madness, knocking out the skylights and building a self-powered flying machine?

Or is it, as the closing dialog suggests, a story about the friendship between two men? We have Michael John Casey’s in-control/not-in-control Hector, ex-office manager. Who is Achilles, and who Patroclus?

With a scrambled timeline and multiple scene resets, the play calls for the ensemble cast to swap out bits of Elizabeth McFadden’s set repeatedly—and they even manage to turn some of these tasks of stagecraft into entertaining bits.

And then there is the thread of Tarot, with the ambiguity of reading the significance of each card in the deck, each image comprising its own reversal. As Hector hints, is our Fool, the man-child Séamus Miller, perhaps the one who is really in charge?

• Pol Pot & Associates, LLP, written and directed by Kathleen Akerley, Longacre Lea, Callan Theatre, Washington

Themes of this year’s selections include black-white race relations, death and dying, acceptance of the other, hard choices, gender issues—and indoor plumbing.

Chisa Hutchinson’s waspish comedy Dead and Beathing pits Carolyn (the fearless Lizan Mitchell), a wealthy woman weakened by a long-term illness and in hospice status, against her caregiver Veronika, an equally tart-tongued woman (the resourceful, pitch-perfect N. L. Graham). Carolyn, who has made no friends and many enemies in her life, needs Veronika’s assistance to accomplish a single task, one that might redeem both of their lives. Veronika, a ardently Christian woman of hidden talents (she prepares “the tastiest fucking omelette” with Gruyère and herbs for Carolyn), carries a secret that threatens to undermine their shared project. The setup is a bit perfunctory—Carolyn makes a too-hasty decision to get the action of the play moving and to keep it within the 90 minutes of real-time running. However, the moral dilemma that Veronika faces, one of money and life, is well-drawn, and good fodder for drive-home discussions with a theater companion.

One Night, a physically and emotionally violent drama by Charles Fuller, addresses the strains endured by soldiers fighting in the 21st century, chief among them the gnarly issue of gender integration within combat units. It’s told largely in a tangle of paranoid hallucinatory flashbacks, and the effect is appropriately disorienting, if perhaps a bit distancing. The here-and-now of the play is a hot-sheets motel somewhere on the West Coast where two Iraq war veterans on the run, Alicia (Kaliswa Brewster) and Horace (Jason Babinsky), seek shelter for the titular one night. Offstage voices (it’s the sort of cheap place with paper-thin partitions), alas, are only audible when it’s convenient to provide an impetus to the story. And a highway patrolman who turns out also to be a vet is too pat. But Fuller’s command of military lingo (his A Soldier’s Play is from 1982) is convincing, and his outrage is clear.

Some of the flashiest acting comes from Alex Podulke as Julian in Thomas Gibbons’ chamber drama Uncanny Valley, a science fiction drama of bioethics and life extension. Julian is a androidish construction being put together, part by part, by offstage engineers and being trained (cognitively, kinetically, and emotionally) by Claire (the quietly strong Barbara Kingsley). It turns out that Julian is being assembled for a mission, one for which Claire’s programming is only a substrate. Once Julian begins to execute that mission, the action of the play bogs down a bit, as these two skillful actors are left to tell us what transpires offstage. However, the challenges that Claire faces in her backstory, cognitive excursions on the part of her family members, throw some discussion-worthy highlights on to Julian’s narrative.

In a supporting interview, Gibbons says,

One of the things that’s interesting about [2001: A Space Odyssey] is the way that Hal, the computer, is more human than the astronauts. He acts almost irrationally. Throughout the movie, the human beings show very little emotion. They’re all corporate space travelers. Hal, even though he is just a lens and a red light, is the one that is more human.

The drama The Ashes under Gait City, by Christina Anderson, is sparked by the history of Oregon’s pre-Civil War exclusion laws; little discussed today and not repealed until 1926, the legislation was surprisingly effective at suppressing the population of African Americans. In 1860, there were but 128 among a total population of 52,645.

The play follows the charismatic Simone the Believer (Daphne Gaines), who uses social media to organize a tiny group of followers. Their mission: to disrupt the complacence of fictitious Gait City, Oregon and to make a home for the displaced and ignored. Gaines is commanding onstage, but she is even more effective in video projection: the twinkle in her eyes obscures the controlling, paranoid soul that is just discernible there. Willie E. Carpenter is charming as a socially inept mailman who joins the group and (quite conveniently) has mad hacking skills. The play’s violent climax doesn’t unfold the way we might expect, but it provides one cautionary example of how a cult can form. The revolution will not be televised, but it will certainly be YouTubed.

The weekend’s high point is Bruce Graham’s North of the Boulevard, an entertaining black comedy set (in this production) in a small city somewhere in the crotch of Pennsylvania. David M. Barber’s richly detailed, grunge-soaked set gives us Trip’s Auto, a neighborhood garage losing out to urban blight and chain competition from Pep Boys. There’s a grimy tool cabinet, practical lighted advertising signs, an Obama poster hiding a huge crack in the wall, and a blown-out lawn chair patched with a moving blanket.

What drives the play are the get-rich-and-get-out dreams of the proprietor Trip (the brooding, explosive Brit Whittle) and his friends Larry (Jason Babinsky again) and Bear (Jamil A. C. Mangan), and so it reminds us of A Raisin in the Sun. That is, until the three’s plans (which involve a theft of McDonald’s scratch-off game pieces and grisly insurance fraud) start to unravel à la American Buffalo. Mangan’s Bear, an African American security guard with a lot of time for self-education, a rich basso voice, and John McCain’s politics, engages in some George Jefferson-Archie Bunker sparring with the unloved Zee (Michael Goodwin, nevertheless endearing despite all the nasty stuff his character’s been up to).

Babinsky is astonishing as Larry, a stammering schlub of a guy who’s lost his house and is working as an orderly in a nursing home (skills that provide valuable to him in the end). Verbally abused by his crummy father Zee, burdened with a special-needs son, and naive enough to think that a petition drive will accomplish change in this corrupt burg, Larry has a comic Kenny McCormick moment where he seems to swallow the collar of his parka to tamp down his revulsion. When he’s particularly stressed, he judiciously squeaks into falsetto—Babinksy could give a master class on this accent note. With all that Larry’s endured, his first act “so long, Dad” (not exactly his words) aria is well-deserved.

• Contemporary American Theater Festival at Shepherd University, Shepherdstown, W. Va.
• The Ashes under Gait City, by Christina Anderson, directed by Lucie Tiberghien
• One Night, by Charles Fuller, directed by Ed Herendeen
• Uncanny Valley, by Thomas Gibbons, directed by Tom Dugdale
• North of the Boulevard, by Bruce Graham, directed by Ed Herendeen
• Dead and Breathing, by Chisa Hutchinson, directed by Kristin Horton

Gibbons’ play was inspired in part by the LifeNaut Project, whose Bruce Duncan spoke at the festival. It’s an intriguing, perhaps disturbing proposal. The flattening of personality that our current limited technology entails is distressing, but no doubt, at one time, the same was said of tintypes and wax cylinders.

Sutton Foster has chosen her next project well, the Broadway premiere of Tesori and Crawley’s Violet, which played off-Broadway in 1997. Violet (Foster), a young woman of the North Carolina mountains, travels by Greyhound bus across the South in 1964 seeking physical redemption. Her face disfigured by a scar (thankfully, left to our imagination) from a childhood accident, she is certain that a faith healer in Tulsa can restore her body. Indeed, this Preacher might grant her an entire suite of feminine attractions, as Violet sings in the entertaining “All to Pieces.” On her trip, she meets two servicemen, one white (charming Monty), one black (Flick, a bit hot-headed), and the trio bond quickly.

It will come as little surprise that the Preacher (energetically performed by Ben Davis) can do no such thing for Violet, although he puts on a much better show than the Wizard of Oz, with the second-half gospel barnburner “Raise Me Up.”

The story of Violet’s childhood and the accident that ended it is told in flashback, interleaved with the narrative of her Tulsa journey. Emerson Steele as Young Violet brings a twangy, innocent exuberance to her role. The details of the mishap are left ambiguous, whether to smooth out some of its creepier implications from the source material (Doris Betts’ short story, which I have not read), or just so that we can draw our own conclusions about how life’s misfortunes happen.

The score is an assemblage of various influences, as Anthony Tommasini has noted. It’s laudable that most of the song structures follow life’s sharp twists and turns, rather than falling into an intro-verse-chorus simplicity.

But the end of Violet’s journey (the one that doesn’t go from east to west but from heart to heart) is somewhat unsatisfying. The connection between the strictures against Violet’s scar and Flick’s skin color wasn’t earned, at least for OTC and me.

Nevertheless, the show it a great showcase for Foster’s clear, sweet voice and Broadway charisma.

• Violet, music by Jeanine Tesori, book and lyrics by Brian Crawley, based on “The Ugliest Pilgrim,” by Doris Betts, directed by Leigh Silverman, Roundabout Theatre Company, American Airlines Theatre, New York

Nicky Silver’s new comedy recapitulates many of his favorite themes: dealing with an overly controlling parent, self-medicating with food, discovering one’s true sexual orientation—whether this be “discovering” in the sense of finding or revealing. Audience favorite Linda Lavin appears in the role of Audrey Langham, a long-in-the-tooth veteran of the regional theater circuit who perhaps is ready to hang up her traveling shoes. Audrey’s retirement is at the expense of her daughter Kitty (Jennifer Westfeldt) and son-in-law Dennis (Ken Barnett), who are working through their own life crises during their annual getaway to their Long Island summer home. There’s a nice whiff of Blanche Dubois and Mitch in the relationship between the serially-married Audrey and the bemused neighbor Winston (the resourceful Richard Bekins). Of the relationships between the six characters of the play that unfurl, the one between Audrey and Winston is the most interesting, and sweet, and well played—and yet its resolution is the most unconventional.

Lavin has a deep toolbox of microexpressions that she puts to comic use during a fraught technical rehearsal of Medea that has her at wit’s end. And she shows us a lovely singing voice in a run-through of Weill and Brecht’s “Surabaya Johnny” that she alternately plays straight and for laughs.

• Too Much Sun, by Nicky Silver, directed by Mark Brokaw, Vineyard Theater, New York

A rose-colored scrim drapes the stage before each act of Act One, a dramatized version of Moss Hart’s memoir of becoming a playwright. The play, written and directed by James Lapine, is a big wet kiss to American theater of the 1910s and 20s. The Algonquin denizens make quick, funny cameo appearances; the first act closes with an uplifting view of Broadway marquees. Indeed, the narrative of the entire second act (and perhaps it’s not the strongest one) is whether and how Hart can find a way to write and rewrite his first well-supported production, Once in a Lifetime, into a successful New York show. Well, to paraphrase Hart, often life doesn’t follow the most dramatically urgent pattern.

Beowulf Borritt’s set, three levels on a revolve, is a stunner, with details that give the multiple locations of the story extra character: a stairway with a step down before you can go up; the framework of a New York rooftop water tank.

The story unfolds linearly, but it is framed as the reminiscences of an older Hart, played by Tony Shalhoub. Matthew Schecter plays Hart as a boy, but most of the work goes to the adorable Santino Fontana, who plays Hart as a young man. Fontana’s Hart never walks down the stairs when he can run; he is eager to volunteer for a job that he’s not ready for; sometimes his mouth runs away with his thoughts. Over the course of the play, his dialect shows Hart’s voice modulating from the rough working class English that his parents and playmates speak to the urbane tones of the mature Hart.

Shalhoub doubles as Hart’s abusive father Barnett, but he comes into his own as Hart’s collaborator, George S. Kaufman, all his tics and quirks on parade. Kaufman, pathologically concerned with hygiene, would go to any lengths to avoid shaking hands with someone; Shalhoub’s balletic avoidance maneuvers are a delight.

Andrea Martin does nicely with the three roles of Hart’s poor-relation aunt Kate (early encourager, nay enabler, of Hart’s budding interest in theater); Frieda Fishbein (Hart’s agent with a good dash of Edith Prickley); and Kaufman’s wife Beatrice, the quiet power behind the throne.

• Act One, written and directed by James Lapine, from the autobiography by Moss Hart, Lincoln Center Theater at the Vivian Beaumont, New York

Paul Morella shines as The Librarian in this gentle existentialist fable with just a dash of conspiracy theory. A naive provincial librarian in The Netherlands receives a Baedecker’s travel guide in the book drop, only to find that it’s overdue by more than a hundred years. Seeking an explanation for this mysterious return, he assembles a package of clues, which he presents to us as a chalkboard- and slide carousel-illustrated lecture.

The Librarian’s quixotic mission to reveal, to prove, to justify the existence of his quarry, working from no more than “the ephemera of a life” (tram tickets, police reports, laundry receipts) redeems his own life—and perhaps each of ours—from its more usual fate, the insignificance of an abandoned voice recording at a fair, bought and sold for 50 cents.

This thoughtful, spiritual piece also has its comedy: there’s a nice running gag about a certain juggernaut of a French musical that seems to be playing everywhere in the world simultaneously.

In this solo work, Morella does well with the multiple voices that are required to populate The Librarian’s lecture; however, his baseline Dutch dialect wanders a bit. Nevertheless, his engaging, bemused, slightly obsessive Netherlander bureaucrat is a pleasure to watch.

• Underneath the Lintel, by Glen Berger, directed by John Vreeke, MetroStage, Alexandria, Va.

Best courtesy reminder of the season: The Librarian enters the lecture hall with the house lights still up, straightens his presentation material, then writes on the chalkboard, “TURN OFF CELL PHONES.” He adds, “PLEASE.”

Two powerful solo shows played in the area over the past weekend, both of them responses to violence: in one case, large-scale mayhem that many of us would consider heroic; in the other, a small-group killing, inexplicable, that has deep emotional resonance.

Denis O’Hare is The Poet, a time-shifting tramp in a trenchcoat and porkpie hat (rather than one of Samuel Beckett’s bowlers), tumbled down the centuries to sing the story of Homer’s Iliad. The Poet’s song/riff is a blend of the original Greek, a verse translation, a bit of audience interaction and prompting, and a free adaptation into vernacular English. His memory failing, nevertheless the Poet can summon music and his Muses (skillful Brian Ellingsen on double bass and Milltone tongue piano) and can turn a clever phrase: “Athena tequila” is especially fun.

The piece focuses on the best-known incidents of Homer’s poem: the love between Achilles and Patroclus, Achilles’ great sulk, and the brutal killings of Patroclus and Hector. The Poet’s sentiments perhaps lie with the people of Troy, for although O’Hare’s voice is neutral when he embodies one of the Trojans, he adopts a loutish English dialect for the Greeks that owes something to Sicily or South Philly. The crux of this 100-minute monologue is a stupendous catalogue of wars known to Western history, for a thousand years an unbroken chain ending (for now) in Syria.

Speaking to us out of time as he does, when the Poet names the great cities destroyed by war, from Troy down to Dresden and Hiroshima, he briefly pauses, then moves on. Could it be that, Cassandra-like, he can see the next great devastation of the future, and knows (better than the Greek prophetess did) that it is pointless to share his vision with us?

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Nanna Ingvarsson’s task is no less challenging, as she personifies more than half a dozen people (many of them composites) connected to the 2006 mass murder-suicide at the West Nickel Mines School, a former Amish one-room schoolhouse in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania. From an innocent schoolgirl of six or seven, to a sassy supermarket clerk, to the tormented killer himself, Ingvarsson runs through a series of emotional and physical changes; Jessica Dickey’s script is a patchwork quilt of interlayered monologues (with a small debt to the Tectonic Theater Project’s own Laramie Project). The actor does well to focus on a specific, simple gesture for each speaker (a twirled bonnet string, a closed-off pair of folded arms) so that we keep our bearings as characters pop in and out.

The piece works best as a primer on the Amish perspective on the shootings. Rather than seek an explanation, a “why” of the violence, the community’s immediate response is one of of compassion, most notably toward the widow of the gunman. We hear the inspiring story of martyred Anabaptist Dirk Willemsz, who escaped from religious imprisonment across thin ice, only to turn back to rescue his pursuer who had broken through into the icy water. Is it possible that such a simple gesture of peace can forestall destruction?

• An Iliad, by Denis O’Hare and Lisa Peterson, based on Homer’s Iliad, translated by Robert Fagles, a Homer’s Coat project, directed by Lisa Peterson, Clarice Smith Center Kay Theatre, College Park, Md.
• The Amish Project, by Jessica Dickey, directed by Holly Twyford, produced by Factory 449, Anacostia Arts Center, Washington

Timothy Douglas’s cast brings home a strong, balanced production of August Wilson’s play set in 1969 Pittsburgh. Tony Cisek’s generously-proportioned set design, a rundown restaurant where the overhead fixtures haven’t been cleaned in a long time, gives the characters the opportunity to step forward to tell a story or to recede into the background as needed. There’s a rich texture to the lives of these people, as they go about their days, refilling salt shakers, playing solitaire dominoes to pass the time, or just eating a much-needed meal of beans and corn muffins.

Shannon Dorsey’s gimlet-eyed Risa rejects the appeals of the men around her, even as she knows she will end up tied to the charismatic Sterling (Ricardo Frederick Evans), a would-be revolutionary destined to serve petty sentences for petty crimes. Frank Britton gives comic relief Hambone a gravel voice and a ruined dignity. A great scene in a corner booth between the cranky old man Holloway (lanky Michael Anthony Williams with an expressive wingspan) and the louche numbers runner Wolf (stocky, stylin’ KenYatta Rogers in a red hat) crackles with energy.

• Two Trains Running, by August Wilson, directed by Timothy Douglas, Round House Theatre, Bethesda, Md.

An efficiently-told 57-minute version of the Tchaikovsky ballet, executed with a sort of “street puppetry” aesthetic in the confines of Flashpoint’s Mead Theatre Lab. The puppets Aurora, her suitor Florimund, the king and queen, and the two key fairies of the story are manipulated bunraku-style; the cast of eight doubles as live actors who fill in the roles of courtiers and the like.

If Aurora finds more than one pirouette to be a challenge, she does show remarkable hang time on her jumps. The transformation of the evil fairy Carabosse (she looks like a furry insect) into a dragon is quite fearsome.

The piece makes a good introduction to non-verbal storytelling for younger audiences; there were a few rapt youngsters with us on Saturday afternoon. A comic pair of courtiers break up the action with mischief and remind us that needles of any kind are not permitted in Princess Aurora’s home.

Arrive early to secure a front-row seat for the little ones; sight lines in this tiny black box are a challenge.

• Sleeping Beauty: A Puppet Ballet, directed by Matt Reckeweg, Pointless Theatre, Mead Theatre Lab at Flashpoint, Washington