ROGUE REVIEW: All's Red That's Riding Hood
I can't recommend All's Red That's Riding Hood, an original play by Terrance V. McArthur that won the Woodward Shakespeare Festival's 2007 Playwright Competition. Conceived as a cross between a fractured fairy tale and a riff on Shakespearean tragedies, the play gives us a different perspective on the traditional Riding Hood tale. This time the Wolf is an exiled nobleman named DeWolf (played by James Sherrill) and Red Riding Hood (Alicia Buss) an opinionated near-adult who is quick to judgment. Written in blank verse, the play draws allusions to other fairy tales as well and then squeezes in a "Romeo and Juliet" motif.
Sherrill is well-cast physically in the role with his imposing height and long, flowing hair, and he offers a nice hint of the hurt and vulnerability that De Wolf feels within. Buss, as Riding Hood, has a strong stage presence and handles the blank verse nicely, while Randi Saul-Olson, as the Grandmother, injects some liveliness into the production with her character's brazen declarations. (It turns out that Grandma has, well, a little drinking problem.)
There are glimpses of provocative themes in the play, including the inevitability of stereotypes and the imposing hand of fate. But the production itself, directed by Heather Parish, remains mostly inert on stage, with characters trapped in strangling soliloquies and the storyline never really taking us anywhere fresh and exciting.
The danger of fractured fairy tales is that they've been done so many times before, from Sondheim's "Into the Woods" to even the movie "Shrek," that the genre is a little worn. The hybrid attempt here at twisting a well-known storyline and commenting on Shakespeare's tragedies just doesn't work.
Playing: 6:15 p.m. Saturday 3/1, 2:30 p.m. Sunday 3/2, 7:30 p.m. Friday 3/7, 2:30 p.m. Saturday 3/8 at The Severance Building, 1401 N. Wishon Ave. Cost: $7. Rating: PG-13.
Comments:
I WILL recommend this play - especially to those who are conversant in the actual Shakespearean tragedies.
I'm not going to quibble with the Bee's reviewer: I think the staging was overwhelmed by the large "black box" style curtains and the lack of set pieces, but I thought the fracturing of Grimm's fairy tales and homage/satire of the Bard's tragedies was a great idea...and one that McArthur as playwright handled in a superior manner.
"All's Red..." isn't just a send up of the little red riding hood story - there is plenty of comic fodder from other fairy tales as well. When the wolf asks the audience what he should do now that he's been exiled from the "deWolf" family, he muses that his time may be well spent blowing down houses of straw and brick (Three Little Pigs) or tempting shepherd buys to call out in alarm (The Boy Who Cried Wolf). Additionally, it's not just "Romeo and Juliet" that finds its way into "All's Red" - it's also "Hamlet", "Macbeth", "King Lear" and "As You Like It".
People who enjoy a play that provides lots of "a-ha" moments (those moments when you recognize the "inside joke") or the obscure reference will find plenty to like here.
Posted by: jayparks at March 3, 2008 4:24 PM
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