By Benjamin Treadwell · Contributing Writer
Children’s theater is on a roll! Last year, they had a splendid performance of “Honk!” and this year they presented a delightful production of “Hello, Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle!”
The show is an adaptation of beloved short stories from the 1950s, in which Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle, the neighborhood “fairy” godmother, helps parents deliver commonsense and/or magical cures for common childish vices. The adaptation to the stage condensed the timeframe of six stories and added a musical number to each story.
And what an adaptation it was! As a childhood reader of the stories, it was truly wonderful to see how well the actors brought the characters to life. Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle was magical and delightful and unexpectedly talented in all the right directions. Each character from the six vignettes — even as part of the musical ensembles in other vignettes — simply were their characters whenever they were onstage. The animal characters were admirably presented and portrayed (which I’ll return to later). The musical numbers were the perfect tool for moving the stories through their dramatic arcs in a compressed timespan.
The individual cures were hilarious, poetic-justice solutions to the kids’ vices. We watched, smiling, as a boy with terrible table manners learned practical etiquette from the genteel pig Lester and a clumsy girl found her balance with some dance magic from Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle. We laughed as a girl’s rude answering back got held up in the tough-truth mirror of the saucy Penelope Parrot. We nodded when a chronic daydreamer got to share his dreams, but we were also urged to think of life with more wonder and moved to pondering as Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle helped a fraidy-cat see that shadows just remind us that there is a light.
And we all rocked along to perhaps the most memorable segment,“The Radish Cure,” which featured the most impressive singing and the most impressive costuming. Patsy wouldn’t bathe, and so her increasingly deep layer of topsoil received a copious quantity of radish seeds. These spectacularly sprouted onstage and proved the virtue of not loving dirt once and for all.
One key contributor to the whimsy and magic of the show was Anna Wolcott. I interviewed her and learned the technique and philosophy behind all the marvelous costuming in this play. According to her, based on her experience with “Honk!,” it was better to create the impression of the animal and its personality through outfits than to try to create an animal suit and “get too animal.”
Thus, for Penelope, she chose a pirate outfit — perfect for creating the impression of a parrot, especially if this pirate costume included some added feathers and featherish layers. She chose a mud-brown tweed suit and a brown bowler hat with ears for Lester the Pig, expertly conjuring the gentleman hog.
Anna also succeeded masterfully with Patsy’s outfit — first clean, then filthy, then sprouting radishes, then finally clean again — all in the span of 10 minutes. She used layered costuming and some artfully concealed magnets (and possibly Velcro, given the sound effects) to produce her stage magic.
The show undeniably succeeded, and, according to senior director Tessa DiGuglielmo, despite last-minute changes, cuts and a three-show grind of a day, everyone still got to do their best scene and song.
All said and done, I think the children’s theater show this year was very much a success, from song-and-dance numbers and costuming to special effects. If you went, you know that you couldn’t help but post a notecard of praise for the cast and crew on the corkboard. If you didn’t attend this year, I can only say that you missed a whole bundle of free-admission fun.
