THE CHALLENGE OF translating arguably one of the world’s most well loved stories, replete with fantasy and symbolism that reaches into the hearts of the crabbiest of grown-ups, is not to be sneezed at. Director Francois Theron has achieved something quite extraordinary in this production of Antoine de Saint-Exupery’s […]
WHAT WOULD YOU do if you discovered a great big cuddly lion with a penchant for roaring loudly at times of great emotion, in your local municipal library? This fabulous little yarn created by Michelle Knudsen and brought to musical life onstage under the directorial hand of Francois Theron […]
The utter madness of Roald Dahl’s 1960s runaway success involving a giant peach, a solution to the unhappiness of a small boy at the hands of revolting grown ups and an investment of hope in the future rickety and full of peach flesh though it may be, has […]
Armed with a couple of cardboard trees, some simple box-like structures and tiny reflections of buildings and cows, three able young performers tell what could easily be South Africa’s most romantic and beautiful tale, offering a trajectory that stretches from the idyllic rurality of Mvezo in the Eastern […]
Corrupting Noel Coward’s lyrics a bit but celebrating the intent of his 1947 song that warns a woman against putting her child needlessly on the stage, I cock a snook at the young mommies and daddies who bring their relatively freshly-hatched babies, still in swaddling clothes to the […]
A tonic replete with the heady charm of the 1920s, A Year with Frog and Toad is a fabulous paean to the value of friendship that will leave you with a smile in your heart, whoever you are. It’s a simple concatenation of Arnold Lobel’s sweet little stories, […]
Charles Dickens’s Oliver Twist is one of those stories that has been consumed by the children’s theatre industry, thanks in part to the eponymous West End and Broadway musicals of the 1960s featuring glorious songs by Lionel Bart. It’s also been deemed a children’s story because the main […]
Children’s theatre has the license to take the idea of soppy and stretch it to biblical proportions, which enables adults and children alike in the audience to cry with empathetic abandon, as the characters can declare love for one another with the kind of fierce naïve sentimentality that […]
Just when you think that you may have seen the Wizard of Oz – first brought to the silver screen in 1939 with a young Judy Garland in the starring role – enough times, along comes a production like this, bursting at the seams with the kind of […]
There’s a certain kind of magic that comes of nostalgia onstage; it needs to be nipped in the bud before it sinks into maudlin silliness or utter irrelevance. When grownup nostalgia is mixed with child audiences, the dangers are obvious: you could lose their attention in a slippery […]
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