One thing these two very different children’s theaters share is respect for their audience. They don’t talk down to the kids sitting before them, they don’t ludicrously overact or get synthetically hyperactive in order to whip up some energy. The scripts are witty, with gags that tickle the grownups too, and the performers take their jobs seriously – no sense of “I’m just doing this until a real acting gig comes along” – while actually having fun.
And their audiences love them.
Paintbox Theatre and NCT Kids also share a common history. Paintbox grew out of the children’s theater that storyteller Tom McCabe founded at the Mount Holyoke College Summer Theatre, and in 2003 became the kids’ adjunct to New Century Theatre, itself a Mount Holyoke descendant.
Two years ago Paintbox and NCT parted ways and the newly formed NCTKids took up the matinee slot in New Century’s Smith College venue. After a couple of seasons in makeshift accommodations at the Northampton Senior Center, Paintbox is trying out two venues this summer: the Williston Northampton School in Easthampton and the Shea Theater in Turners Falls.
Paintbox specializes in irreverent, lickety-split deconstructions of favorite stories, employing just three actors and constant audience participation. It’s half twisted tales, half comedy improv – an offbeat storytelling mosaic that also features on-screen art by local children, projections that invite the audience to shout out stage directions, a live-action sound-effects table, and kids brought onstage to help out with the action.
This year’s season began with Raggedy Ann and concludes next week with Peter Pan at Williston, with McCabe himself as Captain Hook. This Friday and Saturday, at the Shea, there’s The Great Race – the one between the tortoise and the hare. Kelsey Flynn, a mainstay of early Paintbox shows, has come out of retirement to play the nimble and arrogant “Highballin’” Hyacinth Hare, with Linda Tardif as sweet, poky Tammy (“The Tornado”) Tortoise. The racetrack is the entire periphery of the auditorium.
Troy David Mercier, in a lop-eared dog costume, is the race announcer and Connor Paradis wields things that go whistle, bang and pow at the sound-effects foley. The other day, as Hyacinth repeatedly dashed around the track in record time, temporarily losing the lead to Tammy when she paused (for a nap, a cell-phone check-in and a plug for her corporate sponsor) the kids – and parents too – spontaneously joined in as rooting fans. In the final lap, with slowpoke almost at the finish line and speedy hot on her tail, the room exploded with the lustiest unprompted hollering I’ve ever heard.
Where Paintbox thrives on direct audience involvement, NCTKids aims to create “a different experience,” as director Cate Damon told me after its first season – one that prepares youngsters for a lifetime of theatergoing as engaged spectators, “with the belief that children of all ages can be captivated by theater that is intelligent, thought-provoking and joyful.”
NCTKids’ specialty is small-scale musicals based on beloved children’s books, with musical direction by the ubiquitous Mitch Chakour. This year it’s A Year with Frog and Toad, drawn from Arthur Lobel’s popular early-readers about the friendship of two riverbank neighbors. It plays next Wednesday–Saturday mornings in NCT’s Theater 14 on the Smith College campus
This show has a more distinguished history than most plays for children. An off-Broadway hit in 2003, it moved to Broadway and collected three Tony nominations. With a script and score by Willie and Robert Reale, it’s the savviest, wittiest and most enjoyable kids’ show I’ve seen.
Damon’s production is likewise the tightest, liveliest and most professional in the troupe’s first three seasons. Frog and Toad are played by Kyle Boatwright and Myka Plunkett, both of them New Century veterans. Dressed like their literary counterparts in Twenties suits, they make a delightfully harmonious odd couple, Boatwright big and bumptious to Plunkett’s angular nonchalance. They’re both women, where Lobel’s heroes are male, but that’s neither referenced nor relevant, just good casting. And their racial difference – Boatwright is black, Plunkett white – serves as an unspoken nod to the characters’ interspecies friendship.
They are supported by the multitasking trio of Maya Rivera, Katie Sloan and Nichole Wadleigh. Among them they play a baker’s dozen animal friends who thread through the show’s series of small-scale adventures – mole, mouse, lizard, turtle, Frog’s relatives, a trio of migrating birds who sing Andrews Sisters harmony in flapper gowns, and my favorite, Rivera’s slo-mo postal worker who gives literal meaning to the term snail mail.
Oh yes, one more thing NCTKids and Paintbox have in common: After each performance, the actors scurry out to the lobby for up-close interactions with their young fans.
And that’s not all!
I haven’t caught up yet this season with the Majestic Children’s Theater, a program of the Theater Project in West Springfield. The company presents stage versions of children’s classics with an enthusiastic troupe of young performers directed by Stephen Petit.
This year’s roster includes a The Frog Prince: A Musical, an original adaptation of Frances Hodgson Burnett’s beloved A Little Princess, and the swashbuckling classic Treasure Island. Each of the three opened for a week’s run earlier this month, and they all return the first three weeks in August, playing Sunday through Wednesday.
Photos: Peter Pan, Jenn Burdick
The Great Race, Chris Rohmann
Frog and Toad, Rick Teller
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