THE HUNTING OF THE SNARK
While audience appreciation is not necessarily the best gauge of quality–e.g. Andrew Lloyd Webber’s The Phantom of the Opera–there’s clearly something wrong with a version of The Hunting of the Snark that gets nary a laugh. Some kids may take to the show’s edgy hyperactivity, but the delicious verbal wit that makes the poem fun to read is hopelessly lost, partly because of inconsistent articulation by the actors but mostly because of the way Pickering (a very gifted actor here making his directorial debut) buries the verse under a ton of colorful but messy activity and visual effects that look like leftovers from Michael Maggio’s misshapen A Midsummer Night’s Dream, in which Pickering starred last season at the Goodman.
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In the midst of all this defeat and disillusionment, there’s one notable success: the unlikely friendship that develops between the Butcher and the Beaver. Since when the trip begins the Butcher admits the only thing he can kill is beavers (in Pickering’s staging the Butcher wields a pretty scary-looking beaver cleaver), their emerging comradeship–pure and faithful and everlasting–is a major moral victory; it’s hard not to see the relationship as Carroll’s metaphor for “that tenderest joy, the heart-love of a child” in which he found solace from the stupidities and cruelties of the world.
