THE FIR TREE
Chi-Town Puppet Theatre
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
The Fir Tree is a rather bare little fable of the life and death of a Christmas tree: the sapling longs to grow up and learn more of the world, then regrets the loss of its idyllic youth (a message probably lost on most children). As adapted by James Engelhardt, however, The Fir Tree also becomes a parable about heroic fathers, widowed mothers, reverence for wildlife, preservation of the environment, and the inherent maturity of being good to others. The plot has been expanded so that the tree’s growth parallels the growth of young Erica, whose father died fighting a forest fire and who develops from an angry, selfish child into a kind, responsible young woman. Eventually Erica uses the knowledge she’s gained to save a forest tree from destruction by a careless blaze, an action that ties together several themes.
The result is a “children’s play” only in the sense that Sondheim’s Into the Woods is a children’s play: there’s enough densely packed material to supply several plays. The many auxiliary characters–woodland flora and fauna as well as two comic servants right out of Walt Disney, speaking in those impossibly exaggerated cartoon voices that should be banned from children’s theater–may represent an effort to “liven things up” for short attention spans, but they merely slow the action. If younger children grow restless, however, older ones are likely to appreciate the eminently tuneworthy music, sung with professional ease by Lara Filip as the tree, Mary Nesseler as Erica, and Lori Baur, Jeff Pohl, and Kay Frances as everybody else, to the equally professional guitar accompaniment of George Sawyn.
An inflexible taped sound track and the show’s several characters keep the three agile puppeteers–Jim Grote, Scott Swenson, and Cindy Tegtmeyer–busy, but their work pays off. The Snow Queen is fresh, unpretentious entertainment whose technical expertise will interest adults while its imagination amuses their children.
