Assuming the kids have been left at home, what thinking adult does not want to take a few shots at the princess club?
The whole princess phenomenon began as a way to juice extra revenue out of the Disney backlist. There's a credible case for exposing youngsters to Cinderella and Sleeping Beauty and the rest if they're enjoyed in the context of their original stories, but when the heroines are forcibly removed by their owners and stuck on some theme-park fashion runway, that case evaporates. Some of us were champing at the bit to see Redmoon Theater deconstruct the pernicious pressures on girls to be both naughty and nice, rather than just themselves.
The resultant new show -- "The Princess Club" -- has its head and heart in the right place. But it's a disappointment.
Over the last year or two, the visuals at Redmoon have only grown in sophistication -- and Andrei Onegin's design for this show is exceptionally cool. The visual motif here is an abandoned warehouse -- where princesses escape their packing cases and play out their own stories with each other, often with highly imaginative, puppet-driven versions of the classic fairy tales. And the conceptual artist Jim Lasko also has become highly adept at working with musicians. This show has an assertively diverse and original score from The Bitter Tears.
But the storytelling? Oy.
The young actors' ability to take a human command of their conceptual world and connect emotionally with an audience? Practically non-existent.
These twin problems have persisted in Redmoon's most recent productions and they need to be fixed. This beloved company is a Chicago treasure. When you've developed such a distinctive and brilliantly executed visual vocabulary, there's no reason to keep running away from engrossing narrative and clarity of idea. Redmoon shows should land in an audience's lap -- clearly, emotionally, viscerally. The story and the human performances need the same polish as all the effects. Currently, it's night and day.
And thus if you see this loose show cold -- without reading the concept statements -- I think you'll struggle to follow its point.
Perhaps Redmoon took on too much when it went after Snow White and Lindsay Lohan -- maybe they each needed a show. But the main problem here is that a piece all about the manipulations of pop culture actually has no point of entry in reality. There's no real girl on whom these tales are wrought.
The princesses -- played by Kasey Foster, Judith Lesser, Molly Plunk, and co-director Vanessa Stalling -- are one-dimensional grotesques with misshapen bodies (they bulge with padding). I suspect that's a comment about body image, but we're still left with figures that seem removed from the subject. And we don't care about them. Lauren Sharpe, who plays a more normative princess seemingly indoctrinated into this rambling, meandering world, at least makes some sort of dramatic progression over the 85-minute running time. Sharpe has the beginning of a truthful connection, the start of a human thread that could sustain a show still stuck in a not-so-easy-bake oven.
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"The Princess Club"
When: Through Oct. 7
Where: Redmoon Central, 1463 W. Hubbard St.
Running time: 1 hour, 25 minutes
Tickets: $15-$30 at 312-850-8440
Copyright © 2007, The Chicago Tribune
