Charlotte's Web, EB White's famous children's story, is a romance about a piglet, Wilbur, saved from the farmer's axe by a spider, Charlotte. It's also about death and a kind of resurrection. When Charlotte dies, Wilbur makes sure her 514 babies are safely hatched.
At first blush this hardly sounds like musical material for the school holidays but, says John Alsford, have no worries. Alsford is this summer's director for Phoenix Players of Charlotte's Web - Some Musical! He has created a show which is an entertainment for young and old, and - in the Phoenix community theatre tradition - a wonderful experience for the 27 children and grown-ups in the cast.
In 1952 New Yorker Elwyn Brooks White published the original Charlotte's Web, promptly dubbed by the US Children's Literature Association "The best American children's book of the past two hundred years", and praised by one critic for its "liveliness and felicity, tenderness and unexpectedness, grace and humor and praise of life". Alsford has aimed to bring all this to the stage through music, dance and song in an Australian style. The core directing team - Alsford, musical director Susan Davenport and choreographer Elissa Singer - have re-worked the American script, giving their show a local feel, especially in the humour, which counter-balances some of the sentimentality which can be attached to a story of American farm life.
Alsford sees working on the musical as a maypole dance. The music is the strong central fixed point, interpreted in the dance and the songs, holding the dialogue and storyline together. This is the opposite to many productions where the music is an add-on to the storyline, but the advantage is that from the beginning of rehearsals 4 months ago all the children and adults on stage have been actively working together, especially to create the dance sequences. This has also allowed Alsford, now a veteran of 12 years' work with Phoenix (a veteran indeed of Blue Folk where he was first directed by Dominic Mico in 1979) to focus on helping his young choreographer, 16-year-old Elissa Singer, to find ways of translating her original dance ideas into movement sequences which can work successfully for performers of different ages and experience.
This approach is just what Charlotte's Web and Phoenix Players need. Like Warehouse Circus and other Canberra community theatres, Phoenix brings together diverse, especially young people and, in Alsford's words, "corrupts the kids into theatre - where they gain so much confidence, friends for life, and have such fun". He cites his own daughter, Annie, now a respected drama teacher in country NSW, as proof - and her one-time college boyfriend, Mark Truebridge. His career began as stage manager when Alsford directed Peter Pan at Hawker College, and today is a NIDA graduate, currently lighting director for opera houses in France and Germany.
Learning friendship and trust, and tolerance of difference, is the universal theme of Charlotte's Web. When speaking of the animal and even insect characters, Alsford points out that they are "invisible" to the adult humans. "They're like barmaids and hairdressers - like people who just do their job." Like himself, in fact, in his day job as Commonwealth driver. EB White makes the invisible non-entities of farm life into characters with the same humanity as the humans - oddly similar in idea to George Orwell's Animal Farm. White's animals, too, are aware of the conspiracy against them. Wilbur, the new piglet, is naïve as Sheep says "But you know why they want to make you fat and tender, don't you?" Fern, the farmer's young daughter is equally unaware. For children watching, it is through Fern's and Wilbur's awakening that they may come to understand what intolerance of difference means to the victims.
When presented as a musical, with both entertainment and new understanding in mind, this production reinforces feelings of community not just in the abstract but right before us on stage by one of our Canberra well-established community theatre groups, Phoenix Players.
Charlotte's Web - Some Musical! adapted by Joseph Robinette; music and lyrics by Charles Strouse; based on the story by EB White
Phoenix Players at Theatre 3, Ellery Cres., Acton
January 13 - 28
Evenings 7.30pm Fri 13, Sat 14, Thurs 19, Fri 20, Sat 21, Fri 27, Sat 28
Matinees 2.30pm Wed 18, Sat 21, Sun 22, Wed 25, Sat 28
Australia Day Thurs 26 at 11am and 3pm
Bookings: Ph 6257 1950
© Frank McKone, Canberra
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