What, no mouse?
No mouse, but the Arkansas Arts Center Children’s Theater has a bucketful of fun with the same story that gave Mickey Mouse one of his best roles. The Sorcerer’s Apprentice opened Friday night to a crowd of about 200 children and adults. Like a magic broom, it swept up.
The story is watered down from the 18th-century German poem by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. The wizard orders his apprentice to fill a tub. Instead, the young apprentice brings a broom to life by magic. The broom fetches water, but too much.
Walt Disney cast Mickey as the hapless apprentice in Fantasia (1940). He made the wizard a glowering threat, and these images have lasted ever since. The poem doesn’t describe much, though, giving playwright and director Keith Smith a tub to fill with his own cobwebbed set and brand-new creations.
He conjures up children’s theater stalwart John Isner as the sorcerer and high school sophomore Tanner Berry as the wizard’s bumbling helper. But their tale is a drop in the bucket compared to the new story that Smith introduces: how a petulant girl named Miranda (high school sophomore Sarah Nicholson) learns to love Halloween.
All that, and Smith’s hour-long stage adaptation, finds room as well for a Spider-Man spoof, zombies, Doctor Who time travel and some ingeniously costumed (by Nikki Webster) brooms.
Sissy Quaranta has one of the show’s best lines, explaining how a broom can have arms and legs: “I have been anthropomorphized. You can look it up later.”
In the old story, the sorcerer cleans up the trouble with a command of, “Back now, broom, into the closet!” (Sometimes, these things are easier than you expect.) But Smith complicates the soggy situation by calling on Miranda to work magic, who has no idea how.
The result keeps things up in the air for quite a spell.
The Sorcerer’s Apprentice continues through Nov. 10 at the Arkansas Arts Center Children’s Theatre in Little Rock. More information is available at arkarts.com, or by calling (501) 372-4000.
Arkansas, Pages 11 on 10/26/2013