The Ugly Duckling was a lovely theatrical experience Friday night at the Arkansas Arts Center Children’s Theatre in Little Rock’s MacArthur Park.
Children’s Theatre company member Katie Campbell “devised and directed” and adapted from the Hans Christian Andersen tale this story of a young girl who starts out as a duck out of water and eventually discovers the proper way to spread her wings.
She tells it as a puppet-shadow play, in which the back-projected shadow of the girl (Aleigha Morton) cunningly interacts with nearly 100 paper puppets (via a pair of overhead projectors), ably manipulated by actor-puppeteers Paige Carpenter and Rivka Kuperman. There’s no dialogue whatsoever; as though this were a silent film, a 15-piece “pit band” of Arkansas Symphony Youth Orchestra players, with Geoffrey Robson conducting, plays an illustrative new musical score by Jessica Drake Mosher.
There are some muddly bits — the shadow of a tractor chasing the shadow of a bird across a lawn seems both to come out of nowhere and not to connect with the rest of the story, for example — and there may be a touch too much mimicry gimmickry (an overextended scene between the shadow girl and her shadow reflection). But mostly it’s a delight to watch and to hear.
The first of three Studio Shows, a new Children’s Theatre series this year, takes place not on the Children’s Theatre main stage but in one of the two backstage studio spaces. It’s a lot more intimate, but it also may be a little hard for tiny children to see the screen. Friday night, several kids and parents sat down on the center-aisle floor for an unobstructed view.
Additional performances of The Ugly Duckling will be at 2 and 7 p.m. today; 2 p.m. Sunday; 7 p.m. Friday; 2 and 7 p.m. Sept. 5; and 2 p.m. Sept. 6 at the Arkansas Arts Center in MacArthur Park, East Ninth and Commerce streets, Little Rock. Ticket information is available by calling (501) 372-4000 or online at ArkansasArtsCenter.org/ theatre.