Just So
Musical based on the stories of Rudyard Kipling. Book and lyrics by Anthony Drewe. Music by George Stiles. Directed by Anthony Drewe. Choreography by Stephen Mear. Scenery and costume design by Peter McKintosh. Lighting by Jeff Croiter. Sound by John Stone. Music direction by Wendy Bobbitt Cavett. At the North Shore Music Theatre, Beverly, through July 1.

One of the surprise hits of the past season was last summer’s charming musical retelling of “The Ugly Duckling” by wordsmith Anthony Drewe, composer George Stiles, and the costume/scenic designer Peter McKintosh. Honk! combined childlike simplicity, hipness, and humor in a confection that was so effervescent that even a bit of PC moralizing about tolerance of difference and the importance of interior beauty couldn’t weigh it down.

The British creative team of Drewe, Stiles, and McKintosh are back this year with another musical fable. Taken from the delectably exotic tales of Rudyard Kipling, Just So actually predates Honk! Despite many similar elements of plot and style, it just misses being as perfectly realized, but it’s still a pleasant evening in the theater and a perfect introduction to live theater for children.

Kipling’s short stories originated, like A.A. Milne’s Winnie the Pooh tales, as yarns spun for a child — in this case Kipling’s daughter, who traveled with her father from England to Africa and India. Told to pass the long hours aboard ship, the stories featured many of the animals familiar to father and daughter from the exotic climes they visited.

Librettist and director Drewe has combined and conflated several of these tales, using the saga of a journey as a narrative frame. For his protagonists, he’s borrowed Kipling’s Eldest Magician (a combination of God and Kipling père), the Elephant’s Child with the “ ’satiable curiosity,” and the KoloKolo Bird, who is afraid to fly. After the Magician allows the King Crab to escape his clutches on the day of Creation, the Crab wreaks havoc on the world by “playing” with the sea — that is, stirring up the tides and flooding the land. Egged on by the Magician, the Elephant’s Child, accompanied by the reluctant KoloKolo Bird, decides to track down the villain. Along the way to the “great, green, greasy Limpopo River,” the pair have many adventures — which give the authors an opportunity to share the stories of “How the Rhinoceros Got His Skin,” “How the Leopard Got His Spots,” and how the Kangaroo got such heavily muscled legs.

There is some predictable moralizing on the order of “Even one small person can achieve great things” and “It takes all kinds of different creatures to make up a world.” But it all goes down pretty easily. And Stiles’s music, at best a chameleon-like reproduction of theatrical archetypes, is just right for Drewe’s clever versifying. (An example from the Rhino story: “That loathsome oaf who stole our loaf.”)

The various vignettes give designer Peter McKintosh plenty of scope for his delightfully whimsical fantasy. Abetted by choreographer Stephen Mear, he brings us the Parsee Man, who bakes such “superior comestibles” as cake and is decked out in chef’s plaid pants and white jacket — the fastenings of which are silver forks and spoons. His hat may not “reflect the rays of the sun in more-than-Oriental splendour,” but the skullcap with wire whisk attached is inspired silliness.

Seldom resorting to obvious choices like animal-printed fabric, feathers, and elaborate headpieces, McKintosh fashions his creatures out of human clothing that is slyly suggestive of the animals. And Mear completes the illusion by creating gestures, gaits, and stances that are giraffe-like or jaguar-like or kangaroo-like. The show’s pachyderms are far more imaginatively realized than the elephant Horton in the recent Broadway show Seussical.

The cast, like that of Honk!, is young, personable, and funny. The performers are also great, uh, hoofers. Among the standouts: Michelle Potterf’s long-limbed prancing giraffe with two upstanding plugs of hair that suggest ears; Stephanie Kurtzuba’s befringed Zebra; Rudy Roberson’s disco Jaguar dressed like John Travolta in Saturday Night Fever; Christopher Youngsman’s lanky, double-jointed Leopard; and Christian Borle’s high-jumping, Aussie-speaking Kangaroo with the inflatable leg muscles. In the central roles of the Elephant’s Child and the KoloKolo Bird, Barrett Foa and Garrett Long are perfectly childlike. Only Tom Demenkoff as the Eldest Magician disappoints; surely God/Daddy doesn’t have to work so frantically to be loved.

Issue Date: June 21-28, 2001