The Theater Project’s lively rendition of “The Phantom Tollbooth,” showing through Sunday, is an antidote to winter blues, political blues, holiday blues — any type of blues, really.
The Theater Project’s production of “The Phantom Tollbooth” will be showing through this weekend, starring Hazel Bell as Milo, Crawford Martinez as The Watchdog, Owen Vachon as The Humbug, Sho Ludlum as Azaz the Unabridged/King of Dictionopolis and Lucy Engstrom as The Mathemagician/King of Digitopolis. Courtesy of The Theater Project
Susan Nanus’ adaptation of the children’s book by Norton Juster takes place, in part, in the fictional world of Dictionopolis, “where all the words in the world are from,” as a watchdog named Tock tells a boy named Milo. “It used to be a marvelous place, but ever since rhyme and reason left, it hasn’t been the same.”
As Milo, Tock and a “Humbug” dressed like Napoleon make their way through the improbable, impractical and sometimes perilous lands of Wisdom and Ignorance, Milo trades his ennui in for heroism and brings peace to the warring kings of numbers and letters who, without his help, are unable to communicate.
“Whether or not you find your own way, you’re bound to find some way,” the enigmatic “Whetherman” at one point reminds him, a message that seemed to resonate not only for the more youthful members of the audience.
Showing in the cozy central room of The Theater Project’s repurposed 1800s home on School Street in Brunswick, “The Phantom Tollbooth” cast consists of 32 kids and teens. Director Julia Brown wrote about the production, “What I love about youth theater is really exemplified in the story: Weird kids doing weird stuff for the love of weird literature. Luckily, they had one weird director who was honored to work with this exceptional group of kids.”
The inevitable glitches in the production — such as when a gaggle of children in red-and-white striped hats milled about in the Land of the Doldrums, making frequent pit stops to read from a kneeling Julia’s script — only added to the wonder of the play, where town crier–dressed elementary schoolers shouted synonyms, thesaurus-like, after everything the other actors said and characters dined on letters, quite literally eating their own words. If some of the actors had a propensity to laugh a little after their own lines, well, who could blame them? A girl sitting in the third row laughed unabashedly, as if on cue, after almost anything anybody said onstage anyway, like The Theater Project’s very own laugh track.
After the completion of his quest, Milo returns to his humdrum bedroom, only to find that a mere hour has passed since he set off a journey that would bring him face-to-face with a living dodecahedron, Kakafonous A. Discord, Doctor of Discord and the Princess of Pure Reason, among others. Armed with the knowledge that, in some places, a pencil really is considered a magic staff, he is inspired to make better use of the hours to come.
In the end, “The Phantom Tollbooth” is a reminder that children really do know best.
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