THEATRE REVIEW: LITTLE HOUSE ON THE PRAIRIE, THE MUSICAL
30 Jan'10

Little House built with straw

JOHN COULBOURN, QMI Agency
Rating: 2 out of 5

You loved the book.

You loved the television series.

What you’ll make of the new musical cobbled from Laura Ingalls Wilder’s LITTLE HOUSE books is anybody’s guess. It depends on just what draws you to the theatre.

If it’s story, chances are Rachel Sheinkin’s book is going to disappoint, for although she marshals Wilder’s familiar, familial troops — saintly Ma and Pa Ingalls, their three loving daughters and a community of friends and neighbours — and puts them through their by-now-familiar paces as homesteaders on the American prairie, in the process she manages to turn their life into a homily-ridden pageant, instead of an involving family drama.

In fairness, she gets scant help from Rachel Portman’s music, and less than none from lyricist Donna Di Novelli — which means those looking for a hummable score are likely to discover that this isn’t their particular cup o’ sassafras.
Never thrilling, Di Novelli’s lyrics hit a low point in the first act in a number titled Make It Home, with a lot of nonsense about nailing the outside out, and the inside in — and rarely rise above that level for the duration.

Meanwhile, Michelle Lynch’s derivative choreography does little to enliven things, evoking not so much the spirit of the American West as memories of better musicals and better productions about the American pioneer experience.

If performances are what draw you to the theatre, then Little House at least offers a mixed bag.

As mother Caroline Ingalls, an all-growed-up and strident Melissa Gilbert returns to the LITTLE HOUSE she once occupied as young Laura in the TV series. In the process, she proves conclusively that Harvey Fierstein isn’t the only musical theatre actor in the world who can’t really sing.

Steve Blanchard, Alessa Neeck and Carly Rose Sonenclar do their best to bring life to the cardboard cutouts that are the saintly Charles, the saintly and long-suffering Mary and the timid and long-suffering Carrie. Their best fails to put grit into this piece of American blancmange.

On a more positive front, Kara Lindsay manages, against long odds and with a charming assist from Kevin Massey (cast as love interest Almanzo Wilder), to transform the pivotal role of Laura and her voyage to maturity into something not only three dimensional, but hugely likeable as well. Their success must be weighed off, too often, against Kate Loprest’s over-the-top and hugely self-satisfied turn as the obnoxious Nellie Oleson, a cartoon apparently in exile from Legally Blonde.

And finally, if it’s staging alone that draws you to the theatre, then you should know there are moments when director Francesca Zambello’s work delights, not with the technical pyrotechnics that mark many modern musicals, but rather with utterly elegant simplicity instead — a legacy, one suspects, of the thrust stage on which this production was formed.
But even here, there are mixed blessings.

For while Zambello et al conjure some thrilling horse races and sleigh rides out of little more than thin air, they also manage to ignore the few doors in Adrianne Lobel’s minimal set and walk through walls instead, blinded no doubt by the fact that lurid sunsets seem to last all day on this particular patch of the prairie.

LITTLE HOUSE ON THE PRAIRIE is all a bit of a hit-and-miss affair, one that delighted some few of the Mirvish patrons at Thursday’s opening at the Canon Theatre.

But others, one suspects, were left like me, with a vision of Laura Ingalls Wilder and Lucy Maude Montgomery knocking back a few stiff ones in the sweet hereafter, driven to drink by musical theatre adaptations of their work that transform the humanity of their stories into little more than spun sugar.

At the Canon Theatre
Directed by Francesca Zambello