What did we think? We saw the musical adaptation of Julia Donaldson and Axel Scheffler’s Charlie Cook’s Favourite Book before it comes to Newbury
A stage adaptation of Julia Donaldson and Axel Scheffler’s Charlie Cook’s Favourite Book is on its way to the Corn Exchange next week. From kings and queens to aliens and ghosts, there's something for everyone in Charlie's amazing book…
We sent our reviewer to see it at Oxford Playhouse at half-term so that Newbury audiences could hear how good it is and book this delightful Little Angel Theatre family musical, adapted by an old Newbury favourite, the composer and lyricist Barb Jungr (who once ran regular cabaret evenings at New Greenham Arts).
Charlie Cook’s Favourite Book at the Oxford Playhouse
on May Tuesday, May 28 to Thursday, May 30.
Review by JON LEWIS
Adventures in Books
Islington’s Little Angel Theatre’s touring production of writer Julia Donaldson and illustrator Alex Scheffler’s Charlie Cook’s Favourite Book, now adapted by composer and lyricist Barb Jungr and director Samantha Lane into a musical for three to eight year old children and their families, promotes the idea that reading books stimulates the imagination of young minds.
Charlie (Pierre Hanson-Johnson), a bookworm, and his lively sister Izzy (Jazmine Wilkinson) who gets bored easily by books and prefers to play energetic games, are almost at a pre-fractious stage of the day at home with their mother (Georgie Samuels).
Sensing problems ahead, the astute mother, taking the cue from Charlie’s pirate story book, grabs a colander and a ladle from the kitchen, and starts to role-play a pirate. The kids take this as a cue for an afternoon of animating a series of Charlie’s books. Each role-play contains a jolly song (Jungr’s music is piped rather than live) and some witty banter between the siblings.
In the children’s version of Goldilocks and the Three Bears, the point of view is that of the bears who are annoyed at the presence of an annoying girl with blonde hair in their house.
In a story about knights fighting dragons, Izzy donning some armour and a sword, the heroine discovers that the best way to defeat a dragon is to tell it a joke. The jokes probably go over the heads of the youngest of the children in the audience but the song with its chorus ‘ha ha ha, hee hee hee, dragons like hilarity’ hits the mark well.
One of Little Angel’s trademarks is its inventive use of puppets. Here, Maia Kirkman-Richards’ puppets all emerge in surprising ways from books. Either the puppets are part of the books, or the books are part of them.
There’s a wonderful crocodile whose ever-stretching belly contains volumes of books that it has eaten. One story about birds in an encyclopaedia features different-sized birds living within pages of books. When the mother pretends to be sleeping, the kids plant puppet alien tentacles around the brightly covered room (designer, Ellie Mills).
Fun.
Charlie Cook ‘s Favourite Book tours to the Corn Exchange Newbury on Friday, June 21 to Sunday 23.
