Playwright: Lydia Gordon. At: The BoHo Theatre, 7016 N. Glenwood Ave. Tickets: www.BrownPaperTickets.com; $25. Runs through: Sept. 9
The Coriolis Theater Company brings its first production up north to the Heartland Studio. The small black-box theater is a good match for this endeavor that's been more than two years in the making. The production features a young fresh-faced cast, with several members arriving straight out of school or with only a few shows under their collective belts.
Three fairies start the first act perhaps inspired by the trio in Disney's Sleeping Beauty, as they're all adorned in a brightly colored dresses. They set up the scene with a young man named Asbjorn, who escapes his arranged marriage, getting mixed up in the process with an evil queen who turns him into a bear. The talking bear sets out to prove that a girl named Freja will fall in love with him no matter what his formsimilar to the age-old princess-and-the-frog story.
Freja and the bear don't work out in time, thanks to her bungling, and Asbjorn goes back to the arranged marriage of the evil queen's daughter. Freja embarks on a journey to find Asbjorn and break the spell before the wedding happens. She heads to the queen's castle, which is "east of the sun, west of the moon"get it?
Bean bags and white curtains provide the furniture, and there were strings on the back wall that the fairies fiddle with, for some odd reason. The talk's sing-song pattern tries to keep the plot moving, with certain phrases such as "there's a bear at my door" being repeated. It is a style choice and doesn't work in some scenes. One more verse of "whither the wind shall blow" and I was going to be gone With the wind!
I applaud having original music, but there were notes that were cringe-inducing and difficult for the performers to tackle right out of the starting gate. Travis Austin Wright (Asbjorn) has a nice moment while Freja sleeps, singing the line "you and the starlight."
Sometimes the show shifts into children's theater and then back to serious moments, such as an encounter with an alcoholic abusive father. There is no LGBT content and it would have been a nice touch to have the evil queen played by a drag queen. The role needed to be more campy after so much droning on of the tunes to lighten the mood.
There were a few other missed opportunities at humor but this is the company's first production, leaving many kinks to work out. With a talented cast like this, it will be nice to see what else they can do in the future. Unfortunately East of the Sun, West of the Moon goes south pretty quickly.