Rainbow Company’s ‘Sleeping Beauty’ imaginative, energetic

Rainbow Company's take on Ben Farrar's witty version of "Sleeping Beauty" is 100 percent childproof. Farrar maintains the story's essence but throws in a few major changes. Our heroine is not passive. She's a martial arts expert who beats up five frightening goblins. The evil fairy is, here, a sarcastic wizard who dons a patch and carries a mean stick. And our princess has a relationship with her rescuer (a woodcutter) before she gets too close to that nasty spindle.

What makes the show unusually inviting is the light spirit director that Toni Molloy-Tudor, the design team and the diversified 28-member cast have given it. The energy never lets up.

Alex Krabiel plays our title character - whose name here is, gulp, Fergie - as a kind, bright near-16-year-old. She gets to show her acting skills when she portrays a goblin who has been turned into Fergie. Watching her look beautiful while walking with a monstrous air and wolfing down a bowl of cucumbers like a food-deprived rhino is - well, you just have to see it.

Karl Locke-Wells makes Charlie the woodcutter a down-to-earth man of the land. You can tell right away that he has the heart, intelligence and physical ability to take care of a damsel in distress. David Hannigar is pleasantly slimy as the bellowing Nemesis, and his assistants are costumed by student Coral Benedetti (under faculty supervision) with scaly body parts and dark faces that immediately give away their dark souls (and their stupidity).

Student set designers Jack Magee and Marianna Paez have come up with a unique steampunk design. You feel as if you're watching the "bricks" and the "forests" through a black light. It's wonderfully surreal.

Balancing out all the frantic characters is the amusingly staid Robert Hyatt as the King. Oh, and let's not forget the eccentric Mary Alice Brunod-Burack as the elderly sweet talker who tricks Fergie into near-death. She's one scary woman.

When I asked two children what their favorite parts were, they kept tripping over themselves trying to come up with an answer. Finally one girl said, "I liked it all." A very perceptive critique, I think.

Anthony Del Valle can be reached at vegastheaterchat@aol.com. You can write him c/o Las Vegas Review-Journal, P.O. Box 70, Las Vegas, NV 89125.