Director, cast make most out of turkey ‘Willy Wonka’

The stage adaptation of "Roald Dahl's Willy Wonka" is full of over-sweetened, bouncy ditties and ballads. They're meant to teach moral lessons to those children too young to realize they are being insulted. But after about a half hour, Super Summer Theatre/P.S. Productions' musical got to me. It goes to show how much lemonade an energetic, capable cast and director can get not from just a lemon, but a turkey.

A group of children win a tour of a magical candy factory run by the famous Wonka (Shawn Martin). Most of the kids are hilariously spoiled demons. But our hero, Charlie (Almog Aybar Agron), is earnest, poor and eager to help his family. The real point of the tour isn't revealed until the end, but, as you'd expect, it has a lot to do with being a good person.

Dahl's Wonka was a mysterious, sometimes villainous creature, which suggested -- as did James Barrie's Peter Pan -- that being childlike in spirit is not always a good thing. The libretto doesn't significantly fill out the story, but its real offense is its banal score (no one writes schmaltz like Leslie Bricusse).

Luckily, director Philip Shelburne seems to have given great thought to individual characterizations. He finds the right cartoonish scale for the enjoyable silliness. And he and choreographer Rommel Pacson infuse the cast with a great sense of fun.

I can't give all the individual performers who deserve a nod their proper applause here. But Agron grounds the show with an unsentimental, straight-forward performance as Charlie, in which the actress is totally convincing as a boy. Martin doesn't quite get at the complexity of Wonka, but he's amiable and commanding. The children and their parents are all played with such spot-on clarity that they seem to have been invented for these roles.

I think Shelburne made a mistake in having Evan Bartoletti design a scaled-down set. Wonka's factory is a place of magic -- like Oz -- and its dull appearance goes against the evening's tone. Likewise, Sandra Huntsman's costumes don't often take the opportunity for visual opulence (not in budget, but in imagination).

The show nonetheless adds up to a happy experience. Shelburne's gifts as a director have considerably deepened. Here, he takes a doodle of a script and pays enough attention to detail to make us think it has something to say.

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