Happily Never After?

I first saw Fairy Tale Ending at the Fringe Festival last summer in a small theatre located inside the Palmerston Library. It had sold out all its shows and I was at an extra show added on the last day. It was voted one of the Best of the Fringe shows and went on for 2 weeks as part of the Best of the Fringe Festival. Now it's back as part of the Next Stage Theatre Festival at the Factory Theatre. I went to a Saturday matinee show.

Originally created for the Toronto Youth Theatre by Kieren MacMillan and Jeremy Hutton, it is a cross between Into The Woods and Fractured Fairy Tale. A cop (Cristina Gordon) is investigating a series of fairy tales gone wrong and calls on the eye-witness testimony of a young girl named Jill (Meagan Tuck) to identify the culprit from the list of usual suspects. First, the asthmatic Big Bad Wolf (Andrew Moyes) got his hairy paws on the Three Little Pigs (J.P. Baldwin, Carl Swanson, Mike Wisniowski) in a number called "Addicted" ("He's a porkoholic"). Second, Goldilocks (Jennifer Walls) never learned from her selfish behaviour ("I Totally Don't Even Give a Care") in destroying the Three Bears' stuff. Finally, the Troll (Amanda Leigh) turned the Three Billy Goats Gruff into a beauty product called "Gruff Exterior".

What could be making these beloved tales go so wrong? Is it the mysterious boy Jack (Maksym Shkvorets) that frightens everyone except Jill? The answer is a tragic accident that have made the Land of Far, Far Away no longer a haven from the changes of everyday life.

All the actors were fine and funny, though some were given leave to really ham it up, given the material. The singing was competent, though a few could not sufficiently project their voice into this larger space. As such, some of the reasonably clever lyrics were probably lost on the audience unless you were in the first 3 rows. The only negative to the afternoon performance was a cell-phone ringing behind me during a dramatic scene where Jill received some truths from the oracular Three Blind Mice.

Though not quite at the level of Sondheim's Into The Woods, this musical is an amusing 75 min for children from ages 5 to 95. Well, maybe 7.