Theatre X has become a world where brightly colored ducks, cats and frogs jump around, sing and dance.
"Honk!" retells Hans Christian Andersen's classic story "The Ugly Duckling" but includes a more fleshed-out plot and musical numbers.
In the show, farm animals gather to see the hatching of four cute ducklings and one awkward bird appropriately named Ugly (James Mills). Quickly cast out by his brothers and sisters for his appearance, Ugly seeks acceptance from the barnyard cat (Joey Torres), whose only goal is turning Ugly into duck Ö l'orange.
Ugly soon runs away and gets lost, meeting domesticated chickens, military geese and one outrageous southern bullfrog, among other animals, while trying to find his way back home.
Meanwhile, Ugly's mother (Lisa Fenstermacher) frantically searches for her lost son, whom she unconditionally loves for being who he is.
The choreography, set design and especially the costume design are excellent.
Get content from The Daily Lobo delivered to your inbox
Unfortunately, the play is marred by two glaring faults.
The first is the dialogue. The sign of a weak script for a children's play is when there is nothing for the older audience - by which I mean middle-school aged and up - to latch onto.
"Honk!" tries. Several lines are filled with double entendres and hidden sexual jokes aimed to go over the heads of children so the rest of us have something to laugh about.
These "adult" jokes are not funny.
The second fault comes from the difficulty of staging a musical inside Theatre X. While the theater is small and intimate, much of the dialogue in "Honk!" is lost as the cast tries its hardest to project to an audience sitting on three sides of the stage.
Most of the lines are delivered with the actor's backs to half the audience. The actors also have to compete with a live band that drowns out their singing. This creates confusion about who certain characters are and what exactly is going on.
On a note about theater etiquette, two people in the audience on opening night cackled like hyenas throughout the show.
Not only was it distracting for the audience and actors, but it scared the children and was irritating.
Overall, "Honk!" is an enjoyable play to take a young child to see. The production is fantastic, and the script retains Andersen's original message about accepting others' differences.
However, the quality of the dialogue and the theater it's performed in prevent this ugly duckling from ever becoming a swan.
"Honk!"
Theatre X
Thursday, Friday and Saturday
7:30 p.m.
Saturday and Sunday
2 p.m.
Grade: B+ for children
C- for everyone else
