A Mouse That Roars

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The New York Sun

“The Mouse Queen,” an import from London’s Little Angel Theatre now playing at the New Victory, has a dozen good puppets, plenty of British charm, and an allacoustic klezmer band. And at a recent Saturday matinee, it passed the toughest test of all: It kept the ages-4-and-up crowd on the edge of their booster seats.


There are puppet shows on the fall calendar with more razzle-dazzle than the deliberately low-tech “Mouse Queen.” Both BAM’s recent “Tall Horse” and the New Victory’s own upcoming “Cathay: Three Tales of China” utilize more than 100 puppets in complex stagings. By comparison, Steve Tiplady’s “The Mouse Queen” seems like a show cooked up by your relatives at Thanksgiving. There’s a single scrim, above which one or two marionettes bob. Sometimes the scrim is illuminated for modest shadow puppetry. There are a handful of rod and Bunraku puppets, a few props, and a simple set made of giant newsprint.


Yet in the case of “The Mouse Queen,” less is more. The homespun surroundings make for intimate, human-scale theater. The potency of this imaginary world depends less on the connection between children and puppets than on the rapport between children and performers.


Dressed in loose black suits and broad-brimmed black hats with animal ears, the seven performers sing and act with genuine warmth. Their gentle, winning smiles welcome children into a land of make-believe where Foxy the Fox plays the accordion and the monkey-lady plays sax. And in large part, it’s the wonderful klezmer music that makes the room feel so cozy. Ben Glasstone’s delightful score tips its hat to doo-wop, gospel, rock, blues, gypsy music, and jazz, but best of all it sets a warm, old-fashioned tone. There are even inspired touches of vaudeville, like the scene where the lion (played in a full body costume by the marvelous Tim Kane) fakes a tap dance while a band member plays the spoons.


The characters’ accents and slang establish the fact that “The Mouse Queen” hails from across the pond, but the British connection is more than skin-deep. Its book (by Messrs. Glasstone and Kane) and lyrics locate it in a far-from-sugary class of children’s entertainments that includes “Mary Poppins,” “Winnie the Pooh,” and “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.” The story, drawn loosely from Aesop, begins when a naive field mouse is caught by a jungle lion. Surrounded by her predators, little Tilly quavers, “Could you be more sensitive?” They shrug and sing, “That’s the way it is.”


The song, one of several cheerfully realistic tunes in the show, makes Tilly’s predicament plain: “The big fish eats the little fish / The little fish eats the clam / The pig eats just about anything / And everyone likes ham.” Tilly, who is no slouch, quickly realizes it’s no fun being at the bottom of the food chain. “I wanna be big,” she growls, belting out her anthem in a throaty Satchmo voice.


So Tilly rushes off to the dangerous big city. Complications ensue, mainly of the cheese-and-traps variety, and Tilly makes a hipster urban friend. In the meantime the lion, who has come to the city to take on the king of human beings, gets his comeuppance. This allows Tilly to fulfill the show’s earlier prediction that some day, a tiny mouse will be able to help a big lion. (Hint: It’s those sharp little teeth.)


But the show’s heart isn’t in this type of moralizing. Yes, the mouse can help the lion, the lion can have an epiphany, the animals can agree to stop eating each other. But given what’s come before, it all seems too tidy. This is, after all, a play that includes a mouse in the throes of a cheese addiction, a lion who brags about being “marvelous at murder,” and a Cinderella type who sings, “There must be something more / Than Hoovering the floor.” Blithe but honest in its approach to life, “The Mouse Queen” is much more “Muppet Show” than “Lion King.”


While the show can be funny and sweet, it doesn’t shy away from darker themes. The loveliest song of “The Mouse Queen,” “Down, Down, Down,” has some of the most pessimistic lyrics imaginable. Sung by Tilly and the lion, who have reached their low point after being abandoned at the city dump, the mournful little ditty laments life’s tendency to drop you down the stairs. Yet its melody is so irresistible that at a recent performance, when the performers reached the last note, the little treble voices out in the house kept on singing. “Down, down, down …” they sang, then hushed, eager to hear what was coming next.


Until October 23 (209 W. 42nd Street, between Seventh and Eighth Avenues, 646-562-2200).


The New York Sun

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