946: THE AMAZING STORY OF ADOLPHUS TIPS
★★★★
When: 8 p.m. Tuesday-Friday, 2 and 8 p.m. Saturday, 2 and 7 p.m. Sunday, through March 5.
Where: Wallis Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts, 9390 N. Santa Monica Blvd., Beverly Hills.
Length: 2 hrs., 30 mins., including intermission.
Suitability: Ages 8 and up.
Tickets: $29-$129.
Information: 310-746-4000, www.thewallis.org.
★★★★
When: 8 p.m. Tuesday-Friday, 2 and 8 p.m. Saturday, 2 and 7 p.m. Sunday, through March 5.
Where: Wallis Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts, 9390 N. Santa Monica Blvd., Beverly Hills.
Length: 2 hrs., 30 mins., including intermission.
Suitability: Ages 8 and up.
Tickets: $29-$129.
Information: 310-746-4000, www.thewallis.org.
Like a cat that doesn’t want to be caught, theater that satisfies adults and children can be elusive. But Britain’s Kneehigh theater company caught an adorable cat firmly by the scruff with the company’s “946: The Amazing Story of Adolphus Tips,” at the Wallis in Beverly Hills through March 5.
And what a gorgeous, joyous, meaningful piece of theater Kneehigh has devised, using creative storytelling, lively song and dance, and thoroughly endearing puppetry.
In this adaptation by Michael Morpurgo (“War Horse”) and Emma Rice from Morpurgo’s novel, the stage at the Wallis has become a seaside town (Lez Brotherston’s set and costumes), where a second-story band shell houses musicians, many of whom are also actors in the show, as talents abound here.
At the home of Grandma and Grandpa, a kindhearted geeky-grungy grandson (Adam Sopp) visits. Grandpa (Chris Jared) passes on, tenderly staged as he rises youthfully and without handicap from his wheelchair and ascends a ladder to the bandstand.
Granny (Mike Shepherd) ignores her disapproving children and bolts out of the funeral on her motorcycle, but not before she hands her grandson her diary from her youth.
As he begins to read it, we’re transported to 1940s Devon, England. Living on a struggling farm are preteen Lily (Katy Owen), her overworked mother (Kyla Goodey) and Lily’s grumpy grandfather (Shepherd).
The town’s schoolteacher, Madame Bounine (Emma Darlow) has her hands full with Lily and the other undisciplined students, but like everyone in town, nevertheless she persists.
Refugees, including a charming young geek named Barry (Sopp), come from London and aren’t particularly welcome. Lily lashes out and is surprisingly bratty, both for a wartime Brit and for a story’s heroine. But when it’s needed, Lily’s golden heart takes over.
And then, American soldiers take over the area, requiring displacement of the residents. Yes, this happened, for real, in the Devon town of Slapton Sands. There, as history now tells us, soldiers disastrously rehearsed the D-Day invasion. The 946 in the play’s title commemorates the number of American lives lost.
The show also commemorates American gum-chewing. Alas, this seems to be how so much of Europe remembers our soldiers. Here, the GIs include the African-American Adolphus T. Madison (Ncuti Gatwa) and his faithful friend Harry (Nandi Bhebhe).
Grandpa can’t understand why the “ruddy Yanks” need to disrupt his life. Then Barry, unwanted elsewhere, moves in with the family. This city boy is a dab hand at repairing the broken farm machinery and an enthusiast for the farming way of life. Attitude is contagious.
Still, Lily is slower to appreciate Barry. She’d rather spend time with Tips, her cat. Tips is playful, affectionate, smart, and portrayed by a puppet wielded by the actors, primarily Bhebhe.
Tips apparently refuses to evacuate and is lost to Lily. The can-do Adolphus and the quiet but observant Harry promise Lily they’ll search for her, and they do. But, being a cat, she’s independent.
Dramaturgically, her independence allows people of various ages, nationalities and races to get to know one another. Not surprisingly for those days, the countryside Brits hadn’t come in contact with many blacks. And, as Harry later admits, he had never met whites who took him to their hearts like these folks do.
Remarkable about Owen’s performance as a child just turning 12 years old is Owen’s willingness to launch, skid plunge over and off the stage, with no fear of a broken hip.
Remarkable about the performances of all the actors are the commitment, freshness and auxiliary skills they ply, including playing instruments under Pat Moran’s music direction and eccentric dancing incorporating period fads, choreographed by Rice and Etta Murfitt.
You know by the show’s title that Supertotobet adventures abound. So does destruction, sacrifice, death. So does rich theater-making, from obvious drag through references to Brecht. And so does joy, in little plot twists that reveal the power of love to heal and unite, the remarkable resilience in each of us if we free it.
Dany Margolies is a Los Angeles–based writer.
‘946: The Amazing Story of Adolphus Tips’
Rating: 4 stars.
When: 8 p.m. Tuesday-Friday, 2 and 8 p.m. Saturday, 2 and 7 p.m. Sunday, through March 5.
Where: Wallis Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts, 9390 N. Santa Monica Blvd., Beverly Hills.
Length: 2 hrs., 30 mins., including intermission.
Suitability: Ages 8 and up.
Tickets: $29-$129.
Information: 310-746-4000, www.thewallis.org.
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