Chicago Sun-Times: Whimsical winter show a treat for all

Redmoon Theater's Winter Pageant highly RECOMMENDED

WHEN: Through Dec. 29

WHERE: Pulaski Park Fieldhouse, 1419 W. Blackhawk

TICKETS: $10-$12

CALL: (773) 388-9031

There aren't very many shows that can keep a 2-year-old and a 50- year-old equally enchanted and filled with wide-eyed wonder. Yet for the last 11 seasons, the crafters of Redmoon Theater's annual Winter Pageant have managed to pull off precisely this devilishly difficult trick, and to do so with a grace and wit and an endless sense of invention that verges on the near-miraculous.

What the artists of Redmoon create is, on one hand, an homage to childlike craft and the possibilities of cardboard, plastic sheeting, confetti snow, papier-mache, junk-shop detritus and thrift-shop fashions. At the same time, they dish out some of the canniest social commentary around, with a deceptively adult sophistication that is not lost on kids.

But then, who else but the artists of Redmoon would be able to look at a pogo stick and realize it could easily be turned into a pneumatic drill fit for ComEd workers? Who else could imagine a blue stairway to paradise where the bearded man in charge of changing the seasons is engaged in a heavenly game of roulette? And who else could conjure the calamities of a large, single-parent family beset by a power failure, a bumblingly inept landlord-janitor, a crowded, crumbling apartment, the general travails of winter and, on top of all this, a Kafkaesque city bureaucracy? (Best of all, they do all this with great humor, making sure that the delicate net of fantasy is never ripped by preachiness of any sort.)

Of course, Redmoon also does much more in its deceptively easygoing, hourlong show. It employs an incongruous yet seamless combination of stick puppets, giant masks, grade-school-style scenery, Italian-style street clowning and carnivalesque stilt walking. It creates an affection-laced family of seven hungry, squawking babies--most of them puppets who pop up out of dresser drawers, or arrive in baskets pulled in on a laundry line, or appear full-grown and perpetually stuck to their harried mother's leg. And on top of it all, the theater weaves itself into the lives of the local community by blending gawky preteens and shy adolescents (all part of Redmoon's impressive outreach programs) with its core of skilled young professional performers who can endow nonsense chatter and goofy props with absolute believability.

This year's pageant has been conceived and directed by John Musial, the ingenuous Lookingglass Theatre ensemble member who has collaborated with a vast team of imaginative designers and funky musicians. And he has come up with one of the best Winter Pageants to date--unified by a clear, highly effective storyline and sharply defined characters, and delicious in its whimsical but pointed conjuring of the grim realities (and crazy joys) that confront poor urban dwellers.

Much of the pleasure here is in the whimsical details: the street lamps made from flowerpots; the band member-composers who arrive in the guise of city mice ("Will play for cheese," reads their collection box); the giant doughnuts slowly munched on by indolent utility workers; the cubist construction of the basement apartment where the janitor dwells; the otherworldly little puppet theaters, with a 1930s feel, that come to life in the four balcony area windows of the Pulaski Fieldhouse space where the show is being performed.

The actors (Meghan Strell, Katie Connolly, Thom Jackson, Seph Quaglia, Mark Comiskey, Cynthia Castiglione, Jonathan Pitts and Tanera Marshall) are delightful. And the designers, led by D. Christopher Krause (and including Laura Miracle, Frank Maugeri, Susan Haas, Casey Gunschel, Cynthia Main, Chris Wooten, Ben Spicer, Shoshanna Utchenik, Alison Heryer) deserve equal applause, as do all the workshop leaders and volunteers involved in the project.

This is theater that can convince you that winter is worth the hassle simply by means of an enchanting snowstorm conjured by the shaking of twiggy trees. Although for those who live only for spring, there's good news, too--a giant sun that rises, winks and spreads the heat of the tropics even as you disappear into your scarf, hat and gloves.