Juvenile Delinquency

EVERY EVENING this week at the Loeb, upwards of 40 talented people have convened to pour their creative energies down a bottomless pit. As usual, weeks of work show their traces in the intricate movement of scenes, the well-targeted snap of dance steps, the synchronized sparkle of line delivery and reaction. The complex mainstage machinery rises and whirs, the orchestra thumps away, the presentation flows. But the pit yawns, and engulfs the actors' sparkle, and remains bottomless, for theirs is the most pitifully misguided endeavor the Harvard stage has witnessed in many moons

Conceived--God knows how--as a musical adaptation of the work of children's author illustrator Maurice Sendak. Really Rosie inflates and links the sparse content of three or four Sendak sketches in an insultingly arbitrary attempt at narrative. How, after all, could one write a script realistically incorporating. "Chicken Soup with Rice," an alphabet song, a Dracula sequence, and the saga of I Don't-Care Pierre? And why would anyone really want to?

Sendak tries by postulating a group of nasty little kids--the kind who populate his books--who play at making a movie, and, in the process, take turns presenting "screen test" sequences which digress into the characters' original tales. Not that much in the way of either tales or transitions survives. The kids' ringleader is Rosie (Dede Schmeiser), who spends most of her time fantasizing about the terrible things that may have happened to her little brother, Chicken Soup (Steve Gutwillig), who tags along after her by parental edict. One hanger-on is named Alligator (Valerie Gilbert)--she's the one who sings the alphabet solo, which starts. "Alligators All Around." Another is Pierre--the Pierre who gets eaten by a lion in another Sendak book. Rosie's brother is named Chicken Soup merely so that--in the evening's most outrageous nonsequitor--the final, curtain-dropping dance number can be set to the lyrics of Chicken Soup With Rice, arguably Sendak's most vacuous work.

THE SEQUENCES THEMSELVES suffer from the same illogic; the viewer is constantly tempted to borrow a page from Pierre's book and shots "So what--" at the pointless unless on stage. A glaring example is the treatment of Pierre himself (Rick Reynolds), beloved in book form as the kid who never said anything to anybody except "I don't care" and eventually I don't cared himself into getting gobbled up by a lion. This version, by casting a body-suited women (Linda Hammott) as the doggerel in just the right suggestive murmur, manages to transform this grisly little sage into a sex fable--a counterintuitive and ultimately meaningless exercise. Of course it works that way if you want it to: "Then I will out you, don't I care!" "And you will be inside of me." "I don't care!" "So the lion are Pierre." The mistake lies in thinking that you can jazz up children's fiction by adding previously un-included sexual innuendo.

Equally frustrating are the scenes spotlighting Rosie, for Schmeiser's electric performance is filled with signs pointing nowhere. Script and actress both provide flashes from time of a fascinating, absolutely believable personality--the imperious kid everyone knuckled under to in childhood, who planned the games and made up an the rules, whose whims were law. But from this take the part wanders into aimlessness. Like the rest of the cast, Schmeiser is forced to superimpose grown-up sexuality on otherwise recognizable eight-year-old dialogue; what's more, between pelvic gyrations, she and cohort Kathy (Susannah Rabb) are saddled with lyrics like "Ah, nuts to all this sufferin'!...Gimme a Bufferin."

HOPELESSLY TRAPPED by such drivel, the cast nevertheless plugs away with surprising spirit and energy. Less, unfortunately, can be said for other aspects of the production. The band consistently falters on the Carole King score, while the disjointed intrusions of motherly presence via large video monitors (with sequences by Melanie McDermott, Alison Taylor, and Ruth Mieszkuc) fail to achieve any immediacy at all. But such flaws of execution remain secondary in a show which so clearly should never have been attempted. The Sendak mystique for children is in many ways analogous to the grown-up vogue of Edward Gorey--the charm lies in the ascendancy of nonsense over logic, in the ingenuous whimsy at work, and most of all in the dominant, idiosyncratic drawings.

A less promising prospect for theatrical adaptation could hardly be imagined; it is difficult even to conceive of what convinced the mainstage selection committee to lavish a coveted slot and budget on so ill-conceived a venture. And in viewing the results, one is reminded, sadly, of the mathematical axiom that zero, no matter how many times, multiplied, can never equal anything but zero. A typical verse from any of Maurice Sendak's clever, malicious little tours de force--take "Stir it once, stir it twice, stir it chicken soup with rice"--means virtually nothing, and therein lies its charm. Blow it up to the size of the Loeb mainstage, add reddish lights and a crescent moon, choreograph it for 30 people in black lectards, and what have you got? Nothing, Nothing at all.