There was a moment during Where the Wild Things Are’s opening night where a child, so taken in with the play and its rich interactivity, raised her hand from the audience to say something.
Her guardian gently pressed her hand down, but that moment was one of the sweetest signs of the immersive power of Manitoba Theatre for Young People’s season opening show, an adaption of Maurice Sendak’s iconic 1963 picture book.
At the beginning of the production — which tells the tale of Max, a boisterous young boy who is sent to bed without supper and finds himself on an island inhabited with an array of monsters, where he becomes king — Wild Things masks were handed out to the audience, and kids were invited to shriek, howl and respond to dialogue as they acted out the creatures.
Victor Mariano and Linda A. Carlson in the MTYP production of Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are.
Max’s bedroom exploded into an exotic jungle that covered much of the theatre in an inventive scene where the audience was asked to help orchestrate things — well-rehearsed elements inviting improvisation from all.
Adults mostly sat back, as one would at a comedy show hoping not to be picked on by the performers, but the kids, as young as three or four, clearly got a big kick out of it all. And they never seemed scared as they engaged with the show’s themes of embracing and taming one’s inner wild thing.
This co-production between MTYP and Presentation House (which runs about an hour and is aimed at audiences aged three to eight) features a two-person cast, the tirelessly energetic Victor Mariano and Linda A. Carlson, who performed to a full house on Friday and capably held kids’ attention.
Greenlit by Sendak as a theatrical concept over two decades ago, the play has a neat local origin story.
When Sendak published Where the Wild Things Are, critics complained the children’s book, with its iconically illustrated monsters, was too spooky for kids. One can easily see how live theatre could risk making the monster’s scariness feel too big and vivid.
This play’s work-around is to put the audience in the role of the Wild Things, where they interact with the show in different ways, mostly from their seats. Play originator Kim Selody worked with MTYP founder and former artistic director Leslee Silverman on the concept in the early 2000s, winning Sendak’s approval.
Over the past 23 years, Wild Things has seen around 1,000 performances all over the world.
Beyond softening the story’s inherently spooky stuff, there are other reasons to be impressed with this show’s expertly staged interactivity.
Amid dire financial forecasts for Canada’s performing arts industry, many are making an appeal to audiences to recall what makes the performing arts, especially traditional European artforms, so unique: their “liveness.”
The phrase is repeated like a counterspell to Netflix and TikTok’s mass hypnosis, and we sometimes feel guilty if we’re too wiped to set aside a few hours on a winter night to applaud, at the appropriate times, a master of this baroque instrument or that 19th-century style of dance.
Victor Mariano performs on the MTYP stage.
Enriching and life-changing though these experiences can be, they tend to imply a certain passivity. And passivity and great art, as well as a lot of addictive brainrot, are also available to us through screens at home — making liveness, by itself, a tough sell sometimes.
Yet there’s another quality almost entirely unique the performing arts, and more egalitarian in spirit, and that’s interactivity. This is present to varying degrees in every live artform, and kids probably thrive on it more than adults.
If you grew up going to MTYP, you’ll certainly have memories of being transported into a state of mesmerism by not much more than a good yarn and creative use of simple props and sets.
But maybe your favourite memories will be of the shows that went a little further, inviting you to play along by talking back to the actors or even getting up on stage with them.
MTYP’s Where the Wild Things Are has all the above and works with classic source material.
Spike Jonze’s dark film adaptation is OK, but this is a richer experience for a child.
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