Appreciate the pirate in First Stage’s ‘Judy Moody and Stink’
“That’s not real, is it?”
So asks Stink Moody, brother to big sister Judy and costar of First Stage’s “Judy Moody and Stink: The Mad, Mad, Mad Treasure Hunt,” which opened Friday night under Jeff Frank’s direction.
Stink asks his questions while the Moody siblings are in the middle of a ghost tour, walking through a cemetery as their guide (Bo Johnson) regales them with tales of the long-dead pirates surrounding them.
It’s a bit more than the suddenly frightened Stink had bargained for when the siblings embarked with Mom and Dad for a weekend adventure on an offshore North Carolina island.
When that adventure began, Stink had been riffing on “Treasure Island,” singing lusty pirate songs, wearing a patch and calling himself Scurvy Stink. But children’s vivid imaginations, dwelling in the border country between Neverland and adults’ more narrowly drawn reality, can tilt in an instant between dreamscape and nightmare.
Would that this lackluster show had tilted more often, rather than being as narrowly conceived as it is by playwright Allison Gregory. A stage adaptation of Megan McDonald’s Judy Moody books should enrich and enliven the world existing in the Moody siblings’ minds. Gregory’s play diminishes it.
As embodied by Eloise Field and Thatcher Jacobs in the Porcupine cast of alternating young actors I saw, Judy and Stink are largely reduced to going through the motions of the McDonald book that chronicles the stages of a treasure hunt — all while competing for the prize with siblings Smart Girl (Abby Schaufler) and Tall Boy (Liam Jeninga).
Playing their parents, Kay Allmand and Todd Denning can seem as daft as their children see them; they also project as implausibly and blithely unconcerned with what their kids are up to (or even where they are). Accomplished actors both, they’re wasted window dressing here.
Johnson’s Scurvy Sam — the costumed pirate organizing this hunt, while also playing the four very different gatekeepers Sam impersonates while advancing the Moodys from clue to clue — is both much more interesting and what’s best about this show.
Johnson’s Sam isn’t just a guy in a costume playing pirate. He’s also just this side of weird as he adds random thoughts about cats being grey in the dark or riffs on Paul McCartney’s “Blackbird.” Entertaining himself in a dead-end job, he’s not above messing with the kids he shepherds along; there’s some particularly fine moments between him and Jacobs’ Stink.
But there aren’t enough such quirky interludes, in a show taking few risks and exhibiting no depth. It’s one of the few shows I’ve seen at First Stage that actually sells young people short, dumbing down rather than looking up to all their imaginations can see.
“Judy Moody and Stink: The Mad, Mad, Mad Treasure Hunt” continues through June 3 at the Marcus Center’s Todd Wehr Theater, 929 N. Water St. For tickets, call (414) 273-7206 or go online at firststage.org. Read more about this production at TapMilwaukee.com.