Everlasting magic in inspired ‘Tuck’
The great, vine-covered boughs of Joe Ragey’s set design won’t be contained by the Lucie Stern Theatre’s stage. They extend so far into the audience that, even if your climbing days are long gone, you can’t help but start to strategize: “If I were to stand on that seat, then climb on that other patron’s shoulders, maybe, just maybe, I could reach that first branch ... ”
“Tuck Everlasting” as a whole also offers an invitation to dare, to climb, to see anew and much farther from the highest limb. TheatreWorks’ regional premiere, which opened Saturday, Dec. 1, might adapt Natalie Babbitt’s 1975 young-adult novel, but it proffers ageless wisdom.
Young Winnie (Natalie Schroeder on opening night, alternating in the role with Katie Maupin) has been cooped up in her Treegap, N.H., home ever since her
father died, allowed not even to the fair heralded by the discomfiting Man in the Yellow Suit (Michael Gene Sullivan). Escaping just once from the anxious clutches of her mother (Teressa Foss) to explore the mysterious woods outside, she meets a new friend in the elfin, devil-maycare Jesse Tuck (Eddie Grey), who with his family shares a superpower and a secret. Mae (Kristine Reese), Angus ( Jonathan Rhys Williams), Miles (Travis Leland) and he are all immortal, never aging, and Winnie could be immortal, too.
Chief among the highlights of Robert Kelley’s production is Schroeder as Winnie, who brings not just powerful vocals and a sense of play to her choreography (by Alex Perez) but also real artistry. To early lines that could have just been onenote establishments of Winnie’s innocence and goodness, Schroeder might add a shrug, or a kind of wink at her circumstances. “I get it,” she seems to be saying. “I’m in some ways a little more grown up than my mother is, but I’ll play along.” She shapes the dynamics of a musical phrase to enhance its meaning, finding heaps of volume in the choice to be suddenly pianissimo; her character sings not as a static declaration of feeling but to work through a dilemma.
Lyricist Nathan Tysen finds lovely, pithy ways to express that dilemma. To be separate from the rest of the human race — from your own family members who didn’t drink the elixir of immortality — is as if the two hands of a clock never again “came back as one,” sings Miles. To be immortal is no longer to live; “we just are. We just be: no before, no beyond,” sings Angus.
As Jesse’s mother, Mae, Reese imbues each lyric with the stakes of a chokehold. As Jesse’s woebegone brother Miles, Leland has a voice as clear and comforting as daybreak. Colin Thomson and David Crane supply irresistible high jinks as the double act Constable Joe and Hugo, two detectives on the search for the missing Winnie. Crane in particular vibrates like a live wire, making it no wonder his Hugo would shriek and recoil at the slightest fright; it’s almost as if the whole stage will go kablooey unless his character finds something to yelp at.
The show’s one major flaw is a characteristic one of its young-adult genre, which is that its older characters don’t get drawn with the same depth and logic of its younger ones; their traits and desires are flimsily established, only to be left hanging or abandoned. But we’re meant to identify with Winnie, and the show’s aesthetics set you alight on a childhood flight of fancy. Lighting designer Pamila Z. Gray makes the beguiling trees, the cluttered attics of Ragey’s set glow with secret life, luring you in with the promise of fairy tale magic.
But the real magic of “Tuck” is how earthbound, how real, how everyday the story is at its conclusion. The musical makes the simple act of going through life — aging, losing older family members and gaining younger ones, accepting your own end of life — seem as enchanting, as charmed as anything the fountain of youth might offer.