Updated ‘Beanstalk’ story smooth and sly
“Jack and Phil, Slayers of Giants, Inc.” neatly and slyly updates the traditional story of “Jack and the Beanstalk” for a contemporary young audience.
Columbus Children’s Theatre’s polished and brisk production of Charles Way’s one-act play follows impetuous Jack (Mitchell Kallner) and his more reserved friend Phil (Aidan Behrens) up the beanstalk and into the lair of the giant (voiced by Brandon Boring), with results a little different from those of the familiar fairy tale.
In this version, Jack is upset because his anxious widowed mom, Barbara (Krista Lively Stauffer), can’t afford the mortgage on their house and has put it on the market.
He persuades next-door neighbor Phil to join him on a trip to a pawn shop. There, he trades an antique watch for magical beans. As expected, his trip to the top of the beanstalk nets Jack a golden egg. But it also leaves him with a swollen head.
When he comes back down, he is greeted by eager reporters (Karla Andrews and Isaiah Colon, amusingly playing various oversized roles). While ignoring Phil’s presence, Jack basks in the spotlight of being interviewed on television, greeting the president and starring in a music video.
Only when the giant threatens to eat the town’s residents does Jack do a turnaround and recognize the importance of his friendship with Phil.
The play, under Ryan Scarlata’s light-handed but firm direction, recognizes the plot’s message without slowing the action to hammer it home.
Kallner and Behrens make a winning team. Their characters have their differences, but they’re not so far apart that you can’t imagine them as longtime friends.
Stauffer is persuasive as a mother giddily, if temporarily, carried away by the thrill of celebrity; Boring, playing Phil’s father, is grounded as a man who takes infectious pleasure in all kinds of tools and is even more pleased when in his son’s company.
Technically, the show is pleasingly smooth, integrating projected images with scenes on an elevated stage from which the boys pop out into the giant’s magical world. The audience on Sunday afternoon was delighted with the giant, who appears as an enormous puppet face, created by Tonya Marie of Gypsy Cat Studios, peering out through a window and occasionally sneezing on the boys.
Although the show sometimes aims at adults, particularly in some Kafkaesque scenes in which the boys are marched to a secret headquarters by the military, the play doesn’t lose touch with its primary audience or with the story from which it takes flight.