THE ADVENTURES OF PINOCCHIO
at the Garage
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Pinocchio’s first independent action is to run amok through the village, upsetting vendors’ carts, mocking distressed ladies, and generally causing pandemonium (a stage parents call “the terrible twos”). He proceeds to lie, bully, throw tantrums, and discard without hesitation the gifts given him by his poor but selfless father, Geppetto–who, to be sure, had originally thought to put his offspring to work, a sinister motive both Collodi and Vitali abandon almost immediately. Pinocchio strays from his duties at first sight of pretty slave-puppets or smooth-tallking shysters promising easy money. Later he undergoes bizarre bodily changes like those signaling puberty. But with the death of one parent figure–the everforgiving Blue Fairy, a thinly disguised version of the Virgin Mary–Pinocchio comes to realize his own limits and mortality and vows to rescue his father from an untimely fate.
Vitali’s synthesizer-based music tends more toward extended recitative than traditionally structured song–an exception is the Fox and Cat’s delightfully oily “Favor for a Friend” duet. And the lyrics are occasionally as wooden as the play’s hero (“While you were gone / So much went on”). With all its flaws, however, Lifeline’s production is still a welcome resurrection of a fable left too long in storage (even the Disney version looks rather quaint in 1994). It needs only a bit of refocusing to make it all that its authors intended.
Midway through the play Alcandre declared, “I gave up hoping for coherence long ago.” By then, so had I.
