Border walls are crumbling at theaters all over town these days, the Trump-mandated edifice being the metaphor du jour for a political revolution sourced in protectionism and thus anathema to many artists. You can see this trend particularly in children’s theater, where a message of inclusivity, open borders and tolerance for others is de rigueur, but has taken on new metaphoric urgency.
Even when your source is "The Magic City," a novel written in 1910.
Edith Nesbit surely would have approved of the performance collective Manual Cinema’s hypnotic, contemporary take on her story of a 9-year-old orphan girl, Philomena (Sarah Fornace), whose loving, parental older sister, Helen (Julia Miller), takes up with a beau. This sudden trajectory — you really don’t see these things coming when you are 9 — makes Philomena fearful that her special relationship with her near-perfect sister will be compromised, especially since Brandon has a 7-year-old son, Lucas, whom Philomena finds understandably irritating, him being a 7-year-old boy and thus unable to help himself.
So Philomena retreats into her fantasy world where there is room only for Helen (and Patrick Swayze, but that’s too long a story for this review). The land of her imagination is a miniature, walled metropolis fashioned according to her own desires. And protected by a superpower, Godzilla-like version of herself. She doesn’t tweet much nor attack the media, but you get the idea.
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Watching this show made me retreat into the city of my dreams for a while, but, well, the lights have to come up and life outdoors has to be faced, whatever the news of the day. Before the arrival of rude reality, Philomena has to learn that families can be blended, that love is expandable and really not a zero-sum game, that 7-year-old boys are not irredeemably awful but have fears of their own, and that bridges are preferable to walls.
Although best known for writing "The Railway Children" (which has more of a sentimental reputation than the actual book), Nesbit was an avowed socialist and a founder of the Fabian Society, so I doubt she’d have considered Manual Cinema’s production an imposition on her allegorical and quite prescient themes. More like an enjoyable updating thereof, as devised by Drew Dir, Fornace and Miller.
Manual Cinema — a highly distinctive group chosen by the Chicago Children’s Theatre to inaugurate the studio theater in its new West Loop space — blends moviemaking and live performance. You watch the story on a screen, even as you see how the live actors, shadow puppets, sock puppets, toy theater characters, silhouettes and other inventiveness are making the film you are seeing. Live musicians provide a hip accompaniment to the narration and digital sound effects, created by Maren Celeste.
These are high-quality performances — especially the fab Fornace, who forges the most empathetic of 9-year-old girls, even though she has to present Philomena in a whole variety of dimensions, forms and formats, and Miller, playing the kind of sister who constitutes a blessing, at every stage of a girl’s life.
I’d recommend "The Magic City" for roughly 6- to 11-year-olds, and if you are introducing any kind of familial change or blending into your kids’ lives, you’ll find it especially helpful, I think. It even made this grown man think about throwing down a new bridge or two, and taming his inner Godzilla. On some occasions.
Podcasts are having a growing influence on live performance. That might sound like a strange point to make, given the famously sophisticated visuals of Manual Cinema, but you could close your eyes, listen to the music and Celeste’s intimate "This American Life"-like narration and enter a kind of dreamscape of your own.
There are dangers there — at one of the performances I saw, some kids were taking a sneaky middle-of-the-day nap, a consequence of a show that is about 15 minutes too long, especially since initially intense amounts of narration give way to overly long sequences of music and pictures, dissipating some of the requisite dramatic tension.
But that’s just for a bit. Everyone wakes up all the better. Great cat puppet, too.
Chris Jones is a Tribune critic.
cjones5@chicagotribune.com
Twitter @ChrisJonesTrib
REVIEW: "The Magic City" (3 stars)
When: Through Feb. 19
Where: Chicago Children’s Theatre, 100 S. Racine Ave.
Running time: 1 hour, 15 minutes
Tickets: $25 at 872-222-9555 or chicagochildrenstheatre.org
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