Pinocchio Review – A complete family musical that replaces Collodi’s darkness with warm, humorous lessons | stage

‘FIt’s fun!” bellows Pinocchio as he cries onto the stage, testing the limits of his newly mobile legs. It’s a salutary edict for anyone adapting the many moral, horrific, and bizarre episodes in Carlo Collodi’s 1883 novel. Charlie’s new family musical takes Josephine and Jim Fortune to heart, darting outside the blocks to cover an impressive portion of Collodi’s story while trading darkness and finger-wagging for heart-warming lessons and raucous humor.

In a narrow-minded Italian town (the song “Mamma Mia” plays frantically to kick off the next delightful silliness), free-thinking inventor Geppetto is an outcast. His ticket to adventure arrives as a piece of talking wood, which he plans to turn into a fortune-winning puppet. Of course, Pinocchio has other ideas. But here, the doll’s journey into childhood is not just about learning what makes us good, but what makes us human. His scratches along the way are born not of evil, but of curiosity and exuberant energy – captured perfectly by the three puppeteers who animate Peter O’Rourke’s minimalist wooden design (including Lee Braithwaite, who gives Pinocchio a wild, wonder-filled voice), and by Josephine’s Book, which sees Pinocchio launch into life’s big questions only to interrupt the answers by shouting “I’m hungry!”

Under the careful direction of Sean Holmes, the 14-person cast brings full enjoyment to the villains and helpers Pinocchio meets along the way. Kerry Frampton and Lucy McCormick are extremely dastardly as Fox and Cat, who leave him penniless and hanging by his feet in a tree, but Stephen Webb is outstanding as Campi Giacomo Cricket and the terrifying kidnapped coach. The band is excellent, enhancing Vicki Igbokwe-Ozoagu’s innovative choreography and giving us wonderful, soaring harmonies. Fortune’s songs, which range from rock ‘n’ roll to ska, from pop to blues, are catchy and the lyrics (by Fortune and Josephine) are witty and poignant, but sometimes too fast and complex to understand.

The production leans into Collodi’s crudeness (“A chicken coming out of a cooked egg?” “That makes perfect sense,” The Amazing Cricket) and the Globe Theater’s folding fourth-wall, with a theatrical twist to the audience and a perfect moment when Pinocchio’s puppeteers bend over as he insists that he move without assistance. But his greatest success is the addition of another transformation – that of Geppetto (played with humor and heart by Nick Holder) from normal but neurotic caregiver to full-fledged father. A reminder that what makes us human is communication.