The swamps outside of Duloc are not an obstacle for Connecticut Repertory Theatre. The company’s choice of “Shrek The Musical” for its big spring production is inspired. The show makes the best use of the resources available to it, including the puppetry prowess of the UConn Puppet Arts program and a bunch of high-spirited acting students. The college production also finds contemporary political relevance in the story of fairy-book characters displaced from the kingdom they’ve called home. You’ll be a believer.
The cast is led by professional actors Will Mann (as the lumbering big lug Shrek), Desi Oakley (a sarcastic, whipsmart Princess Fiona) and Mark Boyett (smarmy Lord Farquaad) but is defined by the youthful exuberance of students in the UConn MFA and BFA acting programs.
Among the most excitable: Scott Redmond as a hyperphysical dancing machine of a Donkey, Matthew Sorensen (singing in his own voice while manipulating a 4-foot wooden puppet) as a pipsqueak Pinocchio, and ensemble members such as Rebekah Santiago Berger, Derrick Holmes and others who have three, four or more roles in this frenetic fairy tale adventure.
Not all the stand-outs are human. This fantastical musical odyssey gets a boost from dozens of puppets — flapping birds, blooming flowers, blind mice, a gingerbread man (tortured by human soldiers brandishing spatulas and rolling pins) and a gorgeously scary dragon who exists in segments of head, wings and tail and is whisked about the stage like a Chinese kite.
For a show that’s ostensibly about acceptance and diversity, “Shrek” has an awful lot of jokes about its characters being short, ugly or stupid. This poor judgmental attitude is undercut at CT Rep by a racially varied ensemble, some cross-gender casting and the eschewing of idealized body types. The cast is all shapes and sizes. When they come together for a mad dance like “Freak Flag Fly,” “Shrek” becomes a dorm Halloween party gone wild.
Most interestingly, the ogres do not appear in greenface — Mann and Oakley perform in their own natural skin color, wearing hats with the species’ iconic tubular horns to denote ogreness.
For the uninitiated, “Shrek The Musical” is not a jukebox musical like the 2001 animated film on which it was based. The movie was scored with pop songs from “Bad Reputation” to “Hallelujah.” From that audacious audio soundtrack, the musical retains only “I’m a Believer,” which it relegates to an encore. As much as I like that song, I wish they hadn’t done that: I walked out the theater involuntarily humming that infernally catchy Monkees/Smash Mouth tune when I would rather have been savoring the show’s tender original love song “When Words Fail” and the gentle reprise of “Morning Person.”
It’s a powerful score that shifts deftly from style-parody (“I Think I Got You Beat” is basically a bad-taste rewrite of “Anything You Can Do, I Can Do Better” from “Annie Get Your Gun”) to imaginative scene-setting (Fiona’s hopeful song about leaving the locked tower she’s been trapped in for years, sung by herself at three phases of her life) to misfit anthems (“Freak Flag”).
This is the musical with a song called “Build a Wall” in it, and director Margarett Perry milks every potential President Trump reference in a show she sees as a story of deportation and xenophobia. While Boyett doesn’t do a Trump impression as the insensitive and insecure Lord Farquaad, he is made up to look a little bit like him, and even wears a red ballcap emblazoned with “Make Duloc Great Again.” When he rides into one scene on a hobbyhorse, he yelps “Whoa, Kellyanne!”
It’s not all cheap gags. “Shrek” is about something: home, family, respect, hope, truth and responsible leadership. This show is a fine embodiment of multicultural community values, whether that body is human or a puppet.
SHREK THE MUSICAL — book and lyrics by David Lindsay-Abaire, music by Jeanine Tesori, directed by Margarett Perry, produced by Connecticut Repertory Theatre — plays through April 30 at the Harriet S. Jorgensen Theatre, 2132 Hillside Road, on the UConn campus in Storrs. Performances are Wednesday at Thursday at 7:30 p.m. and 8 p.m. on Friday and Saturday, with 2 p.m. matinees on April 29 and 30. 860-486-2113, crt.uconn.edu.
