Mark Twain, the American author and humorist who predicted he\u2019d go out with Halley\u2019s Comet (he died the day after it swung by these parts in 1910), might rightly be called the poor man\u2019s William Shakespeare. After all, Bill put a lot of stock in the movement of the stars too \u2013- besides, Twain\u2019s novel\u00a0“Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,” from 1884, features lots of Shakespearean devices, like mistaken identities, hidden treasure, forced confinement, the vicissitudes of the law, the open road and the aspirations of the runaways who tread it.
\nMark\u2019s characters are a skosh rougher around the edges, and his language is maybe a little coarser, probably a byproduct of his general impatience with the situations modern humanity creates for itself. In the right hands, the Finn novel makes an eminently stageworthy treatment of those foibles and the life lessons they reap. By way of illustration, Carlsbad\u2019s New Village Arts has called on an ideal group. Its current\u00a0“Big River: The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn”\u00a0is a rambunctious and downright adorable entry, even as the venue itself imposes a big restriction of its own.
\nThe give and take in this 1985 Tony Award-winning script (it had its premiere mount at La Jolla Playhouse under former artistic director Des McAnuff) is positively topnotch, with librettist William Hauptman and late composer Roger Miller making way for each other\u2019s craft like the relay racers they are. Twain\u2019s story is the ultimate beneficiary \u2013- his idealistic young Huck and beleaguered black runaway slave Jim build an unlikely and unbreakable friendship in their eastward travels by raft from Twain\u2019s native Missouri, even as drunkenness, abuse, greed and wrongheaded townsfolk threaten to “sivilize” Huck and further victimize Jim, who\u2019s only trying to earn enough money to buy back his wife and kids.
\nThe men even overrun their destination a time or two, the rivers beckoning their epiphanies in a beautiful story of “considerable trouble and considerable joy.” Indeed, the piece is as big as the waters the men traverse \u2013- and that\u2019s precisely what brings the experience up ever so slightly short.
\nNew Village Arts is a Carlsbad destination, having grown precipitously once it moved to its very nice venue (which includes an art gallery and studios) in 2007. Even so, there\u2019s only so much space to go around in the performance area and its single story of about 100 seats.\u00a0Big River\u00a0is bustin\u2019 out all over the place amid director Colleen Kollar Smith\u2019s sense of fun and youthful abandon \u2013- and often enough, the ratio of space to creation is well out of whack. Big production numbers like “Do You Wanna Go to Heaven” and “How Blest We Are” seem swollen amid the smallish setting; Jim and Huck\u2019s touching “Worlds Apart” reads almost detachedly amid the lack of extras, for whom there\u2019s precious little room.
\nThink\u00a0“Dances with Wolves”\u00a0on a 32-inch screen. You get the idea.
\nBut y\u2019plays the hand ye\u2019r dealts, which is to say there\u2019s much more to this piece than its four walls. Escondido high schooler Reed Lievers matches Huck\u2019s spunk and temerity word for word, his home-cooked smile rivaling that of Zackary Scot Wolfe\u2019s Tom Sawyer (Wolfe is also a total riot as the Young Fool in the wacky treatise “Arkansas”). Bryan Barbarin\u2019s Jim is an open sore of a man, yet Barbarin fuels Jim\u2019s indefinable sense of hope, the cornerstone of which is Huck himself.
\nThe husband-and-wife team of Manny and Melissa Fernandes exude the hucksterism their King and Duchess live for, while Natasha Partnoy\u2019s spirited Mary Jane colors some major subtext almost singlehandedly. Everybody else is just fine in collaboration with the show\u2019s six barnstorming musicians, who kill the bluegrass and gospel-tinged tunes geared to the show\u2019s intent by music director Jon Lorenz.
\nA giant wooden moon defines Christopher Scott Murillo\u2019s rustic set; the rest of the technical effort evolves accordingly (like Smith, many on the technical and creative staff are Lamb\u2019s Players Theatre veterans; how bad can they be?).
\nIn 2005, I was privileged to see this entry as part of a national tour mounted by North Hollywood\u2019s outstanding Deaf West Theatre and New York\u2019s renowned Roundabout Theatre Company; it was staged at the sprawling Ahmanson Theatre in L.A. and was an absolute landmark in the annals of entertainment statewide. As much as anything, the venue fueled the show\u2019s colossal success amid the half-million musicians and choristers and their hootin\u2019 and hollerin\u2019; the companies (like the NVA troupe) were beside themselves with the joy of performance, and the breadth of their effort touched every patron in the theater\u2019s 1,600 seats.
\nBut even as the NVA space is by rights far too small for this show, you can\u2019t knock these people for trying. In fact, they succeed very handsomely amid the restriction. That TV may be only 32 inches wide, but the cast\u2019s aliveness makes every pixel count.
\nThis review is based on the matinee performance of April 10. “Big River: The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” runs through May 15 at New Village Arts, 2787 State St. in Carlsbad. $44-$47. newvillagearts.org, 760-433-3245.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Mark Twain, the American author and humorist who predicted he\u2019d go out with Halley\u2019s Comet (he died the day after it swung by these parts in 1910), might rightly be called the poor man\u2019s William Shakespeare. After all, Bill put a lot of stock in the movement of the stars too \u2013- besides, Twain\u2019s novel\u00a0“Adventures […]<\/p>","protected":false},"author":726,"featured_media":256883,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_seopress_robots_primary_cat":"11560","_seopress_titles_title":"It's the thought that counts in NVA's adorable 'Big River'","_seopress_titles_desc":"","_seopress_robots_index":"","jnews-multi-image_gallery":[],"jnews_single_post":[],"jnews_primary_category":[],"jnews_social_meta":[],"jnews_override_counter":[],"footnotes":""},"categories":[11549,11560],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-256882","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-arts-entertainment","category-la-jolla-village-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/test.sdnews.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/256882","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/test.sdnews.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/test.sdnews.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/test.sdnews.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/726"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/test.sdnews.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=256882"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/test.sdnews.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/256882\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/test.sdnews.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/256883"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/test.sdnews.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=256882"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/test.sdnews.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=256882"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/test.sdnews.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=256882"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}