"Harold and the Purple Crayon' at the Prince

When Crockett Johnson drew comic strips and children's books back in the '40s and "'50s, his audience— which consisted of kids like me— knew nothing of today's buzzing and beeping mechanical toys and relentlessly frenetic videos. Consequently, we were forced to rely instead on our imaginations.

Johnson's minimal drawing style tapped into these limitations: He used simple lines and just a few colors to tell a story clearly, without the constant distractions that seem obligatory in today's children's fare. Harold and the Purple Crayon, the first of Johnson's seven Harold books, concerned a lonely little boy who utilizes a single purple crayon to create an imaginary world of his own, complete with gardens, castles, circuses, clowns, witches, horses, lions, elephants, dragons, Martians, all of which appear and disappear at his command.

The question naturally arises: How would a live adaptation of a charming but unpretentious '50s tale like Harold appeal to today's hyped-up kids, bombarded as they are with the high-tech wizardry of Big and The Nightmare Before Christmas, all available 24/7 in their own homes on big-screen high-definition TV, thanks to TiVo and YouTube?

Bad omens

My apprehensions were aroused when I arrived for Sunday's performance with my six-year-old twin grandchildren in tow. The Prince Theater lobby was mobbed with hundreds of tiny twerps, mostly high on junk food, and frazzled parents chasing after them. Inside, in keeping with what is apparently some sort of Philadelphia theatrical joke directed solely at me, the seats immediately behind me appeared to be occupied by patients from a tuberculosis ward. And whereas Harold is an intimate story, the Prince is a long theater, whose last rows seemed about half a city block from the stage. How, I wondered, would kids even see and hear live actors on the stage from such a distance, especially with so many grownups blocking the view?

To make matters worse, Sunday's performance was preceded by several speeches, including one by a politician. Politicians possess many skills, but speaking to small children (who don't vote) isn't one of them. All around me I could sense kids squirming and sneezing and coughing. Bad signs.

Then the show started and suddenly you could hear a pin drop. Every kid's attention was focused raptly on the stage, thanks to a remarkable non-stop combination of music, dance, animation and puppetry. Harold (Heather Fox) waved his purple crayon and images appeared on the screen— first static, then moving, and finally morphing into live (and mostly purple) characters and animals that played, danced and chased Harold through a succession of moving backdrops: a circus, a garden, a starlit sky, and a seemingly endless art gallery, among others.

Larger than life

This Harold, it turned out, is a story told through dance, not words. Kids didn't need to listen to spoken dialogue because there was none, aside from a few lines of narration. They didn't need to strain to see Harold because he was adorned with an enlarged puppet head. Ditto for the other four energetic dancers, who mostly appeared as enlarged creatures. (A giant witch that terrified Harold was reduced, via Harold's crayon, to a tiny witch doll easily stuffed into a box.)

Charles Gilbert's score was a bit too unrelievedly frenetic for my taste, but compared to the ear-splitting noise most kids are exposed to today, it seemed like classical music. Clearly a great deal of creative thought and talent was brought to bear on this show— enough to hold kids' attention for a full 60 minutes.

Credit director/choreographer Leslie Reidel for reviving Crockett Johnson's forgotten character and seizing his point: that even in the computer age, nothing can replace the power of human imagination.