Rainbow version of ‘Rapunzel’ lets down its hair

This is not your fairy godmother’s “Rapunzel.”

Not with a dragon who can’t breathe fire — or fly. To say nothing of a villainess with bigger hair than the title heroine’s.

Yet that’s exactly the point in “Rapunzel! Rapunzel! A Very Hairy Fairy Tale.”

The Rainbow Company’s production of the storybook romp opens a two-weekend run Friday at the Charleston Heights Arts Center.

Your first glimpse of the set confirms that this is no conventional fairy tale.

Instead of the usual castle and turret, the setting for “Rapunzel! Rapunzel!” (designed by Kris Van Riper ) seems geared for a rock concert, complete with scaffolding, risers and amplifiers.

That’s exactly the idea, according to director Toni Molloy-Tudor , Rainbow Company’s education director.

“The set designer wanted to put it within the framework of a touring music or rock concert,” she says, thereby creating an image Rainbow Company’s young audiences would “identify with.”

The contemporary backdrop sets the stage for a play-within-a-play — and provides “a real juxtaposition between one world and another world,” Molloy-Tudor says.

Although “Rapunzel! Rapunzel!” starts with the same story as in the fairy tale, this production provides “an updated version, with modern references and lots of modern jokes,” including numerous anachronisms, she says.

Written by Janet Yates Vogt and Mark Friedman — the same team behind “How I Became a Pirate,” which Rainbow Company presented last year — “Rapunzel! Rapunzel!” relates its hairy fairy tale in “sort of off-the-wall fashion,” the director says.

That makes it more relevant to today’s audiences, young and old, she adds.

“I’m a student of the fairy tale, and I love them, but they have to be made current to the mores of society in order to survive,” Molloy-Tudor says. “If they don’t change and grow with the world, they’re lost.”

In that vein, this “Rapunzel” features a heroine (played by Delancey Prince) who, despite her imprisonment in a tower, “still has good old-fashioned spunk and spirit,” the director says, citing the character’s “attitude of a modern-day young woman.”

Even when Rapunzel meets Sir Roderick (Lucas Reilly ), “the nobleman who wants to save her, she’s assertive and saucy — but still very feminine,” in Molloy-Tudor’s words. “She’s not someone who’s just sort of languishing.”

And speaking of Sir Roderick, “the hero is not totally infallible,” the director adds. “That’s important, too — he’s a human being.”

Which is more than we can say for Socrates (Deimoni Brewington), the castle’s resident dragon, who also narrates the tale.

As for the tone of the tale, the name of Rapunzel’s nemesis — her nasty aunt, big-haired Lady Za Za (Pat Lusk) — should give you a clue.

So should Rapunzel’s practice of putting on earbuds and listening to music when she’s stranded in her tower.

Cast members perform music, but “Rapunzel! Rapunzel!” is more a play with music than a full-on musical, in Molloy-Tudor’s view.

That, in turn, leaves room for “more dialogue and character development,” she says.

Character development is all well and good, but “Rapunzel! Rapunzel!” also has its share of wacky humor — embodied by, among others, a Gypsy Woman (Nancy Marcellus) with a Yiddish accent.

Marcellus’ daughter Leta also appears in multiple roles — in the Gypsy chorus, as a tango break dancer and as one of the play’s forest folk.

But they’re only one of two mother-daughter teams in the show, reflecting Rainbow Company’s age-appropriate casting policy. Fittingly, Rapunzel’s mother, the Queen, is played by Suzanne Prince — whose daughter Delancey plays Rapunzel .

A senior at The Meadows School, Delancey makes her final Rainbow Company student bow as Rapunzel, along with five other company members who’ll be graduating from high school this spring.

“I don’t know who was more excited,” Molloy-Tudor says, when mother and daughter found out they had been cast as mother and daughter.

After all, it wouldn’t be a fairy tale without a happy ending.

Contact reporter Carol Cling at ccling@
reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0272.