The stories of Eric Carle come to WHBPAC

The players of the Mermaid Theatre of Nova Scotia think they’ve found a way to breathe new life into Eric Carle’s classic children’s books.

Using fluorescent puppets, bathed in black light that renders the puppeteers invisible, the 37-year-old Canadian theater company will aim to re-create Mr. Carle’s staple collage-style artwork when they perform “The Very Hungry Caterpillar and Other Eric Carle Favourites” at the Westhampton Beach Performing Arts Center on Saturday, November 14.

The show is the first of two internationally-known pieces of children’s theater coming to the center this month. The second is a series of musical playlets by the Paper Bag Players called “The Great Mummy Adventure,” coming to town for a performance on the day after Thanksgiving, November 27.

“These are two wonderful opportunities in November to make

the performing arts part of families’ lives, and it’s a great way to introduce kids to the performing arts,” said Joanna Ferraro-Levy, the Performing Arts Center’s director of arts education. 
The Eric Carle performance comes as “The Very Hungry Caterpillar” celebrates its 40th anniversary this year, the same year that Mr. Carle turned 80. Along with the caterpillar’s tale of metamorphosis, the Mermaid Theatre will also stage “The Mixed-Up Chameleon” and “Little Cloud.”

“They’re just brilliant,” Ms. Ferraro-Levy said. “They bring books to life in vivid color. The art is duplicated perfectly.”

The Mermaid Theatre started performing “The Very Hungry Caterpillar” 10 years ago, and tacked on the other two stories in 2003, according to John Allen MacLean, one of the two performers who will operate the puppets this Saturday. He and another puppeteer, Rebecca Russell, will act out the three stories, narrated verbatim from the books by actor Gordon Pincent, to music written by the company’s in-house composer, Stephen Naylor.

The show, directed by Jim Morrow, runs for about 45 minutes after beginning at 11 a.m., with a question-and-answer session afterward and a pre-show workshop in creative movement for ticket-holders starting at 10 a.m. for $5 per child. Tickets are $20 or $15, depending on seating.

Mr. MacLean said that the company likes to open up with “Little Cloud,” because it’s best suited to pulling parents and kids out of their frantically-paced lives.

“It’s a very, very gentle show,” he said. “We start our show with that just to get everyone in the mood and slow them down.”

While “The Very Hungry Caterpillar” is always the biggest crowd pleaser, he said, his favorite puppet is “The Mixed-Up Chameleon,” the protagonist in a tale of envy and eventual self-acceptance, because it’s the most expressive and it usually gets some laughs. He said all the members of the theater company like to call their performances “non-shushing shows,” meaning kids are encouraged to make noise.

“We like the kids to respond, to be able to talk through our show,” he said.

To date, he added, more than 1.3 million people worldwide have seen “The Very Hungry Caterpillar” performed, in places as distant as Japan, South Korea, Singapore and Vietnam.

Two weeks after “The Very Hungry Caterpillar” hits the Westhampton Beach Performing Arts Center, the Paper Bag Players will take over the PAC stage to perform “The Great Mummy Adventure,” an hour-long series of 10 short plays. The Arts Center show will be their 16th performance of this material, which they only started previewing in New York City on November 4 after a period of writing and rehearsal.

In many ways, it will be a typical Paper Bag Players performance, according to artistic director and performer Ted Brackett—short narratives imbued with comedy, song and audience participation­­—but with a few new twists. As is the 50-year-old company’s tradition, most everything on the set will be made of cardboard or paper, materials that strike chords in kids’ imaginations, Mr. Brackett said.

“It goes back to Christmas presents, playing with the box,” he said. “Kids can go home and re-create what they see on the stage.”

About half of the playlets in “The Great Mummy Adventure” are new and half are reworked pieces from previous tours. Mr. Brackett said he mixed things up this time around, involving the performers more than usual in the creative process.

The experiment yielded some novel results, including the musical finale, “Prints,” in which the performers use their hands to paint on a giant paper canvas.

“The Paper Bag Players have worked with paint before, but not in this fashion and not in this way,” Mr. Brackett said. “I was very nervous about that piece working, and the response we’ve gotten so far­­—it’s the highlight of the show.”

Tickets range from $15 to $25, depending on seating, and the show will begin at 3 p.m. on November 27, with a pre-show puppetry workshop at 2 p.m. for ticket-holders for $5 extra.

The Paper Bag Players have made something of a November tradition of their visit to the Westhampton Beach Performing Arts Center, having performed there on the Friday after Thanksgiving for the last five years or so.

Both of the November shows are part of the arts education program at the PAC, a program of family-friendly theater that caters to kids from prekindergarten age to about 12, Ms. Ferraro-Levy said, or “for as long as kids will come with their parents, basically.”

In selecting these two shows, Ms. Ferraro-Levy said, she was attracted simply by the quality of the material.

“There’s children’s theater,” she said, “and then there’s children’s theater.”