Jungle Book' brings youngsters to campus

Dec. 9, 2004
By Anna Anderson
Staff Writer

If you happened to walk through Galvin at 10:00am last Friday, you may have tripped over the long lines of little folk scurrying in to see the annual children’s play.  This year it’s Jungle Book, the musical.  It’s fairly unusual to see so many people less than three feet tall on a college campus, as evidenced by the amused St. Ambrose students attempting to make their way through the Galvin lobby.  The kids are definitely in the mood to see a play about jungle animals.  Two small girls, one sporting cornrows and the other soft curls walk by chanting, “We are elephants.”

One or two kids can make a lot of noise and over 1000 of them could bring the house down, in a literal sense. If you think it’s hard to sit still for an hour, imagine asking the same of hundreds of elementary schoolers.  Finally, after everyone is seated and the lights dim, a woman in a safari hat appears onstage amid the dim roar of many small voices.

“Shhhh,” she says.  The sound is echoed throughout the auditorium followed by relative silence.

As the woman in the safari hat explains what jungle animals we’ll meet in this play, large light stencils of the animals appear on the walls.  The audience reacts with cheers and when the tiger (IS he a CHEETAH?  WHAT IS SHEERKON, THE EVIL CAT-LIKE CREATURE? ) is shown, there is an eruption of cheering and applause.

Part of the success of this play is how the audience has the opportunity to interact with and react to what is happening onstage (or on the walls, for that matter).  For a young audience being able to interact is important.  With the exception of the chaperones, the audience is mostly under the age of 10 and their reactions are spontaneous and uninhibited.

The howling wolves onstage are joined by a deafening howl from hundreds of small mouths in the audience.  Later in the play when the night sky is projected on the ceiling and blue spotlights sweep the audience, exclamations of delight ripple through the sea of small children and they reach their arms up hoping to catch some of the light between their fingers.

A lot of the jokes in the play seem to be lost on the young audience but the overall spectacle of a live play is perhaps more important to the children.  They are on the edge of their seats at some moments and at others, when a scene runs long they are sprawled in their seats and slumped over the armrests.  A few times an actor or two leaves the stage and runs up the aisles.  The lucky kids in the aisle seats stretch out their hands to meet those of the actors.

This version of the Jungle Book is portrayed by actors wearing huge mask-hats that seem to distract me more than aid in the identification of characters.   This is partly because the hat-masks are so exaggerated.  I find that if I watch the mask-hats and not the faces of the actors they look more like the character, but this proves difficult.

There are several parts of this play that will probably be repeated endlessly by school children across the Quad Cities.  One of these is from a scene when Mowgli is with the monkeys in the Lost City.  Over and over the monkeys chant their motto, “We all say so, so it must be true,” and wiggle their opposable thumbs.

After the play the organized chaos of the mass exodus begins.  I enter the fray and ask Elizabeth, a seven-year-old from Cardinal Elementary School what her favorite part of the play was and she says she liked the end the best, because that’s when there was a lot of singing.

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