The timing could not be better. In the week of agreement in Paris, Dr Seuss’s The Lorax burst into buoyant, candy-coloured stage life. This is surely the first fully environmentalist musical. It is not the first ecologically anxious drama. A Midsummer Night’s Dream got there 400 years ago.
The lorax is a creature, something like a beaver with a walrus moustache, who “speaks for the trees”. Entrepreneurs are chopping down the forests. From the tufty foliage they make shapeless strips posing as garments, called “thneeds”: thingth for which there ith no need but a huge market. If I were a tree I’m not sure I would pick as my spokesman a creature with beaver tendencies – too much log gnawing – but he is a plausible, slightly military hero, grumpily loquacious. Seuss’s extraordinary gift of the gab rings out from the lorax name alone: a little medicinal, but authoritative.
He is brought to fat-bellied, orange, spindle-limbed life as a puppet (with three onstage puppeteers) in Max Webster’s production. This joyfully mixes characters of flesh and fabric. You don’t often see a fish being embraced, but a trio of gaping-mouthed, swishing-tailed piscine puppets makes you want to hug them. Dark red bears are acrobats in furry costumes who backflip around the stage. Puppet swans the colour of egg yolks fly high at the end of sticks, and take to the boards as fluttering human ballerinas. Pink and green tousle-headed trees flounce up and down. Exploitative humans race around as a gargoyle gang.
Charlie Fink’s music is bouncily varied: country, rock and a touch of gospel. David Greig’s new adaptation is nimble with the rhyming couplets. It could, though, do with a tuck in the second half, which straggles into preachiness. It also too much resists co-opting child spectators. They want to cooperate. Unprompted, a small voice happily bellowed a suggested rhyme for “hearty”: “FARTY”.
