‘A Wilde Holiday’ Is Luminous With Warmth

It was cold in the house at Friday night’s world premiere performance of “A Wilde Holiday� at Glendale’s A Noise Within. Virtually everyone in the audience remained wrapped in coats throughout the performance.

The chill was not intentional, of course--but there is something oddly appropriate, satisfying even, about being in a cold theater when the show on the stage before you glows like a warm fire.

Such is the feeling with “A Wilde Holiday,� a 90-minute evening of storytelling, poetry and music fashioned around three fairy tales written by Oscar Wilde. The show, a one-weekend event, closed Sunday.

Wilde’s “The Happy Prince and Other Stories� was published in 1888--before Wilde penned better-known works such as “The Picture of Dorian Gray,� “Lady Windemere’s Fan� and “The Importance of Being Earnest.� The fairy tales came to the attention of director Sabin Epstein about 15 years ago, when he was reading through all of Wilde’s works to prepare for a production of “Earnest.�

In “Wilde Holiday,� three stories--�Star Child,� “The Happy Prince� and “The Selfish Giant�--are bound together with poems by Lewis Carroll, Willa Cather, Christina Rossetti and May Sarton, with luminous music by Laura Karpman lending an aura of mystery.

Performed on Victoria Robinson’s almost-bare set by four versatile actors clutching scripts in black notebooks, “Wilde Holiday� is just a notch more elaborate than reader’s theater. Only the occasional prop--a shawl of golden gossamer, a magic wand--aids the performers, who slip nimbly between portrayals of animals, plants and people with happy disregard for actual species, gender or age. It’s just actors, and words--beautiful ones.

And, sometimes, scary, sad or disturbing. Remember, these fairy tales are also Wilde tales--simple, but with an eddy of darkness underneath. And it doesn’t take a professor to make the leap from these fables about external versus inner beauty to Wilde’s later obsession with the subject in “The Picture of Dorian Gray,� with the handsome young man enjoying eternal hunk-hood while his portrait ages and wrinkles in the closet.

Of the three tales, “The Happy Prince� is the saddest, and most lovely. And, surprisingly, the wittiest, with Stephen Rockwell doing a hilariously sulky turn as the Swallow, who wants nothing more than to migrate with his friends to sunny Egypt but ends up stuck in Europe for the winter, keeping company with the talking statue of a dead prince who goads him into doing good deeds. This fairy tale is set in that long-ago land of castles and kings, but Rockwell’s bird--could he get any funnier?--seems to have swooped in from the San Fernando Valley circa 2001.

“Star Child� is the blandest. Besides presenting a standard frog-prince sort of theme, it clutches so tightly to the notion that in fairy-tales, all things must happen in threes--three bears, three wishes, you know--that it ends up going on a little too long. But Anne Marie Lee--who is also possessed of an otherworldly soprano singing voice--shows a touching understatement in her portrayal of the little-boy Star Child.

Deborah Strang, doing double duty as the heavy in her roles the Selfish Giant and Lewis Carroll’s Father William, is robust and effective in both. Geoff Elliott is, well, statuesque as the Happy Prince with tears in his sapphire eyes. It’s an ensemble that plays together like a string quartet--and the result is as fresh and simple as a Christmas tree before the tinsel goes on.