Puppets present perseverence perspective

By Bethany Bray
Staff Writer

April 03, 2008 05:00 am

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Elementary students in North Andover were visited by a wolf in sheep's clothing this month — and the tortoise and the hare, the ant and the grasshopper and other favorite characters from Aesop's fables — as part of a program by the University of New Hampshire's ArtsReach Tour.

A cast of five actors, all students at UNH, presented "Don't Count Your Chickens Until they Cry Wolf," a collection of several of Aesop's fables told through singing and acting with puppets. Performances, given to kindergarten through second-graders at each North Andover elementary throughout the month, were sponsored by the North Andover Schools Enrichment Council.

Thomson Elementary first-graders Payton Oswald and Kyra McLean said they thought the show was "awesome."

"It was funny when she (actress Vanessa Romanoff, as the hare) talked, she had a really funny voice," said Payton of the tortoise and the hare fable.

"It showed that you should keep on trying, just don't take a rest," added Kyra.

The UNH ArtsReach Tour sends a troupe of student actors for the "Don't Count Your Chickens" show to schools all over New England as an outreach program of their department of theater and dance. UNH students that act in the program get course credit.

The actors each wore a brightly colored costume that matched the puppets the held throughout the show. The cast also brought a woodland backdrop as a set, often having the puppets jump out from behind trees.

As the cast worked their way through the fables, they would stop, ring a triangle, and tell the moral at the end of each story. Each character in the fable was represented with a puppet, and the actors often sang part of the story.

In the tortoise and the hare story, actor Justin Morin walked slowly, the tortoise puppet on his hand, as he sang a song with the lyrics "slow and steady wins."

The children cheered him on, chanting "tortoise, tortoise!" over and over as he crossed the stage.

As the hare, played by actress Vanessa Romanoff, stopped to take a rest in the middle of the race, one little boy in the audience at Thomson called "don't do it!"

During the boy who cried wolf fable, the children giggled as Romanoff kept interrupting Morin as he was telling the story with a loud "baa!" from her sheep puppet.

All five members of the cast joined in a song with the lyrics, "dreaming dreams is great, but just in case there's a catch, don't count your chickens until they hatch!"

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