Back in 1845, Heinrich Hoffman created a book of cautionary tales to teach his kids moral lessons. Those German stories, which often ended in the death of the misbehaving child, now provide the basis for the musical “Shockheaded Peter” at Cygnet Theatre.
Depicting the demise of small children could be off-putting to a director who needs to fill theater seats. But Rob Lutfy accepted the challenge of “Shockheaded Peter” and its grisly tales of naughty children and their misguided parents. The original children's book, "Struwwelpeter" including stories about a boy whose thumbs are cut off in order to teach him a lesson about sucking them and another in which a little girl who burns to death after foolishly playing with matches.
But how do you make such potentially offensive material palatable?
Lutfy's solution was to exaggerate everything. So he endows the play with a stylish flair and designs a production so wildly outrageous that it is completely removed from the real world. To achieve this Lutfy employs circus, pantomime and various forms of puppetry.
“When you are enacting violence against puppets you can get away with a lot more, you can be sillier with it,” Lutfy explained. “I thought about Monty Python’s way of doing violence. There’s this famous Woody Allen quote where he says, ‘Drama is I prick my finger. Comedy is I chop my hand off.’ So you have to go big. You have to go big with the violence for it to be funny, especially in this play because it’s a commentary on how we raise our kids, and hopefully, we’ve evolved somewhat since 1845.”
The play is equal parts Betrolt Brecht and "Rocky Horror." It is also deliciously twisted and inventive theater. Kudos to Cygnet Theatre for choosing a show that is not about playing it safe but rather is about pushing boundaries both in terms of creativity and comfort zones. And in the end, its production suggests that it is not the children who were behaving badly, but rather the parents.
“Shockheaded Peter” runs through June 18 at Cygnet Theatre in Old Town.
