‘Fast is FUN!” bellows Pinocchio as he tears about the stage, testing the limits of his newly animated legs. It’s a handy edict for anyone adapting the many moralising, terrifying and bizarre episodes within Carlo Collodi’s 1883 novel. Charlie Josephine and Jim Fortune’s new family musical takes heed, barreling out of the blocks to cover an impressive chunk of Collodi’s story while swapping its darkness and finger-wagging for heartwarming lessons and boisterous humour.
In a narrow-minded Italian town (hammily chorused “mamma mias!” kick off the blissful silliness to come), free-thinking inventor Geppetto is an outcast. His ticket to adventure arrives as a piece of talking wood, which he plans to craft into a fortune-winning puppet. Pinocchio, of course, has other ideas. But here, the puppet’s journey to boyhood isn’t just about learning what makes us good, but what makes us human. His scrapes along the way are born not out of wickedness but curiosity and impulsive energy – perfectly captured by the three puppeteers animating Peter O’Rourke’s simple wooden design (including Lee Braithwaite, who gives Pinocchio a voice wild and wonder-filled), and by Josephine’s book, which sees Pinocchio firing off life’s big questions only to interrupt the answers with yells of “I’m hungry!”
Under Sean Holmes’s meticulous direction, the 14-strong cast bring full-tilt fun to the villains and helpers Pinocchio meets along the way. Kerry Frampton and Lucy McCormick are deliciously dastardly as Fox and Cat, who leave him penniless, hanging by his foot in a tree, but Steven Webb is the standout as campy Giacomo Cricket and the terrifying, kidnapping Coachman. The ensemble are excellent, nailing Vicki Igbokwe-Ozoagu’s inventive choreography and giving us gorgeous soaring harmonies. Fortune’s songs, which range from rock’n’roll to ska, from pop to blues, are catchy and the lyrics (by Fortune and Josephine) are witty and poignant, but at times too fast and complicated to make out.
The production leans into Collodi’s barminess (a chicken emerging from a cooked egg? “That makes perfect sense,” eye-rolls Cricket) and the Globe’s collapsible fourth wall, with meta-theatrical skewering of the audience and a perfect moment when Pinocchio’s puppeteers duck as he insists he’s moving unaided. But its biggest success is its addition of another transformation – that of Geppetto (played with humour and heart by Nick Holder) from natural but nervous caregiver to fully fledged father. A reminder that what makes us human is connection.
