‘Web’: Solid Fare by Pros

Sitting in the audience of the darkened Pantages Theatre on Tuesday, a small boy reassured his friend, “This is just a play. In real life, spiders don’t talk.”

In E. B. White’s classic “Charlotte’s Web,” however, spiders do talk and at the Pantages, the Great American Children’s Theatre from Wisconsin is showing how a good book becomes good theater.

Big, professional stage shows for children come seldom to the Southland. When they do, it’s usually with a recognizable name in the cast or with a self-promoting television tie-in. Last year’s Long Beach Civic Light Opera production of “The Wizard of Oz” with Cathy Rigby and the nationally touring “Sesame Street Live” revues are recent examples.

“Charlotte’s Web,” adapted by Joseph Robinette, falls in neither category. It’s that rarest of breeds: a straightforward, non-musical staging of a children’s classic, true to the author, performed with high-caliber professionalism and not an ounce of razzle-dazzle.

White’s story of Wilbur the Pig, saved from the slaughterhouse by the ingenuity of Charlotte the Spider, is about friendship and the acceptance of change and death as part of life’s cycle. White told it without saccharinity or false sentimentality. The stage production here is equally honest.

In director Leslie Reidel’s capable hands, the visual humor in his well-paced play that makes children giggle is never at the expense of the message. The message, however, is never overemphasized.

Members of the cast, particularly Kelly Maurer as Charlotte and Paul Zawadsky as Wilbur, work together seamlessly. Maurer is properly regal and Zawadsky has just the right mix of humility and joie de vivre.

Chris Flieller, as the irascible rat Templeton, provides a measure of saltiness and Joanne McGee, as Wilbur’s young owner Fern, a nice touch of affectionate warmth. There are also a bustling pair of geese (Paul Anderson and Laurie Birmingham), a feisty sheep and her lamb (Tami Workentin and Mark Lowe).

Among the actors playing adults of the human variety, Brian Mani is a fine, on-stage narrator, hampered like the rest of the cast by the production’s one flaw: a sound system with a tunnel quality.

Allen H. Jones’ full set is another rare pleasure, since a lack of funds so often forces local children’s theaters to take the minimalist or makeshift approach.

Jones begins by startling his young audience with the use of a scrim to take them inside the kitchen of a big, solid-looking farmhouse. A graceful, woodsy-painted curtain hides the quick set change to a lofty barn, deftly realized from a pig’s point of view. Then, it’s off to the livestock section of the county fair, all corrugated tin and wood.

The theater from Wisconsin is one of a very few resident professional children’s theaters in the country. That they’ve been at it a number of years shows in the seemingly effortless ease with which the play is staged. Simplicity, not flash, is the formula here.

At 6233 Hollywood Blvd. through Feb. 3, today-Friday, Monday-Feb. 3, 10 and 11:45 a.m. ($4.50-$7.50). Also at 7 p.m. on Feb. 3 ($6-$12). Ends Feb. 3; (800) 852-9772.