‘Cinderella Caterpillar’ Spreads Its Wings

The Royal Family Bug Band is holding a “Princess Search,” hoping to find just the right rockin’ and boppin’ girl bug to add harmony to the group. There’s only one restriction: Queen Bee and King Mosquito say that creepy-crawlies without wings are too ugly to sing their tune.

“Cinderella Caterpillar,” a comic romp at the Gem Theatre in Garden Grove, is played for laughs, but it sends out a clear message about prejudice and differences.

Lead singer Prince Grasshopper (R. J. Wagner) worries about disagreeing with the in-crowd, but Cinderella Caterpillar (Theresa Lloyd) seems to fit the bill, and besides, he thinks she’s cute.

Meanwhile, Cinderella’s stepmother Wanda (Terry Ray), a wacky black widow spider whose husbands have all met with “mysterious circumstances,” wants the princess spot filled by her other stepdaughter, shy Connie Cockroach (appealingly played by Jennifer Echols, who plays haughty Queen Bee and stately Mother Nature too).

Connie is happy munching garbage and wants no part of it. Wanda, who never got over her days as headliner at the Flea Bag Bijou, insists. (Ray earns big laughs camping it up in his triple roles as Wanda, King Mosquito and a helpful daisy.)

The show, staged by Jim Houle and his Max’s Playhouse company for GroveShakespeare’s new Family Theatre series, isn’t new--it played in 1991 under the title “Cinderella: A Bug Story.” The whimsical look needed no improvement, but the show itself was uneven and is changed here for the better. The script is tighter, the direction is crisper and Randy Haege’s choreography is fun--Connie’s interpretive dance of death, complete with Raid spray, is a chuckle.

Terry Hastings’ new score is not particularly tuneful--the perky “Bug Bop” is the highlight--and no one in the cast is a vocal standout, but the lyrics are a better fit than before.

In the end, of course, Cinderella Caterpillar turns into a beautiful butterfly, thereby negating the reason for the discrimination in the first place, but to the show’s credit, the transformation is a deliberate anti-climax, to keep the message from being lost.

“Cinderella Caterpillar.” Gem Theatre, 12852 Main St., Garden Grove, Saturdays at 11 a.m. through March 6. $6; (714) 636-7213.

Civil Rights: The struggle for equality and a young African-American girl’s coming of age are the themes in “Stamping, Shouting and Singing Home,” a musical theater piece by Lisa Evans that will be performed in schools and for the public February through April by the Mark Taper Forum’s professional theater for youth audiences, the Improvisational Theatre Project, under the direction of Peter C. Brosius.

Preceding a run March 13-27 at the Ivar Theatre in Hollywood, the show will have performances next Saturday at Harvard Community Center, at the Natural History Museum on Feb. 27, Cal State L.A. on April 2-3 and the African Community Unity Church on April 17. There will also be a performance sponsored by the Korean Youth Center on April 10, at a location to be announced.

Information: (213) 972-7662.