A Charming and Interactive ‘Ferdinand the Bull’

Creative Playground, the small, Encino-based children’s theater company of adult professionals, scores high marks for its disarming little production of “Ferdinand the Bull.”

This company, headed by co-artistic directors Elizabeth Tobias and Karen Hardcastle, consistently manages to transform its unprepossessing surroundings--floor space smack in the middle of the frankly utilitarian Encino Community Center--with a couple of props, simple costumes, audience participation and deceptively simple adaptations of classic children’s stories.

Key to the company’s success are actors who can perform comfortably while the audience sits no more than a few feet away, surrounding the performing space.

At that close proximity, if the cast projected anything other than unself-conscious ease, the experience would be excruciating for all concerned. Instead, here as in past shows, in no time the actors establish a comfort level that has adults as well as children enjoying the action.

“Ferdinand,” adapted by Hardcastle from Munro Leaf’s book and directed by Tobias, begins with a craft that figures into the show later. Children get multicolored pipe cleaners with their tickets, and before the show starts, actors Zeke Rettman, Deborah Kellar and M Brauer help them make flowers for Ferdinand’s meadow and to be tossed into the bullring later.

Volunteers can be bulls or people of Spain, or even a bullfighter, although it would be nice if the latter, who gets a bullfighter’s hat to wear, had more to do than simply hold the cape--how about letting the intrepid volunteer make a few passes with it?

Brauer, who plays Sammy, a feisty cow, also portrays pesky Po-Po the Picador, trying to goad Ferdinand--and she’s a sketch. So is Kellar in her Bam Bam the Banderillero clown role.

Rettman’s winning buoyancy and the fast-moving script keep things unpreachy.

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* “Ferdinand the Bull,” Creative Playground at Encino Community Center, 4935 Balboa Blvd., Encino, Saturdays and Sundays, 1 p.m., through Aug. 29. $7; $5 for under age 5. (310) 636-8089.