The best fairy tales have a dark side, and the best storytellers aren’t afraid to address it. Adapting Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Red Shoes” — about a girl who literally can’t stop dancing when she wears that supernatural footwear — director Emma Rice and her Wales-based Kneehigh company revel in the story’s morbid gloom.
The experience is fascinating at times, but it also wears thin.The show crawls at only 90 minutes.
Kneehigh’s “Brief Encounter” is currently on Broadway, though “The Red Shoes” actually predated it by six years in the UK. Both productions share the use of live music and an inside-out aesthetic with exposed theatrical trickery.
Here, narrator Lady Lydia (Giles King in drag) leads us through the tale, enacted in a punk-music-hall style by four shabby, malnourished-looking performers. Their hair shaved to a thin fuzz, they wear identical wifebeaters, Y-fronts and Cornish clogs — you can barely tell the troupe includes a woman (Patrycja Kujawska), who plays the unnamed Girl.
Rice shows how red represents female sexuality — a threat to the church and “proper” morality — as the Girl’s costume turns progressively more crimson. The director’s black-humored use of simple devices to represent violence is also striking. When the Girl asks a butcher to cut off her feet, you get only sound effects, but it’s hauntingly ghoulish. No wonder the piece is appropriate for “brave children” 8 and older.
Still, a little goes a long way. Even with tunes by Offenbach and the hip-hop group Jurassic 5 spicing up the show, it’s not long before you become as sick of all that manic clog-dancing as the Girl herself.
elisabeth.vincentelli
@nypost.com