Charlotte'S Web Play Review

In Joseph Robinette's adaptation of E.B. White's children story Charlotte's Web Charlotte is a very smart spider that saves the pig Wilber, who resides on the farm with her, by spinning words in her web.

The story opens on a farm with the birth of some pigs. The farmer is about to destroy the "runt" baby pig, but is stopped by his young daughter, Fern. She takes care of the little pig, which she names "Wilbur". Now that Wilbur is growing, the farmer must sell him. Fern's urges her dad not to sell Wilbur. Therefore Wilbur is sold to her uncle, Homer Zuckerman.

On Mr. Zuckerman farm, Wilbur meets many new animal friends, Goose and Gander, Sheep, and Templeton the Rat, but without Fern around as much, he starts to feel lonely. One night, a voice answers his wishes to have a friend and promises to be his friend. The next morning he finds out that the voice belongs to a beautiful gray spider named Charlotte. She devises a plan to save him from his inevitable trip to the slaughterhouse. She weaves words into her web, and her sacrificing of most of her energy to do so, she convinces people that Wilbur is "some pig," and he is insured a long life in the barnyard.

Charlotte's Web has no real definite form. It has all three components, tragedy, comedy and melodrama. The tragedy occurs during the end of the play where Charlotte gives up her life to let Wilbur live. Since Charlotte's Web is a children's play, all the humor can relate to little kids. The melodrama happens between Wilbur and Charlotte. Both Wilbur and Charlotte have interpersonal conflicts they have to get over.

Rob Barron unified all of the elements of his play very well. The blocking is one of the main elements I noticed while watching the play. When Goose and Gander stepped onto the stage they always had to follow each other. Gander was always right on top of Goose.

The musical director was Jeffrey Lunden. There was only one song the cast sang together. It was very poor lyrically and failed to get my attention. Very redundant and almost made me go insane. James D. Sandefur designed the set