Announcing the inaugural production of Orlando's newest professional Theatre for Young Audiences!

JACK AND

THE BEANSTALK

Click here for Reviews

by Beth Murray

Directed by April Dawn Gladu

All performances held in the new Ken and Trisha Margeson Theater

Grab your bag of beans and jump on this one
hour exciting adventure of golden geese,
rhyming giants and a hip-hop magician.
How high can you climb?

Performance schedule below:

Matinees for School Groups

Contact our Box office at 407-893-4600 x 1 for tickets. All matinees for school groups are held on Mon, Tue, Thu, Fri at 10:30 at the Lowndes Shakespeare Festival in Loch Haven Park, Orlando. School Group Weekday Student Tickets: $6
1 Free Chaperone Ticket for every 10 students

Performances for All Audiences

Bring the family on Saturday afternoon and enjoy the fun and excitement! All Saturday matinees are held at 2:00. Meet that cast after the show and take a picture or get an autograph for your little tree climber. Contact our Box office at 407-893-4600 x 1 for tickets.
All Audience Tickets for children and adults: $8

REVIEWS

"No beans about it, this 'Jack' is a gem"

Excerpted from the The Orlando Sentinel
By Elizabeth Maupin
Posted March 2, 2002

Somebody ought to pay the kids in the audience at Jack and the Beanstalk.

I'm not saying they're more talented than the professional actors onstage in this show, a co-production of the Orlando-UCF Shakespeare Festival and UCF Civic Theatre. But they're almost as much fun.

Maybe good preschool training does it, but when someone shouts out "Hola!" in this Latin-accented fairy tale, a couple of hundred agreeable little people shout "Hola!" right back. They clap along to the music before the show even gets going, and one pint-sized fellow in the last row does a few John Travolta moves. When a mirrored globe sends shards of light spinning around the Margeson Theater, a voice behind me pipes up, "A disco ball!"

That kind of enthusiasm fits right into this high-spirited piece, which is being performed on weekdays for school field trips and on Saturdays for the public through the end of April. Beth Murray's adaptation, first seen in Orlando when Civic Theatre of Central Florida staged it in 1995, finds plenty of up-to-date humor in the famous old story. And in most cases this production does it up right.

Director April-Dawn Gladu, with the help of choreographer Luisa Valdes, has stressed the south-of-the-border accent of this show, in which the dancers wear serapes and the golden goose is named Enrique.

But more than that, they and almost everyone else involved have stressed the fun. In designer James Sturgell's Giant Land, a peapod is the size of a bolster and comes stuffed with green peas as big and bounceable as basketballs. Costume designer Rebecca Baygents Turk has dressed Lightning the Cow (Jordan Reeves) in black-spotted white chenille, and the gigantic sandaled feet of the Giant (Ron Schneider) -- are gigantic feet props or costume? -- look to be sculpted of massive pieces of foam.

The gangly Jason C. Flora is appropriately ingenuous as Jack, Kareem K. Bandealy makes a knowing bean merchant and Michelle Foytek and Catherine Stork invest plenty of energy in the roles of Jack's angst-ridden mother and the Giant's over-burdened wife. Karen Shriner, in golden in-line sneakers, proves to have a lovely voice as the Harp.

It might be the lovable Lightning and the wide-as-a-barn Giant who please the kids in the house, but it's still Murray's droll script -- and those same kids -- that will tickle their parents. When the Giant comes through the door with "Honey, I'm home!" it's just a matter of time before some knowing child will answer him right back.

                                                                 Last Updated: 05/06/2007                    Copyright Orlando Shakespeare Theater