<b>THE LION, THE WITCH AND THE WARDROBE</b> Festival Theatre/Shaw Festival SpeakupWNY | Buffalo NY and Buffalo News

SF
Through October 4
THE LION, THE WITCH AND THE WARDROBE Shaw Festival/ Festival Theatre

By Augustine Warner

Clive Staples (C.S.) Lewis was a throwback to the glory days of the British Empire, destroyed in the bloodbath of World War I.
One of the key elements of �The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe� is a war for control of Narnia, written by a man horribly wounded in the Somme, one of the most misbegotten struggles on the Western Front of WWI.
C.S. Lewis left Oxford to enlist and be commissioned as an officer for the war.
He was invalided out by his wounds and returned to Oxford for a brilliant career as a student and professor, before eventually leaving for Cambridge.
As a professor and well-known writer, Lewis was a member of The Inklings, an Oxford group which included J.R.R. Tolkien.
While he was nominally an English professor, he gradually shifted into studying and writing about the Christian faith and eventually into the seven-volumes known as �The Chronicles of Narnia.�
In chronology of publication, the first volume is �The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe,� this year�s Shaw Festival show aimed at young people, their parents and their grandparents.
You do not have to have read any of the Narnia books to understand what�s going on.
Book adapters Festival Artistic Director Tim Carroll and Selma Dimitrijevic have a lot of experience successfully turning books onto the stage.
Dimitrijevic directs this Shaw production.
Lewis built his story around a different war, World War II, and the evacuation of London�s young people to rural Britain to save them from the anticipated Nazi bombing, a bombing campaign which eventually leveled cities and killed tens of thousands.
Here, four children from the same family arrive in Professor Kirke�s (David Adams) country pile and are handed into the rigid custody of Mrs. Macready (Kiera Sangster).
What they don�t know is that the house is the guardian of a route between wartime Britain and mystical Narnia.
They are told not to go into one room in the wartime refuge and stay away from the wardrobe in that room.
What a great opportunity for a kid to ignore that order and explore?
Lucy (Alexandra Gratton) falls through the back of the wardrobe and arrives in the frozen wastes of Narnia, wonderful work from scenic consultant James Lavoie.
She meets people from the frozen land and gradually discovers that�s the result of the White Witch (Ėlodie Gillett) seizing control of a warm and pleasant land and turning it into a New England ski resort.
Lucy returns through the wardrobe and tells her skeptical siblings, Susan (Kristi Frank), Peter (Jeff Irving) and the rebellious Edmund (Dieter Lischer-Parkes) what she found.
Edmund goes to Narnia and tells the White Witch and her allies what�s going on, important to them because Aslan (Kelly Wong), the lion and protector of the green and pleasant Narnia, has returned, with the prospect of winter going away and better times returning.
Edmund�s siblings head through the wardrobe and mix with the right people and Aslan.
Led by Peter, they lead a rebellion against the Witch and win and the snow and ice start to melt.
Peter is named the new ruler of Narnia but it�s a part-time job so he and his siblings can grow up in wartime Britain and have further adventures in the mystical land.
Because this is aimed at kids, there are some elements of the story and some characters to make that work, particularly Michael Therriault�s faun Mr. Tumnus and Shawn Wright and Jade Repeta as Mr. and Mrs. Beaver, wearing wondrous costumes from Judith Bowden.
It�s an across the age brackets story and it was difficult to see if the kids liked the show it, as they left the theater.
I did.
Director Dimitrijevic keeps the tangled story moving, unusually showing the cast and stagehands setting up the magic on stage, not letting the action slow which might lead to young people losing attention.
There�s also contributing lighting work from Kevin Lamotte.
The director is working with a cast of newcomers and Shaw veterans, meaning there are no weak spots and some strong performances, like Wright and Repeta�s beavers and Gillett�s White Witch.
�The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe� is aimed at kids and their ticket purchasers and they all will like it.