By Emma Maly
“James and the Giant Peach” is a show that can leave a pit in your stomach. Roald Dahl’s darkly humorous nightmarish escape fantasy has managed to remain as wickedly relevant—and controversial—as when it was first published in 1961.
A Southwestern College production was sweet and juicy, transcending the peach fuzzy logic of the original book. Led by the always wonderful Annabelle Ramos as James, a team of singer/actors wormed into the hearts of the audience as anthropomorphic bugs and creepy crawlies.
An improbable story even for a children’s fantasy, “James and the Giant Peach” features an orphaned boy whose parents were eaten by the world’s first known carnivorous rhinoceros. He moved in with two wicked aunts but was liberated by a giant peach and his new bug buddies when the peach rolls into the ocean and charts a course for New York. After fruit-loving sharks start chomping at the peach, threatening to sink it, the bugs devise a plan to trick seagulls into flying them to the Empire State Building.
Time for Oreos, verdad?
Choreography by Kevin “Blax” Burroughs kept the cast on its toes and musical directors Tracy Burklund and Imahni King squeezed the nectar from some odd but melodic songs of friendship, loss, new beginnings, trials and redemption.
Ruff Yeager has grown into his job as the theater program’s go-to director. He is comfortable producing the uncomfortable and excels at plumbing deeper meaning from source material. Dahl has been a lightning rod in post-reasonable America for some un-PC language. “Peach” has been edited and censored like “Huckleberry Fin” and “Fifty Shades of Grey,” and recent productions have been boycotted for allegedly being “pro drag.”
Yeager’s unapologetic “Peach” was a sign of sanity during a time of rising rightwing reactionism and cultural warfare in the United States.
Dahl made a ladybug, earthworm, spider, grasshopper and centipede the best companions of a troubled little boy when all the humans failed him. Cannot help but love the wicked commentary that some kids find better allies under rocks than in their families.
“James and the Giant Peach” had great heart. Southwestern’s theater program continues to bring excellent productions of provocative work to our community without traveling to New York via jetliner—or flying peach.
