About the Production

Seussical is one of those “rights of passage” shows for theatre artists. It seems that most of us have worked on at least one production of the show in our theatrical lives. For me, it is no different. I stepped into directing this production with the experience of playing the Cat in the Hat under my belt. It is a show I know very well and so that presented a challenge to figure out how I wanted to bring it to the stage.

I knew how the show was traditionally presented and I knew the limitations of such an approach. I frequently referred to the usual approach to the show as the “color vomit” version. As a designer I know it can be challenge to not only have all of that color onstage in the set design but also in the costumes. It gets hard to focus the eye on what you want the audience to see. Knowing that I was tasked with designing and directing the production I knew I wanted to find a way to still have the color without being limited by it. I wanted to bring the design back to the original art work of Dr. Seuss and explore the magic of something as simple as a line on a white page.

I also wanted to make sure that we never lost the message of Dr. Seuss’s works within the story. For me this is a story about bullying and the impact it can have on people’s lives. I wanted to explore that idea as it is something that is still so relevant for children and adults in our world today.

To bring both of these ideas to life I centered the story around the character of JoJo’s drawing notebook. The show began with a group of bullies chasing the girl playing JoJo trying to steal her notebook. The first visual the audience saw was the giant white page that filled the set both on a scrim and the show portals. As the Cat in the Hat brought JoJo’s drawings to life the scrim and the portals changed colors and we started to see the characters come to life through the scrim.

The characters of the Jungle of Nool were those you would see in a high school. Mayzie and the Bird Girls as Cheerleaders, the Wickersham Brothers as Sports Jocks, the Sour Kangaroo as the Popular Girl (a la Regina George), and Gertrude and Horton were the nerdy outcasts. To drive home this idea of the school the song “Biggest Blame Fool” was choreographed to include cell phones so that we could see how gossip and social media posts were used as part of bullying Horton.

This take on the production was very well received and people were surprised at how emotional they felt watching the show. There were many people who felt deeply connected to the characters in a way I have not heard of in other productions of the show I have worked on or heard about. It is definitely a production I won’t soon forget.