This Is No Storybook: ‘Fairy Tale Farm’ Remixes The Classics (Review)
It’s hard out there for a main character.
Reviewing Fairy Tale Farm was a great excuse for me to get out and spend an evening exploring Bristol, RI’s Coggeshall Farm Museum. This outdoor museum “recreates the daily experience of tenant farmers on a salt marsh farm through live interpretation, historic structures, heirloom plants, and heritage-breed animals,” and it’s absolutely idyllic. I’m glad Clockjack Productions put Coggeshall on my radar. Unfortunately, it was a weird place to stage a show that wasn’t especially immersive.
Fairy Tale Farm is a series of vignettes that focus on our favorite childhood characters’ modern-day struggles. Pinocchio needs to pay the rent, Granny wants to live dangerously, and Goldilocks is betting everything on her and Baby Bear’s Shark Tank audition tape. The setups are funny enough, but the resulting scenes left me feeling bleak. There’s a lot of talk about regret and missed opportunities and how hard things are when you step out of the storybook, all delivered in traditional monologue and dialog format. Each scene lasts about 10 minutes. The characters don’t interact with the audience and there’s nothing to do between scenes besides explore the farm. I enjoyed the show and I enjoyed Coggeshall, but I did not enjoy them together.
Between scenes, which happen every 20 minutes or so, I spoke with a few families who also weren’t sure if FTF was supposed to be for kids or adults. Children’s activity books had been handed out with programs, show marketing featured little kids running around the farm, and there was a “make a fairy wand” booth by the live music area. But the writing is 100% aimed at adults and adults only. It’s not raunchy or violent. It’s just that jokes about divorce and death, delivered by competently sincere actors, don’t land for 8 year-olds. The one exception, according to the two kids who weren’t too shy to answer my questions, was Hansel and Gretel’s scene at the Candy House. Watching grown-ups fight about candy and exercise while wearing silly clothes “is just funny.”
Get Leah Davis’s stories in your inbox
Join Medium for free to get updates from this writer.
SubscribeSubscribe
Despite the show’s audience identity crisis, I recommend checking out Fairy Tale Farm at Coggeshall if you’re local and looking for something interesting to do between now and August. Just know what you’re getting into. Bring a picnic and treat your visit like a day at the park with a few theatrical bonuses. You won’t meet your favorite storybook characters at Fairy Tale Farm, but you will get colorful peeks into their problems as you wander the grounds.
Fairy Tale Farm runs Thursday-Sunday from 5pm-8pm through August 1st, 2021 at Coggeshall Farm, 1 Coggeshall Avenue, Bristol, RI 02809. Tickets are available for 5 PM and 6 PM entry times each evening.
After Aug. 1, Fairy Tale Farm runs Wednesday-Sunday from 5:30pm-8:30pm, August 12th through August 29th, 2021 at Old Sturbridge Village, 1 Old Sturbridge Village Road, Sturbridge, MA, 01566. Tickets are available for 5:30 PM and 6:00 PM entry times each evening.
$15 for adults and $12 for youth (Ages 4–17) at both venues.
Discover the latest immersive events, festivals, workshops, and more at our new site EVERYTHING IMMERSIVE, new home of NoPro’s show listings.
NoPro is a labor of love made possible by our generous Patreon backers. Join them today!
In addition to the No Proscenium website, our podcast, and our newsletters, you can find NoPro on Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, in the Facebook community Everything Immersive, and on our Discord.