'Princess Club' puts Redmoon twist on fairy tales

Anyone with a daughter between the ages of 2 and 20 knows about the current princess craze, fostered by Disney and Barbie, fueled by an ever-growing line of toys, clothes, games and videos.

Jim Lasko, artistic director of The Redmoon Theater, noticed it, too, and decided to create a show inspired by the princess phenomenon. The result is "The Princess Club," which opens in previews Sept. 1.

"I have a 2-year-old daughter," Lasko said. "I kept wondering what is this princess thing?"

Lasko was baffled by the continuing interest in stories about girls who have what seem to some to be very old-fashioned notions of how women should act and behave: Cinderella, Snow White, Sleeping Beauty.

"I couldn't believe people were still interested in princesses," Lasko said, "despite all of the changes we have gone through and all of our cultural revolutions."

So Lasko decided to create a Redmoon show around this theme -- Chicago-style. Redmoon does this a lot. They don't begin with a finished script. The company begins with a simple idea and goes about creating a show from scratch -- costumes, puppets, outrageous props, fascinating dances -- pushing the show forward at each rehearsal.

"I gathered a group of female performers together," Lasko said, "and we started to read princess stories and watch princess videos and talk about them and girl culture."

Everywhere Lasko's ensemble turned they saw princesses of one kind or another. They saw good-girl princesses in toys and stories aimed at little girls.

"These princesses are very dutiful, waiting for their husbands," Lasko said.

And then there were bad-girl princesses, represented in the media by the celebrities gone wrong: Paris Hilton, Lindsay Lohan, Britney Spears.

It was decided the show would focus on three fairytale princesses: Rapunzel, Cinderella and Sleeping Beauty.

"We began to play with these ideas," Lasko said, "to see how they grew out of each other."

One of the theater games they played was one Lasko mischievously calls "the plastic surgery game."

"We would read fairy tales and ask ourselves what would our world be like if this story was all we knew about the world," Lasko said. "What would our concept of beauty be. Then we made stuffing and padding for each other's bodies to fit this concept of beauty. We did this four or five times. It was incredibly liberating."

At the end of this process each character had what was essentially a full-body mask, a body cartoonishly distorted to make some comment on princess body images."

Over the course of the rehearsals, which began last winter, a story emerged about three people, in Lasko's words, "living in the basement of this mediocre puppet theater."

"They find these fairy tale stories," Lasko said. "And everything they know about the world comes to them through these princess stories.

"It has been an incredible experience. Because I am a man I don't know much about being a woman. My ensemble taught me so much.

"It was also incredible to play with those images of the good princess and the bad princess and to realize their power and their influence on girls today."