As the husband gets home from work, he doesn’t just tell his wife about his day. He flips her around his arm or his shoulder, as if she’s a wheel or toy. There’s nothing unnatural or gimmicky here; it’s expressive. Theirs, you can tell without words, is a playful, loving, close relationship.
Elsewhere in “The Nightingale,” diving hoops become the brush through which that same man and some minions search for a rare bird with beautiful song. In another scene, a large outline of a cube — balanced, twirled and juggled like Atlas hoisting a globe — helps establish a tech leader’s lonely, megalomaniacal ambition.
Such is the promising vision of People’s Circus Theatre, which Felicity Hesed founded in 2023. “The Nightingale,” which opened Friday, June 6, at the Children’s Creativity Museum Theater, uses homespun circus to adapt Hans Christan Andersen’s 1843 fairy tale about a precious bird, the emperor who covets it and its eventual replacement by a bejeweled facsimile.
In our era of artificial intelligence, we need art that helps us understand what differentiates humans from increasingly realistic robots, why that distinction matters and what replacing living beings with soulless machines might cost.
If “The Nightingale” seems ideal source material for that purpose, Hesed’s straight-theater scenes bludgeon, telling us phones, excessive work and unchecked greed are bad. The show’s geared for ages 7 and up, but reaching elementary schoolers doesn’t require the baldness of a church pageant…