Big River

Theater Wit

Chicago

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When country-music legend Roger Miller died in 1992, the world had “just discovered how good he was at writing scores for Broadway musicals,” said Chris Jones in the Chicago Tribune. The man who wrote “King of the Road” only completed one work for the stage: Big River, an adaptation of Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn in which “the sticky, zesty numbers just keep on comin’ like the good times.” The youthful actors in director P. Marston Sullivan’s bare-bones new production sometimes struggle to do justice to such songs as “Arkansas” and “River in the Rain.” But spirited performances make up for a lack of raw vocal power. With a large cast squeezed into a small downstairs performance space, “you’re pretty much right there on the raft with Huck and Jim.”

That feeling of intimacy is essential for a story about “the relationship between two quite different people, drawn together by their loneliness and outcast status,” said Hedy Weiss in the Chicago Sun-Times. The innocence and insouciance of the young scamp Huck are “captured winningly and quite unconventionally” by Andrew Mueller, who’s convincingly boyish. As Jim, the fugitive slave, Brian-Alwyn Newland displays “a rich, pitch-perfect voice that commands the stage” in “Muddy Water” and “Free at Last.” The supporting cast sings, dances, and even plays in the onstage band, “picking up a guitar, fiddle, squeezebox, or washboard.” The enthusiasm of all involved proves just right for the material, even if “a couple of the story’s most essential transformational moments fail to pop.”