Neil Gaiman's "Coraline" Off-Broadway

An incredible, haunting, production at the Lucille Lortel Theater, "CORALINE" based on the graphic novel written by Neil Gaiman, gets a suitably alternative, off-Broadway spin by the MCC. The play, with Jayne Houdyshell in the title role, with a wonderful cast,concerns a young, smart,and bored English girl who loves to explore.

As you may know, Ms Houdyshell is not a child, and delivers an enchanting performance, following the young Coraline ("not Caroline!") as she moves through a mysterious story that combines fairy tales, mystery, and archetypal mythologizing right out of the Joseph Campbell handbook.

Great performances also included January LaVoy, Francis Jue, Elliot Villar, William Youmans, and Julian Fleisher, who seems to understand cats,whether they are the garden variety, paw-licking, human disdaining kind, or the mythical, able to talk and get you out of fairy tale jams type.

There is an indisputable creepiness, from the strange and charming set, with its piano fragments as scenery, to its score by the show's solo musician, Phyllis Chen, (although the cast helps out with the occasional toy piano or plucked piano string). Ms.Chen plays just pianos: an upright, a toy piano, and a strange kind of altered piano that produces some strange tonalities (and atonalities) indeed. The music by Stephin Merrit is sublime.

Behind a door, Coraline finds a strange parallel universe, and encounters her "Other Mother" played by the creepy-in-costume David Greenspan, who also wrote the play based on Gaiman's book. While each member of the cast knocked his or her performance out of the park at one point or another, and there were many funny and spooky songs performed throughout, it was Greenspan's Other Mother who triggered absolutely explosive applause by his performance of the song "Falling" which was a jewel of bizarre and shattering beauty in the midst of an already haunting theatrical production. It made me pine for an audio or video recording in the future. An enchanting, charming, disturbing, and altogether transporting evening of musical theater.

At the Lucille Lortel Theater on Christopher Street at Bleecker through July 5.

--Brooklyn Beat