When Alex Trebek, Bruno Mars and Queen Elsa from Frozen turn up in a 20th-century fairytale romance, you know you’re in Jabberwocky country.
Camp Jabberwocky’s August 6 production of The Princess Bride was a singing, dancing, elaborately costumed extravaganza with a cast of 60 campers and counselors. Creating roles for everyone required adding new characters throughout the story.
“They changed it a lot, I have to tell you,” confided eight-year-old Asha Marcus of Beacon, N.Y., who had a front-row seat. Asha had been to every rehearsal with her father Jeremiah, a musician volunteering for the show, and watched the final performance intently.
As usual, the play was standing room only, with barely a patch of floor open once everyone found a place in the darkened studio. As audience members filled the room, castmembers gathered on the porches outside.
Camp Jabberwocky has a whole cabin for costumes, wigs and props, and they mined it creatively. There were knights in armor, ladies in gowns, heralds with dragons on their tabards and a jester in cap and bells. A queenly figure in a blue dress and matching crown put her hand on a windowpane and gazed in at the crowd.
And then it was show time, the audience applauding in welcome and after every scene.
In The Princess Bride according to Jabberwocky, the grandfather reads a book to two sick little boys in bed, not one. Instead of Buttercup and Westley as the lovers in peril, there were two pretty farmer’s daughters—Butter and Cup—and two devoted farm boys, Wes and Lee, as well as two Men in Black.
The swordsman Inigo Montoya became the Montoya brothers—making for a double duel with the Men in Black. And even Fezzik the giant, henchman to the scheming Sicilian Vizzini, had assistants of his own.
Unseen in the 1997 film of The Princess Bride, the Dread Pirate Roberts made a swashbuckling appearance onstage along with his ship and 16-member crew, who delighted the audience with the song A Pirate’s Life.
Other showstoppers included Butter and Cup’s poignant rendition of Celine Dion’s My Heart Will Go On, an exuberant song-and-dance interlude to Taylor Swift’s Shake It Off and Fezzik’s solo turn on How I Miss My X, a song originally performed by Patti LaBelle on Sesame Street.
Along with the pirate ship—made in two pieces, one of which reversed to become shrubbery for an ambush—the set design included multiple large, colorful backdrops and a cardboard bedstead for the little-boy characters.
When Vizzini proposed a battle of wits with the Men in Black, the Jeopardy theme music played and Alex Trebek entered the scene to query them on Jabberwocky facts like when the camp goes drumming on the beach.
After Vizzini lost the quiz and expired, Trebek delivered one of the show’s best exit lines: “Good night, and have fun storming the castle.”
But it wouldn’t be that easy for the Men in Black, who were quickly ambushed and captured in a volleyball net. Bruno Mars, in silver pants and a white jacket, ratcheted up the suspense with the song That’s What I Like, and Queen Elsa, in her blue dress and crown, performed her manifesto Let it Go.
Meanwhile, back at the castle, the Men in Black were freed, revealed to be the faithful farm boys Wes and Lee and reunited with their loving Butter and Cup. After Count Ruger went down in defeat before the vengeful Montoya brothers, the evil count’s body remained at center stage while the rest of the characters—including a revived Vizzini—celebrated the lovers’ engagement.
The finale—always a peak moment in Jabberwocky shows—brought everyone on stage to sing A Whole New World from Aladdin, Remember Me from Coco and, in a joyous encore, Whitney Houston’s hit I Wanna Dance with Somebody.
An ice-cream social followed the performance, capping off a rich day of camp activities that included rehearsals, a trip to the beach and a pizza dinner.
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