Performing Arts

It's the little things that had the little ones in the audience giggling: Pooh with his head stuck in a honey jar, Pooh and Piglet falling flat on their backs to think with their feet wiggling in the air.

The Kathy Burks Theatre of Puppetry Arts production of The House at Pooh Corner, created with marionettes that date back 70 years, seems a throwback to an earlier time. The gentle pacing would have worked just as timelessly in 1937, when the show was performed at the White House for President Franklin D. Roosevelt and his family.

At Sunday's 4:30 p.m. show, there was no hint of any attempt to make it faster or funnier in deference to today's presumably sensation-hungry attention spans.

Instead, B. Wolf's 47-minute intermissionless script mines the A.A. Milne books for faithful renditions of four vignettes: Pooh and Piglet hunting a heffalump, Eeyore searching for the missing sticks that used to be his home, Owl looking for a new house after his old one blows down, and Christopher Robin saying farewell to Pooh as he goes off to school while Antonio Vivaldi's The Four Seasons and George Frideric Handel's Water Music play in the background.

At the show's beginning, as the theater dims slowly (mindful of the young audience's potential fear of the dark), pictures from the original Pooh illustrations by Ernest H. Shepherd flash on an overheard screen to a recording of Kenny Loggins singing "Return to Pooh Corner."

It's a key introduction, because children raised on Disney's animated Winnie the Pooh may be a little surprised, if ultimately delighted, to meet the original inspirations here in puppeteer Harriet Babcock Neill's three-dimensional rendition of Shepherd's whimsical work.

The recorded voices of local actors also don't attempt to mimic the classic Disney renditions. Instead, Derik Webb offers up a bouncy Tigger, Douglass Burks a dour Eeyore, Sally Fiorello an earnest Christopher and Seth T. Magill the sweet, well-meaning Pooh. And Becky Keenan gave a squeaky young voice to the timid Piglet, making the character a favorite of many of the littler ones in an audience whose children ranged from ages 1 to 5.

Plan your life

Presented by Dallas Children's Theater through March 30 at the Rosewood Center for Family Arts, 5938 Skillman St. $12 to $21, discounts available. 214-740-0051, www.dct.org.

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