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Review: ‘Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea,’ With a Message on the Environment

Rick Miller in an adaptation of Jules Verne’s “Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea” at the New Victory Theater.Credit...Robert Altman for The New York Times
Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea

Theatergoers, there’s no need to pack scuba gear or even a snorkel mask to plunge into the ocean deep. In Craig Francis and Rick Miller’s “Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea,” a frisky adaptation of the Jules Verne sci-fi saga at the New Victory Theater, a few actors, a few more props and some extremely nifty projections send the audience right to the seafloor. Hey, look out for that squid!

A show by Kidoons and WYRD Productions, designed for theatrical divers 8 years old and up, “Twenty Thousand Leagues” is more than a straightforward reworking of the novel, in ways both good and bad. It begins with another Jules (Mr. Miller, who also directs), a dreamy grad student who can’t quite finish his downer dissertation: “Downward Spiral: Inevitable Collapse of Ocean Ecosystems.”

Instead of writing about that, he decides, via a live feed and some action figures, to create a toy theater version of the Verne classic, imagining his academic adviser (Suzy Jane Hunt) as the story’s hero, Professor Aronnax. But somehow the story overtakes him, and other characters — the harpooner, Ned Land (Marcel Jeannin), and the darkly mysterious Captain Nemo (Richard Clarkin) — also appear. Amid the adventures, there are meditations on narrative, on knowledge and on the oceans’ fragile ecosystems.

The several layers of the story and the pace at which that story is told could use greater precision. Jules lunges into and away from the action too often. The play sometimes paddles around just when you want it to race ahead. The intermission could be dispensed with and the staging might become more immersive. The moments when an anglerfish puppet glides through the audience are magical; there ought to be more of them.

But the acting is never less than zesty and the use of projections, courtesy of Deco Dawson, is sometimes jaw dropping. While the show’s creators haven’t made the environmental themes too stark or scolding, children and their grown-ups may think twice before buying and tossing another plastic water bottle. Even those deadly squids deserve an unpolluted ocean.

“Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea” runs through Monday at the New Victory Theater, 209 West 42nd Street, Manhattan; 646-223-3010, newvictory.org. Running time: 1 hour 45 minutes.

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section C, Page 2 of the New York edition with the headline: A Deep Dive for Kids, With a Bubbling Message. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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