Levin Valayil in Jungle Book, Photo by Rick Miller
Rudyard Kipling’s classic tale of Mowgli, the boy raised by wolves, gets a contemporary reworking in this touring production of Jungle Book. Presented by Young People’s Theatre, this multi-media presentation retains the basic shape and spirit of the original stories, but places an truncated version of them in a current context.
In this adaptation, by creators Craig Francis and Rick Miller, Mowgli is also our narrator. We first meet him in the bustling city of New York, where he works as an architect consumed with guilt for designing buildings that erase the natural world. Opening his Jungle Book, an illustrated journal of his early life and a framing device for this interpretation, he takes us back to the forest in India where his story begins. Continue Reading