If I may, I'd like to explain something really briefly. When I say puppets, I don't mean just any old puppets. We're not talking about socks or Muppets or gloves or anything like that. I'm talking about birds with articulate wings, and water lilies made out of feet. More importantly, I'm talking about Althea, our protagonist. She was played by a living and breathing woman (Rosalie Craig), but her floating existence ("light" refers not to luminescence, but to weight) was made manifest by the hands of four skilled puppeteers in black who carried her over the stage and set in almost all directions. She and her puppet-bearing friends were all skilled dancers, as they had to be, and performed some truly amazing acrobatic and dance feats in order to perfectly create the illusion of a floating woman. 

The thing I love most about this show, though, and the reason I'm raving about it here, is its abandonment of gender binaries. It's an interesting and important departure from the show's source material. In the original fairytale, the princess (who goes unnamed) is cursed with seeming weightlessness and the inability to cry by a jealous aunt. She learns that she can stay pretty much at ground level while swimming, and ends up meeting a prince by her pond who stumbles upon her and falls in love with her. Enraged, the evil aunt, Princess Makemnoit, drains the lake. The prince attempts to plug the hole and sacrifice himself to save the princess, and almost dies in the process. It is only when the sun rises the next day and the prince's near-lifeless body is in the hands of the princess's best healers that he wakes and she cries. After some time and plenty of learning how to walk, the princess and prince marry and live happily ever after.

That is NOT the show you'll see if you buy a ticket to this production. Instead, the prince and princess both deal daily with the effects of their defense mechanisms - Princess Althea never cried, and Prince Digby never smiled, after the death of their mothers. They come from warring lands, and they inherit command of their armies just as their fighting comes to a head. Those two changes to the story make all the difference in the world. In the end, their love is the cherry on a peacetime cake, as our main characters balance marriage, their duties to their kingdoms, and their own personal goals, all while learning how to grieve healthily. There's no attempt to push Althea into any of the typical gender-specific roles we see, by anyone (at least for patriarchal reasons); Digby ends up being the total softie in their relationship; all the couples, regardless of sexuality, are honored, without any being given special treatment or privileges; and love, while being a nice bonus, is not our protagonist's end-all, be-all scenario. The show is about two teenagers growing into young adults and becoming well-rounded people, for the benefit of all who live with and under them. And on top of all that, this inherently feminist production doesn't market itself as being inherently feminist - it instead markets itself as a children's story! While I don't know how I'd feel showing some of the more graphic material in it to my kids someday (wounds from "treatment" for Althea's lightness), I think the ideas it plants in the minds of viewers about self-care, love and not limiting yourself to a single societal role in life are incredibly important for young people to be exposed to.