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The Last Unicorn
The titular unicorn sets off on a quest to discover why she’s the last of her kind. Leaving the protection of her home for the first time, she encounters a number of flawed humans (an incompetent magician, a middle-aged damsel) longing for a fairy tale instead of their own grubby reality. What begins as an upside-down fable ends as a strikingly melancholic and adult examination of heartbreak’s necessity.
Like Beagle’s adored cult classic of 1968, Promethean’s new adaptation is a delightfully weird quest. Adapter-director Rutherford manages to serve both the novel’s hard-core fans and those to whom the tale is new. While it may be easier, at times, for the former group to follow the action, the cast toes the line in moments that might otherwise exclude the latter. Ensemble members occasionally teeter into the cartoonish, and Rutherford tosses in a handful of incongruous modern touches (a Cubs hat, a Joe Biden magazine cover). But Kyla Embrey as the Unicorn and Nick Lake as a sweetly resigned wizard ground the evening with a sense of wry, eternal mourning.
Sean Campbell’s lights and Jeanne Jones’s costumes have a childlike, guileless simplicity. Their palettes are plain but striking: the stage bathed in red, a white rose standing in for a unicorn’s horn. As any good fantasy should, the designs, and the production, allow room for the audience’s imagination. Perhaps Promethean’s version could be a little shorter and darker, but it’s a charming jaunt that more than lives up to its source.
