By Cathy Smith
30 Nov 2008

For Shrek, love comes in the form of Fiona (Sutton Foster), a princess feisty but fairly inaccessible, confined to her room in the tower for 20 years with a fire-breathing dragon outside her door to discourage would-be rescuers. "She's not your typical princess," concedes Foster. "She desperately wants to be a princess and to fit in to all those typical roles, but she also wants to hike up her skirt and do some kung fu and belch and fart. She's just a little off, which is always fun to play. I'm off."

Shrek's friendship comes from a wisecracking sidekick, one Donkey (Daniel Breaker) — an ass with sass, as it were — and together they defy the dragon to fetch Fiona for marriage to a sawed-off mucky muck, Lord Farquaad (played, on his knees, by six-foot-two Christopher Sieber). Breaker hasn't seen the movie(s) and won't: "I think I'm going to wing it. I don't want to be limited to Eddie Murphy's portrayal of Donkey."

Farquaad, according to his creator, is one part Frasier Crane, one part Hannibal Lecter and one part John Lithgow, who originated the role in the animated film. "I saw the movie several times," says Sieber. "I think it's the first time an animation movie with the fairy-tale creatures we grew up with skewed all of that — not necessarily to make fun of them but to ask, 'What would these characters be like in real life?' 'Shrek' was the first movie to come along and ask that."

For local color, the show is littered with displaced fairy-tale creatures — Peter Pan, the Three Little Pigs, the Sugar Plum Fairy, et al — led by Pinocchio (a fey, falsetto-lunged firebrand, as played by John Tartaglia). "We're kinda the catalyst," offers Tartaglia. "Lord Farquaad drives the fairy-tale creatures from his kingdom into the swamp where Shrek lives. To get us off his land, Shrek agrees to be Farquaad's knight and save Fiona. At the end of the show, we realize that we have this power, and we need to stand up for who we are. Why are we waiting for someone to rescue us? We can do it ourselves, because we're proud of who we are.

"My own story is all about learning to accept the fact that I'm this wooden boy, made of wood, who's never going to be a real boy — just a puppet, and all the freaky things that go with it. I have to learn to love myself — that's the theme of the whole show."

Tartaglia's puppeteering in Avenue Q prepared him well for Pinocchio's physicality. A gal-pal pointed out the irony of all this: "I have been a puppeteer for so long that I've actually turned into a puppet — just like Michael Redgrave in 'Dead of Night.'"