Anne of Green Gables
(flash forward)

Bez Zerkal
(adult rejuvenation illusion) 1986, 1994 AKA "Without Mirrors". Contemporary Play School, Moscow. Parable play about love, youth and death. When a 40-year-old woman confuses the son of her former lover for his father, the boy claims to give her a youth potion that works until morning. Can the magic become real?
(-- Jeffr_2bya)

Big
- (AP, UC, AR RN) "The Musical" based on the Penny Marshall film.
- male poster - male
- ca. 1999 Big was performed in Japan. When the boy got up in the morning, he was surprised to have a tight shirt on. During the scene of returning at the end, the man went into the box, and the child actor was relieved of it. (Akira)
- (male AP UC) Review of local version of Big: the Musical - info (O')

Billy Elliot the Musical
(male age forms) London, 2005. 13 y.o. Leon Dominic Cooke as Billy Elliot dancing with his older self during the Swan Lake scene. male link

Birth and After Birth
(male adult baby) Tina Howe surreal play, Atlantic Theatre Company, 10/06. On a set decorated with a "Happy Birthday" banner and a Radio Flyer wagon full of presents, manic, child-obsessed parents prepare to surprise their 4-year-old son, Nicky (the droll Jordan Gelber). When he enters in his jammies, Nicky turns out to be balding, pot-bellied, and well over 200 pounds, a gargantuan comic manifestation of all the energy, worry, and ambition that this crazy couple have projected onto him. Howe manufactures the cacophony of noncommunication. Alternately coddled and abused, Nicky is engaged in a perpetual performance for his camera-toting father and his idealizing mother, but neither parent listens to him, or to the other. Nicky rampages around the room, tearing at packages, trashing the furniture, playing the cello, slithering between guests on the sofa - anything to get attention from his distracted and distracting parents.
Child-as-adult reversal has also been brilliantly played in the works of Charles Dizenzo and Dennis Potter.

Blood Brothers - The Musical
(coming of age FF) Melville Theatre Company. Twin is given up at birth to the wealthy Mrs Lyons. The two boys form a friendship while unaware of the awful truth. Tor Hartley brought a great deal of personality and dimension to the role of Linda, aging convincingly from a teen to a woman through the course of the show.

Cantata of the warrior woman, Daragang Magayon: An epic
(adult to older adult, RN) Merlinda C Bobis, 1993.
Epic poetic chanting form, oral history tradition, southern Luzon. Feminist revisionist re-telling of Philippines ancient myth. Beautiful Maiden transforms herself into Warrior Woman.
1994 performance piece. Stage adaptations: "Kantata ng Babaing Mandirigma" 1994, "Kantada ni Daragang Magayon, Mandirigma" 2000.
Daragang undergoes a fantastic metamorphosis. She turns into an older and therefore wiser woman, until she is allowed to resume her younger form thanks to the ritual prayers of Sakom.

Damn Yankees
(male adult rejuvenation, old age scene deleted) 1955 musical comedy. Retelling of the Faust legend set in 1950s Washington, D.C. Joe sells his soul to become the young and strong slugger Joe Hardy, and leaves his wife Meg ("Goodbye Old Girl"). Lola attempts to seduce Joe and thereby ensure his soul to damnation. At the game, he transforms back to his older self, but Joe wins the pennant. Audiences originally hated Lola turning into an ugly old crone at the end. The day after the opening, the script was changed, and the Devil turned Lola back into a beautiful temptress.

Don Juan in Hell
(adult AR) 2002, KSU Department of Theater. From George Bernard Shaw's "Man and Superman" Old woman (Karen Robinson) wanders aimlessly through hell. Juan informs her that she no longer has to be an old lady, in fact, he says, "In hell, one can change their age at will." She immediately decides to become 17 again, but Juan informs her that 17 has just gone out of style. Everyone in hell's high society has decided that 40 is the fashionable age of the moment, but Juan thinks they're ripe for a change and so tells her if she decided to be 27, she might be a trendsetter. She wills it so, and upon her transformation, Juan realizes that she is none other than Dona Ana, the woman whose father Juan had killed so long ago in a duel to defend her honor.

Earthbeat
(male) 1999. Oguri and Adam Rudolph at Electric Lodge in Venice. Obsession with transformation and the weight of time. Virtuoso drumming and unsparing dance depict our shifting relationship with our bodies. Superbly controlled portrayal of infirmity. Oguri depicts pain and desperation in choreography that mindlessly celebrates beauty and prowess using 18- to 32-year-old dancing athletes and deliberately ignoring the realities of other ages or conditions in life. Amazing sequences showed his face aging, decaying, growing skull-like and then young again as in a time-lapse or special-effect film sequence.

Ek Machine Kabadi Ki
(adult to younger adult ARed) 08/2006. By S.S. Nautiyal. Mask, LTG auditorium, New Delhi. A hilarious comedy on an attempt to transform an aged person into a youth. It tries to address obliquely the complications cloning can create. The entire action takes place in the room of the merchant. At places the production degenerates into a crude farce, resorting to excess slapsticks but on the whole it is entertaining. The play is centered around the family of a kabadi, a scrap merchant and his hand-to-mouth existence. He purchases a machine discarded by a scientist engaged in the experiment of reducing the age of human beings, and turns the life of the family upside-down. Obsessed with the ambition to make the machine functional, the scrap merchant spends day and night to repair it. The irritated and harassed wife of the merchant enters the machine. Lo and behold, comes out a young lady. The merchant and his young daughter in love with a youth next door are flabbergasted to confront this young woman before them. Atul Sharma as the youth next door starts flirting with the old woman when the machine transforms her. This strange situation leads to complications. The tension mounts to the delight of the audience. A young man and a small time businessman, who has lent some money to the merchant, are determined to exploit the machine by bringing customers desperate to regain their youth. Saumitra Verma, as the greedy business man is desperate to change his aging wife into a beautiful and young woman.

Endymion, the Man in the Moon
(slight adult age cycles, age stasis) 1588 Elizabethan comedy by John Lyly. Endymion has fallen in love with the Moon goddess Cynthia. Lyly's witch claims power over age: "I can restore youth to the aged". Endymion celebrates Cynthia for her ability to move between the virtues of youth and age: "Tell me, Eumenides, what is he that, having a mistress of ripe years and infinite virtues, great honours and unspeakable beauty, but would wish that she might grow tender again, getting youth by years and never-decaying beauty by time?" Cynthia's power to wax and wane in age is attributable to the fact that she embodies the divine power of the Moon.

Fiddler on the Roof
(FFed) 1964 musical and movie. "Sunrise, Sunset" Quote: "When did she get to be a beauty, When did he grow to be so tall"

FreeFlow Dance Company
(coming of age) "Idiosyncrasies of the Extremities" First performed 1995, 4 min. About the development from young girl to woman and the transition period.

Girl in the Flammable Skirt, The
(FF) 2005 adaptation of Aimee Bender's story collection. The story of a pregnant teen who falls in love with her hunchbacked step-uncle, the rapid evolution from pregnancy to love to disillusionment, rejection, and a progeny who becomes an adult in a matter of seconds give the spectator a feeling of puzzlement and whiplash.

God's Ear
(mental coming of age) 2008, Jenny Schwartz, The Vineyard Theatre.
A little girl morphs into her adult self with a gesture and a piece of wardrobe, and another character disappears - literally - down a rabbit hole.

Gypsy
(FF APed)The children in the musical magically grow up to become young men and women right before our very eyes, from "Baby June and Louise" to their older versions.

Happy Family, The
(AA adults dressed and acting like children) 1966, London, Maisie Mosco play.
movie adaptation
Mumsy, Nanny, Sonny, and Girly 1969 UK horror-comedy, Freddie Francis. AKA "Girly".
Novella by Brian Comport.
Dysfunctional family in Victorian mansion acts out role-playing fantasy, called "The Game". They are free from strife, sibling rivalry, and even the divisiveness of growing up; "children" Sonny and Girly are in their 20's, but they sleep in giant cribs in a room full of toys and dress like British 6th-formers.

Impromptu
(kinda like AR) Netherlands. Unscripted, unscored musical theatre at Amsterdam's Theater de Cameleon. Ralph de Rijke, Hans Kuykens. In one hilarious scene all the musicians become babies playing with the instruments, their overworked father trying to both control the children and protect the instruments. The babies magically grow up, can suddenly play a perfect salsa, and when the amazed father remarks to the audience "spooky!" the children proudly reply: "We've been practicing, Dad!" We travel in time, looking into the future to see the boss, now an old man, mourn the loss of his wife who never saw her son become famous. A moving moment of loneliness and old age.

Inasmuch as Life is Borrowed
(male AP) Ultima Vez. Dance/stage performance about the beginning and end of the human experience. Includes the short film Inasmuch (14'26") where a baby is born, grows up within seconds and then dies an old man. 1

Into the Woods
(AR) Stephen Sondheim Musical. "The Witch", Mezzo (age 99 and 25). An evil and ugly old woman who places a curse on the baker and his wife preventing them from having children. By the end of the show, she has turned into a young and beautiful woman.

Iolanthe
(age stasis) Gilbert And Sullivan comic opera, 1882. Immortal fairy who looks 17 married mortal and had a son. When 25 year old Strephon is seen in Iolanthe's company, no one will believe that's she's his mum.

Kimberly Akimbo
(old aged) Manhattan Theater Club, David Lindsay-Abair, 2003.
62 y.o. Marylouise Burke depicts the plight of a levelheaded, lonely 15-year-old girl in a frantic family, afflicted with a disease that ages her at four and a half times the usual rate. Her parents are so preoccupied with themselves that they have forgotten her crucial 16th birthday. According to the cruel arithmetic of Kimberly Levaco's disease, "like progeria without the dwarfism," 16 is the age at which most victims die. Will Kimberly find a boyfriend? Will she experience her first kiss? Burke seems to keep turning from a teenage girl into an old woman and back again. Viewers may genuinely take her for a girl when they first see her: the bell-bottom jeans and clamped blondish hair, defensively hunched shoulders, her sullen tucking of her chin into her neck, her way of saying "Da-ad" as two syllables, the luminous ecstasy on Kimberly's face as her father teaches her to swing dance, and her increasingly hobbled walk up and down the stairs as the illness takes its toll. For complicated plot purposes, Kimberly dresses up as an old lady, with sensible shoes, a turban and a cane.

La Fura Dels Baus: "Naumaquia"
(male age forms) Portugal. 1st play in Tetralogía Anfibia (Amphibious Tetralogy). Cosmic marionette show on the ship Naumon. Tamor represents the human as a traveler who undergoes metamorphoses of age, gender and race.

Last Wolf: and Other Tales, The
(APed, ARed, AA) Storyteller/musician Bob Pegg 75 min performance, 2003.
Wolfskin based on Inuit legend.
"Take your clothes off," said the old woman, "and I'll wash you." Wolfskin's bride took off her clothes, the little girl did the same, and the old woman began to wash them both. With each drop of water the bride got smaller and the little girl grew taller. When she was the size of a grown woman, the little girl put on the Bride's clothes and ran out of the cave. The Bride put on the little girl's clothes as best she could, and followed her footprints through the snow.
Inside the hall the little girl was dancing with Wolfskin and they were plainly having a good time. Wolfskin's bride went up to him, but he just said, "Little girl, why are you out so late? You should be at home in bed."
She went out into the snow, and sat down and cried. Another little girl came up to her. "Come with me. My Granny's got something special for you."
They came to a big house and went in. "Take off your clothes and let me wash you." With every drop of water, Wolfskin's Bride grew taller, until she was her normal size again. "Now," said the old woman, "put on those clothes and take this." She handed her a little glass phial. "You'll find your husband asleep next to the False Bride. Pour this liquid in her ear."
Wolfskin's true Bride tiptoed up to the bed and unstoppered the phial. With each drop the False Bride grew smaller. When, at last, she was the size of a little girl again, she woke up. She screamed when she realised what had happened, and ran out of the door. Wolfskin woke. "I knew there was something wrong. It's the spirit of the wolverine, trying to come between us."

Lauren Thompson
- (flash forward) She took a video of herself dancing at age 4, and redid it step by step as an adult in front of an audience, wearing a similar gown but a larger dress in the same style.
video link
- (flashback/flash forward, child and adult age forms)
screencaps

Lizzie Borden: The Musical
(flashback) Music and book by Christopher McGovern. 1998, 2004. Chilling - and convincing - presentation of Lizzie as the victim of long-time sexual abuse by an arid tightwad father whose 2nd wife hated her child rival. In the staging, Lizzie is split down the middle between her adult self, played by Paterson, and an inner child, subtly personated by 7th-grader Andrea Ross.

Lulu Hurst
(teen super strength) Stage performer. 14 year old girl's practical joke got out of hand. Lulu found herself proclaimed "The Wonder of the Nineteenth Century." She was able to withstand the pushing of several men without budging or seeming to exert any appreciable counter force and with one foot raised off the floor. With one hand she pushed renowned athletes around, and she lifted a chair with three large men piled onto it 6 inches off the ground. A few critics claimed that by being made to resist as hard as they could, the men were actually helping her.

Magic Circus
(male AP) DVD shows. The final Special opens with the television debut of the "Growing Illusion", in which son Greg Wilson magically "grows up" into internationally renowned magician Mark Wilson.

Mamas and the Papas, The
(AR, male AP) 2000 Carey English play. "I won't get undressed, I won't have a bath and I certainly won't have my hair washed!" The anti-bath-time antics of 4 year old Harry are driving his mother crazy! When a game of hide and seek slips into a magical parallel universe down the plug hole, Harry's mum becomes a little girl who wants to remember how to play while Harry turns into a grown-up with a whole lot of new responsibilities. After much mirth, mayhem and mystery, Harry and his mum come to a new understanding of each other. male

Maria de Buenos Aires
(AP) Dance Opera, Theatre de la Jeune Lune, Minneapolis. Director Dominique Serrand. A woman grows to enormous lengths under a red tablecloth. A batch of bread dough is shaped into a pregnant belly -- and later, fitted with arms and legs, becomes a baby. A child flashes into a full-grown woman with a twist of cloth. Maria is played simultaneously by Christina Baldwin and Jennifer Baldwin Peden. Nora Epp gives life to Maria the child.

Marilyn: An American Fable
- (adult flash forward, flashback) Musical. Young Norma Jean Baker interacts with her older adult self.

Member of the Wedding
(coming of age, AA) Carson McCullers. 1946 novel, adapted into play 4 years later.
Mostly dialogue with little action, the play portrays the development of 12-year-old Frankie Addams from childhood into teenage adolescence. At first she wants to run away to join her older sister's honeymoon. By the close of the play, Frankie has sufficiently outgrown her need for a mother figure. The sheet formerly hung in the arbor is gone, indicating her changing interests and abandonment of childish games. Frankie now views Barney MacKean as a "Greek god." She has also been accepted by the older girl crowd, and no longer feels so isolated.

Midsummer Night's Tapir, A
- Boy sees people appear at their mental age rather than their physical age. link

Miss Firecracker Contest, The
(UC) Carnelle enters the Miss Firecracker contest, so intent on winning like her beautiful cousin did, that she dyes her hair red and tries to wear her cousin's winning dress, though it's sizes too small for her. She looks ridiculous in the side-splitting, elaborate gown.

New Baby Gag, The
(magic illusion) Turns the well-known Baby Gag into a true mental feat. Show an envelope. Audience picks a famous person. Take from the envelope a photo of this person when the person was a baby! Turn around the baby photo and the selected person is on the other side. Also "May I borrow your baby?", "Mojo Grow Bag".

Nutcracker, The
(APed dream sequence)
- 12/97 annual Hong Kong Ballet. Clara goes to bed after the party and the rest of the story - the battle with the rats and rescue of the Nutcracker, and the voyage to the Land of Sweets - takes place in her dreams, where she is transformed into a grown up (the role taken over by another ballerina) and ends up dancing the Sugarplum pas de deux with the Nutcracker turned Prince in the form of Drosselmeyer's nephew, on whom Clara the child has developed her first crush.
- 1991, Kirov, Orange County Performing Arts Center. Instead of the Western story of young Clara as tourist watching others perform, the Russian staging is of a young teenage girl's sexual awakening. Just as the wooden nutcracker is transformed into a human prince, the pubescent Clara transforms into a woman, and she and the nutcracker prince create, through dance, an image of the ultimate refinement and beauty of sexual attraction.

Nutcracker
(AP) 2003 Pacific Northwest Ballet. Kent Stowell/Maurice Sendak version based on 1819 story by E.T.A. Hoffman. A dreamy Clara dances into adolescence. The enchantments include a growing Christmas tree and living room walls that spin into a snowy night where the child Clara (danced with delicate elegance by Brianna Wallace) finds herself transformed into an adult. From the moment Patricia Barker was revealed onstage as the adult Clara, the evening became unforgettable. With her hair loose, she seemed to be dancing with pure joy, already airborne as her romantically attentive Nutcracker prince, Stanko Milov, lofted her into dramatic high lifts.

Pieces
(mental regression) Actors Alliance Festival, 2005, Lyceum Theater, San Diego.
The story of Victoria (Erin Cronican), who after being shattered by a devastating breakup, takes an inner journey back to herself. Her story changes as she reverts from a bride-to-be to a child. Cronican is marvelous at handling the stresses of each age completely naturally. She starts as a happy young woman looking forward to a new and exciting life. When Reflection enters, she regresses in age. Her movements and speech capture the ages exactly.

Rainbow Kid, The
(TF) "Regnbogastrákurinn" Iceland 1989. A giantess wishes to be turned into a little boy. "The boy" then goes into town to find a fat boy to eat. His skinny friend wishes that his friend will become thin, and that the rainbow kid will again become a giantess with heavy feet. All wishes are granted.

Rise and Rise of Daniel Rocket, The
(flash forward) Each cast member of this Different Stages production saunters onstage a 12-year-old lout and strides off a 32-year-old lout. Alice (Jenni Rall, the only lead who convincingly makes the child-adult transformation), the girl of Daniel Rocke's dreams, is in love with his best friend Richard. Everyone makes fun of Daniel because he thinks he can fly. When it turns out he can indeed fly, he runs away to become famous. When Daniel returns to his old hometown (never a good idea) 20 years later, having achieved fame and fortune abroad, he finds that nothing has changed. The one thing this show, full of 25-year-old preteens and miracles, so desperately needs -- suspension of disbelief -- never materializes. One disbelief-suspending strategy is the ceaseless cacophony of affected (first preteen and then 30-something) voices. According to Rocket and company, life at 12 is bad and it doesn't get any better.

Rock 'N' Role Reversal
(body swap) 50s musical for the whole family about the exploits of a young girl who can switch places with other people. She wants to be anyone but herself.

Señor Discretion Himself
(flash forward, coming of age) Frank Loesser musical, based on short story by Budd Schulberg. The illiterate town drunk discovers that a wealthy newcomer to town has eyes for his 15 year old daughter. Elena Shaddow uses comically awkward gestures in an effort to seem young enough for the role early on, and then blossoming into a grown woman with a gorgeous voice in the second act after the song "Fifteen to Eighteen" charted her change.

Takarazuka
- Japanese all-female theatre troupes that perform musicals. "Puck" was performed ca 1991. A 10-year-old boy and a girl grow to 15, 18, and 19. (same players?) (Akira)

Thumbelina
(growth wish) Northern Stage Christmas offering. Tiny young girl Thumbelina wants to grow taller. Karen Traynor's attempts to make herself grow an extra half-centimetre are hilarious. Thumbelina meets a fairy prince just her size and they wed. She receives a pair of wings to accompany her husband on his travels from flower to flower.

Tom's Midnight Garden
(AP) Adapted from Philippa Pearce book. 2002 Manchester: Adults playing the parts of children is an acquired taste - I found Tom and the three cousins in 'Tom's Midnight Garden' rather arch, but Tom grew on me, and the three cousins grew up in the story. We struggled with the concept of time travel, time machines, and intersecting life-lines. Kirsten Parker, as Hatty, was excellent. Her body language was right out of primary school, and like the notorious cousins, we were convinced she grew taller as her character grew up.

Vows
(AP CB allusion) Louise Warren, Scarlet Theatre, 1991. Helen Anderson, Gráinne Byrne and Sophia Lovell Smith.
3 little girls vowed to wed on the same day. Near the beginning of the performance, Poppy and Pandora opened the drawer containing red childhood cardigans. The clothes magically grew to adult-size on the eve of the wedding.
As a sign of her decision not be married, but to dedicate her life to singleness and the care of growing things, Pasha emptied the dark fertile earth down the staircase. Pandora and Poppy then entered as their childhood selves.
"Where are you Pasha, Poppy asked, and from the top of the stairs Pasha, now also a child, replied "I'm in the tree! I'm so big that I'm splitting out of my nightdress, my head is wearing the moon for a hat..."
Her farsightedness as a child about her deepest needs was demonstrated by her image of herself bursting through her nightdress - the childhood 'skin' that had become too small and tight to contain her.
The adult Pasha was, at one and the same time, gardener, nun and sorceress. Her garment, when it emerged from the nest of leaves, was the habit-like dress. Pasha remade the magic childhood garden so that it became a meaningful place to live her adult life. Poppy's leaf drawer dress became her wedding gown ...whereas Pasha had split out of her childhood nightdress into her new self, Poppy's wings of desire that burst through her dress reaffirmed her commitment to the vow she had made as a child. Pandora quickly pounced on the fairy-tale dress, only to discover that it was too small for her. She had outgrown the fairy tale... Poppy marries the unseen fairy prince.

Wit: A Play
(flash forward, flashback) This Margaret Edson play isn't easy to stage. Scene shifts take place without a pause to let actors get their feet. Our narrator gets a pelvic exam in full view of the audience. Supporting characters double on the fly, and lead characters have to change ages from scene to scene. At the final moments, our narrator appears in front of us as naked as the day she was born.

AP: age progression
AR: age regression
CB: clothes burst or rip
UC: undersized clothing
AA: age-appropriate clothing or clothes grow too
RN: return to normal