Oliver Jeffers’ award-winning children’s book “The Incredible Book Eating Boy” imagines a way in which a young boy named Henry could absorb books — by eating them. The whimsical picture book has been adapted as a musical at the Alliance Theatre, and “The Incredible Book Eating Boy” will have its world premiere on the Hertz Stage on July 13.
The Alliance has partnered with Children Read, A nonprofit organization encouraging literacy among very young readers and distributing books throughout our area.
There’s a book drive in conjunction with the show’s theatrical run, and president of Children Read Cindy Jaret joined “City Lights” host Lois Reitzes along with Chris Moses, the Dan Rearden director of education and associate artistic director at the Alliance to talk about the musical and its accompanying projects in youth literacy.
Interview highlights follow below.
The story of Henry the book-eater:
“He just accidentally discovers that he can eat a book and gain the knowledge. So once he happens upon this skill, he gets greedy and wants to become the smartest boy in the world,” said Moses. “It’s not enough to just eat a page or even eat a chapter; he starts eating and swallowing books whole until things start to go really badly for poor Henry. Both his digestive track rebels, but also all the knowledge ends up getting jumbled up in his brain, so he is no longer the smartest boy in the world.”
“At the end, he discovers that he could still gain all this knowledge if he starts reading; it just might take a little bit longer. So that in short form is the book, but the play… fleshes out that story quite a bit.” Moses added, “This is kind of a lesser-known Jeffers. It’s an earlier book, but it’s so theatrical and so funny, and it’s such a great connection to the decades of work we’ve done using theater as a tool to impact literacy. So I thought this would be the perfect piece to adapt into a play.
On the mission and impact of Children Read:
“It’s really exciting to be able to go into the classroom and read to the children and then hand them their bag of books,” said Jaret. “These children are so excited, and our goal is to give the books to children who don’t have access to many books. But of course, in a classroom, you have a mixture of economic standings in the families, and it doesn’t matter. The children are all very excited to get their own books and be able to start their own libraries.”
“The story I love to tell is, we recently got feedback from a teacher who said when she handed out the bags – because of course, we couldn’t be there because of COVID – one of the little girls cried. She was so happy, she just cried,” Jaret recounted. “They told us stories about children who perhaps were in shelters and their parents just didn’t have the ability to keep a lot of books; not just the financial ability, but there wasn’t room in the shelters for them to keep a lot of books… and so they could only take what they could carry there. Many stories like that.”
A logic-defying feat of production design:
“I can’t give away all the tricks, but what I will promise – there will be eating, actual ingesting of things,” Moses teased. “The set honors Oliver’s artwork beautifully. Kat Conley designed the set and painted it, and it painstakingly echoes the work that Oliver has done and references his own catalog. It’s really spectacular, and then the props in here, there’s a lot of magic and fun.”
He went on, “We wanted to make sure that we track that journey of eating a single bite of paper to a whole page of paper, to an entire book, to multiple books… The production meetings were some of the funniest things I’ve ever seen, all these people putting their heads together, confounded by that exact question, ‘How are we gonna do this? How can he eat a corner of a book? How can he eat a whole book?’” “The Incredible Book Eating Boy” is on stage at the Alliance Theatre’s Hertz Stage July 13 – Aug. 14. Its accompanying community book drive takes place July 1-31. More information and tickets for the musical are available here.
