By Hilary Larkin, Special to KC Arts Beat

This season, the KCB is launching a new Family Series, staging its Second Company and its trainees in six performances of Beauty and the Beast over the course of the third weekend of February at the Folly Theater. It’s always important to applaud the success of a brand-new initiative and to add one’s hopes that it will carry on and thrive. I suspect the production answered its own questions. Tickets all sold out, and at an hour long, with a narrator accompanying the story on stage and piped music from Debiles, it did just as it promised to do: provide an engaging, accessible show for families of all ages and stages. 

Bruce Wells, choreographer as well as narrator, had brought together a neat ballet in a small space with charm and deftness. Brooke Noska as Belle was light, pleasing and crisp; Ben Workman as the Beast/Prince, convincing with his classical movements lapsing into full-on bestial collapses, and some excellent turns at the end. Mei McArtor’s Enchantress was an energetic presence, although narratively a bit of a puzzle when she shows up just to be ‘nice’ (it would appear), and not to lay on the doom about falling rose petals in the latter half. Nobody is really bad here. 

Even dallier Gaston (Owen Watson) dances happily at the wedding after a dramatic stage-fight; no hard feelings there, apparently. The corps danced with concentrated energy on the small stage; a line of eight small pages, ruffed, pig-tailed and bowed, framed the action at court. Christopher Rudd, as Belle’s goofy Dad always bumbling about, was an amusing foil throughout. Mere mortals that we are in the audience, it’s always reassuring to have one person on stage whose body doesn’t work quite the gracious way it’s supposed to, who is rooted in the earth and intends to stay there. We feel, dare I say it, represented. He is everyman. 

Scenic design by Ryan Sbaratta was spot-on, and clever too, making much out of small features. The quartet of garlanded arches were moved around deftly, now porticos, now bowers, and at the end, a sort of delightful rotating maze, keeping the lovers happy losing and finding each other. And there were all the comforting familiarities of the usual ballet version of peasant-life: a cozy cottage and bulging carts full of wares, edible and non-edible alike; to offset all the glitter and polish of the court. Who couldn’t be happy with either option?