<i>Tuck Everlasting</i>: Youth Wasted on the Young

A heartfelt and sentimental take on the purpose of life and living takes hold of Tuck Everlasting, but unfortunately it comes at the tail end of the play, once theatergoers are already collecting their belongings and getting ready to head for the door. It's a shame, too, because those fleeting moments provoke strong and stirring emotion. They come though too little, too late.

Inside a New Hampshire forest, Angus and Mae Tuck and their sons Miles and Jesse live behind the scenes, afraid to come out of hiding or risk being exposed as the never-aging special specimens they are. They turned out this way after drinking from a spring. Over time, they've come to see the fact they will live forever without growing up or growing old as a curse, not a blessing. It's when Jesse is confronted by a precocious 11-year-old named Winnie Foster (Sarah Charles Lewis) that the Tucks must grapple with their immediate future. If this all sounds complicated or convoluted, it's because the play is best designed for those willing to free themselves of reality and standard norms of culture. The production suffers because hardly anything feels consequential or important.

Casey Nicholaw does what he could with the direction and choreography, with the dancing that accompanies many scenes some of the real highlights of the show. It's toward the end that the show gets most comfortable with its own reality -- that its style overcomes its substance. Once the dancers are permitted to come front and center, to regale the audience with its own silent, yet still remarkably effective storytelling, the narrative opens up to a new degree and at a new pace.

The show has a lot to say about the most drastic, dramatic topic of all: life and death. Yet, there are too many unmemorable songs and flat storylines to ignore along the way to eventual meaning and longterm value.