The challenges facing the characters in “Grimm,’’ Company One’s lively new stage adaptation of some of the tales by the Brothers Grimm, are as different as the battery of seven Boston-area playwrights who mobilized their talents for this ambitious undertaking: Gregory Maguire, Lydia R. Diamond, Kirsten Greenidge, Melinda Lopez, Marcus Gardley, John Kuntz, and John ADEkoje.
Alternately serious, silly, creepy, soulful, and surreal, the short plays in “Grimm’’ never reach the profound depths of Stephen Sondheim’s reimagining of the fairy tales, “Into the Woods’’ (recently given a first-rate production by the Reagle Music Theatre in Waltham).
But “Grimm’’ works, for the most part, as a showcase of seven distinctive voices who add a contemporary flavor to the tales that underscores their enduring potency — for good and for ill.
(While the playwrights are ostensibly the stars of this evening, the cast acquits itself quite nicely, with especially indelible performances from Tasia A. Jones, Lonnie McAdoo, Nicole Prefontaine, Becca A. Lewis, Molly Kimmerling, Keith Mascoll, and Kris Sidberry).
The frame for “Grimm’’ is supplied by Maguire, of “Wicked’’ fame, whose “The Seven Stage a Comeback’’ opens Acts 1 and 2 and delivers the poignant final moments.
Whereas “Wicked’’ imagined the lives of the Good Witch and the Wicked Witch in Oz before Dorothy entered the picture, “The Seven Stage a Comeback’’ presents the forlorn spectacle of the seven dwarfs after Snow White has embarked on a new life with her prince (leaving behind the poison apple and the glass coffin).
No more hi-ho for this despondent crew. The dwarfs feel utterly lost without the onetime center of their existence. “She stole our laughter,’’ one laments. So they head out on an expedition to bring Snow White back home, and thus restore a sense of purpose to their days.
