great expectations; Broadway's newest import, Coram Boy evokes Dickens, writes Adam Green, by way of Sweeney Todd and the Brothers Grimm.(Theater review)

Byline: Adam Green

As a high school senior in Durham, England, in the late seventies, Melly Still couldn't decide whether to apply to dance school, art school, or drama school. So she found a college in York that was all three and grew up to become a choreographer, designer, and director. This month, the fruits of Still's education-not to mention 20 actors, 20 singers, several puppets, one angel, and a seven-piece chamber orchestra-can be seen on the New York stage, as Coram Boy opens at the Imperial after two triumphant seasons at London's National Theatre.

Gracefully adapted by Helen Edmundson from Jamila Gavin's 2000 Whitbread Award-winning novel for young adults, Coram Boy is a sprawling, thrillingly staged story of orphans, prodigal sons, monstrous villains, and the music of George Frideric Handel. But don't dress the little ones in their matinee best just yet. Set in eighteenth-century London and Gloucestershire, the show leads its characters-and the audience-on a journey from birth to death to resurrection, with stops along the way for infanticide, child slavery, incest, and general pre-Spock parenting. Coram Boy may have a neo-Dickensian flavor-its epic sweep and fluid storytelling recall the Royal Shakespeare Company's magnificent eight-and-a-half-hour stage adaptation of Nicholas Nickleby of 1980-but its haunting resonance comes from its connection to the shadowy, dangerous world of fairy tales. "We all have dark thoughts, terrors, and fantasies that we don't know how to process or articulate,"says Still, who recently staged Richard Adams's World War II-by-way-of-rabbits fable Watership Down. "Coram Boy, like all fairy tales, gives those thoughts and feelings a home and allows them free rein ...