It's one of the most famous junk food binges in history...and now it's on stage and back in the West End!
The timeless classic of the insect who eats their way through chocolate cake, ice-cream, a pickle, Swiss cheese, salami, a lollipop, cherry pie, a sausage, a cupcake and a slice of watermelon (aka our perfect weekend) has made its way off the page and will return to the Ambassadors Theatre stage this December.
The Very Hungry Caterpillar, a 47-minute show created by Jonathan Rockefeller, features a menagerie of 75 lovable puppets, faithfully adapting the title story, plus three other Eric Carle tales; The Artist Who Painted a Blue Horse (the director's favourite of the three other stories), Mister Seahorse, and The Very Lonely Firefly.
Created by author/illustrator Eric Carle in 1969, The Very Hungry Caterpillar has delighted generations of readers and sold more than 41 million copies worldwide.
The Very Hungry Caterpillar was born of Carle’s love of nature and the books he read as a child following his move from New York to Germany at six-years-old. His parents were German immigrants to the US and took him back to their homeland in the mid-1930s. In 1944, aged 15, Carle was conscripted by the German government to dig trenches. He moved back to New York in 1952, and worked as a graphic designer for The New York Times, before being drafted into the US Army during the Korean War.
In 1967, Carle illustrated the children’s picture book 'Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See?' which went on to become a best-seller. He also created '1, 2, 3 to the Zoo' in the late 1960s, before The Very Hungry Caterpillar was released to the world in 1969.
The holes in Carle's caterpillar favourite were inspired by an item of stationery. Carle had been making holes in some paper with a hole punch when the idea hit him to do something similar with a children’s book. On the advice of his editor, Carle replaced the idea of a bookworm for a caterpillar, and the children's classic was born.
Carle cuts and layers hand-painted drawings as part of his collage technique for his books' illustrations, and for the stage adaptation close to 1000 hours went into hand-painting, cutting and sewing the 75 puppets required.
Those puppets will be brought to life in London once again from 13th December in this bright and beautiful stage show, with tickets (plus a special family ticket rate) available HERE.
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