Sunday, March 2 Kidfest just gets better and better -- and the best of it is, it's not just for kids.

Festival organiser Paula Maguire seems to have a knack for inviting professionals who appeal to the child in us all.

And she pulled off a brilliant coup with the last-but-one show in this year's programme.

A riot of dance and an explosion of colour kept children -- of all ages -- glued to their seats for yesterday's hour-long show.

And -- in presenting his dream-like interpretation of the classic children's story of a puppet who magically becomes a boy -- Robert Desrosiers performed a small miracle of his own in recruiting and choreographing young Bermudian dancers in less than a week. They didn't let him down, either. The girls, from the Jackson School, The School of Russian Ballet and United Productions, rose to the challenge of performing with top professionals and turned in an excellent performance.

French Canadian Desrosiers, billed as one of the most exciting figures in contemporary Canadian dance, laid on a magical mediaeval bestiary of creatures, with superb costumes and an expert eye for movement.

And his five professionals lifted the audience and their young fellow performers with an eclectic mix of different dance styles and music, superbly woven together into a dazzling whole.

Rudolfo Rivas-Franco as Pinocchio was a delight to watch as the puppet created by toymaker Gepetto as a surrogate son took his first hesitant steps along his personal magical mystery tour to real childhood.

Rivas-Franco brought a heart-stoppingly awkward grace to learning to walk -- and then shifted effortlessly from style to style in a dance tour-de-force.

Desrosiers' production was a splendid balancing act on its own -- for he clearly has the talent for entertaining children without patronising them.

And he knows that even if you can't spell surrealism, that doesn't stop you from instinctively appreciating it.

The original score by Eric Cadesky matched the kaleidoscope of costumes, flitting effortlessly, like Desrosiers' bees and woodpeckers, from the classic to jazz to sounds reminiscent of electropop heroes Kraftwerk and Vangellis.

Desrosiers even struck his very own balance of terror, with the eerie sounds of nature as Pinocchio wanders lost in the forest throwing an entirely healthy scare into the audience.

And his simple-but-stunning giant whale -- which swallows Pinocchio as he swims to save Gepetto from a storm -- was a masterpiece of theatrical flair.

The synergy between Gepetto (Robert Glumbek) and Pinocchio captures in dance and gesture the mixture of love and exasperation a parent feels for a problem child. And Justine Chambers conjures up the feline menace of the cat sidekick to Gumbek's elegant "slippery fox'' -- who conspire to cheat the naive Pinocchio out of five gold pieces.

Chambers also shines -- almost literally -- in her role as Pinocchio's guardian angel, the ethereal Blue Fairy and conveys the slightly neurotic jumpiness of the Cricket of Wisdom in grand style.

And she gently guides the puppet boy along the path to becoming the real-life boy he always wanted to be.

But -- even with the surrealistic fantasy on show -- the hardest thing to take in was that there were empty seats.

This had to be overall one of the best Kidfests ever and Paula Maguire -- and her sponsors CAT Ltd, who stumped up for Pinocchio, EXEL Insurance and Renaissance Ltd -- deserve to be congratulated for their vision.

But, on an Island where even the people hired to sell it admit there's not much for children, the fact that the public don't seem to appreciate what they're getting is truly beyond belief.

RAYMOND HAINEY THEATRE REVIEW REV