When Honolulu Theatre for Youth's “;Just So Stories”; opened earlier this month, the opening-night festivities also marked artistic director Eric Johnson's fifth anniversary with the organization. Johnson has brought HTY a long way, and his presentation of four classic Rudyard Kipling children's stories is one of his most inspired creations to date. The show is colorful and fast-paced enough for early elementary school-age children, but there is enough imagination and substance to entertain older children and adults as well.

Johnson deserves a big pat on the back for producing a Kipling-based show. After all, there are people who shun Kipling because his extensive body of work includes pieces at odds with the current ethos. Kipling came to prominence when the British Empire was still waging wars of conquest in Africa and Asia, and the United States was extinguishing the last bits of American Indian resistance and creating a de facto overseas empire of its own in Puerto Rico, Hawaii, the Philippines and Guam. Kipling's 19th-century musings on “;the White Man's burden”; don't play well in 2010, but his fanciful tales of elephants and crocodiles, camels and kangaroos are timeless child-friendly fun more than a century after he wrote them.

Johnson gets the show off to a rousing start with Afro-Caribbean drummer Babasango (aka Russell Robertson II), the show's musical director, leading the cast in a lengthy instrumental number that establishes the tropical ambience and primes the audience for an hour of high-energy interactive entertainment.

Junior Tesoro and the actor currently known as Q are the principals in Kipling's explanation of why kangaroos have such big hind legs and long sturdy tails. It seems that the kangaroo (Q) foolishly asked a powerful Australian deity to make him different from all the other animals; the deity ordered the dingo (Tesoro) to chase the kangaroo, and so it did until the marsupial's legs and tail grew to their current size.

Q and Tesoro take the action out into the audience to great comic effect during the long chase. Costume designer Sandra Payne's minimalist dingo design includes a long biblike attachment under Tesoro's chin that neatly and convincingly represents the dingo panting as he doggedly pursues the kangaroo.

Moses Goods III plays a young, easily misled jaguar in an equally fanciful tale that posits the armadillo as an animal that comes to be when turtles learned to curl up like hedgehogs and hedgehogs learned to swim like turtles. Tesoro and Maile Holck manipulate cute, kid-friendly puppets that represent the quick-thinking prey animals; Q plays the jaguar's patient, long-suffering mother.

Holck stars as the curious young elephant in what is probably the best known of Kipling's stories, and the entire cast does a phenomenal job using their hands and feet to create shadow-puppet characters in revealing how and why the Arabian camel got its hump. All can expect to be awed by the cast's skill in creating elaborate shadow figures here.

Johnson wisely avoids the easy decision to “;translate”; the stories into pidgin or change some of the characters into local birds or animals. Instead, the audience gets to suggest the characters and situations for an entirely new and original “;just so”; story. Improvisational theater is an extremely risky genre, but cast and audience meshed perfectly on opening night with a story about the origin of the humuhumunukunukuapuaa's “;pig snout”; that involved a trip to a food court and the fish's search for a $5 bill.

The improv story will, of course, be something completely different this weekend and the next, but count on HTY's “;Stories”; to be outstanding.