Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Mo Willems and The Storytime All-Stars Present: Don’t Let The Pigeon Do Storytime!’ On HBO Max

If you don’t know who Mo Willems is, then you don’t have kids. If you do, he is probably one of your favorite writers and illustrators. Willems, who spent many years writing for Sesame Street, has spent the last 17 years putting out amazingly funny, and dare we say witty, children’s books, starting with Don’t Let The Pigeon Drive The Bus! In a new special recorded during the “Before Times” at the Kennedy Center in Washington, DC, Willems employs an all-star (and we do mean all-star) roster of comedic actors to perform a few of his most famous stories in front of an audience of little ones and their parents.

MO WILLEMS AND THE STORYTIME ALL-STARS PRESENT: DON’T LET THE PIGEON DO STORYTIME! : STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: Joining Willems on stage are — get ready for this — Natalie Morales, Anthony Anderson, Cameron Esposito, Greta Lee, Oscar Nuñez, Rachel Dratch, Thomas Lennon, Yvette Nicole Brown and Tony Hale. Also performing is sound effect master Fred Newman and Willems’ former Sesame Street colleague Joey Mazzarino, who plays a puppet version of Pigeon.

During the special, which is enhanced by squiggle-line CGI as the Storytime All-Stars perform the various stories, the group performs books that show the range that Willems has shown in his career. Leonardo The Terrible Monster is the story of a little monster (Lennon) who tries to figure out how to be terrible even though he’s more adorable than anything. Knuffle Bunny has Anderson playing the flustered parent of a girl (Esposito) who lost her favorite stuffie at the laundromat. A Busy Creature’s Day Eating has Dratch going through the alphabet — it’s a “requirement” that kids authors do an alphabet book — in a story of a creature eating everything and paying for it.

Then we get to Willems’ two most famous creations. First up, is his favorite in the extensive Elephant & Piggie series: Waiting Is Not Easy, where Elephant Gerald (Nuñez) gets impatient with is buddy Piggie (Morales) when she wants to make him wait for a surprise. Then Brown and Lennon don the pig and elephant ears to perform an original song called “Elephant In The Room.”

After getting chased from the theater a number of times, Pigeon is welcomed with open arms for a doodling segment. As Willems has done during his Lunch Doodles video series, he has the audience draw Pigeon, explaining that everyone can draw cartoons, because they’re just a series of shapes arranged in a certain way, like Pigeon’s body being a Mo Willems’ patented “circangle,” which is a circle that decides midway to be a triangle.

Finally, Pigeon gets center stage, only to be told “NO!” by the entire Storytime All-Stars and the audience repeatedly during a performance of Don’t Let The Pigeon Drive The Bus!

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: If you’ve ever seen a video version of a kids’ show like Daniel Tiger Live!, you likely have an idea what you’ll get here, only it’ll be something that parents and kids will really enjoy.

Performance Worth Watching: If you thought that Michael Winslow was the only person who could make all sorts of sounds, then you’ll be blown away by Fred Newman’s ability to accompany Willems’ stories with noises you didn’t think humans could make. Honorable mention to Dratch for her bug-eyed performance as the Creature who ate everything, then got sick afterward.

Memorable Dialogue: Since we are unabashed Elephant & Piggie fans, we loved seeing Morales’ Piggie tell Nuñez that what he’s waited for is out already: Lots and lots and lots of stars.

What Age Group Is This For?: If Mo’s books are for all ages (and they are), then so is Don’t Let The Pigeon Do Storytime! He even jokes that the kids will have no idea who the “All-Stars” who come out on stage are, and that’s a good thing.

Our Take: It goes without saying that Willems knows how to connect with kids, both through his books and in real life. With his big mane of white hair and Santa-esque beard, he is just goofy enough to show kids how he’s able to create such deep and silly characters like Pigeon, Elephant Gerald, Piggie and even one-offs like Leonardo. Don’t Let The Pigeon Do Storytime!, directed by Bobcat Goldthwait, shows that Willems has become so popular that he can get the likes of Anderson and Lennon and Brown and Hale to make room in their schedules to perform for what’s essentially a kids’ show.

What we’re sometimes afraid of, when we see books we love to read to our kids performed on stage or even animated, is that the televised version won’t live up to the standards set by all the times we read the book. But we didn’t have to worry with this special. All the performers did admirable jobs interpreting their parts, and it was fun to see some people we haven’t seen perform together — like Anderson, Lee and Esposito in the Knuffle Bunny sketch — share the stage.

What we hope is that, after quarantine is over and stage productions are allowed again, Willems takes this on some sort of mini-tour, having a different set of All-Stars perform different stories in different venues.

Our Call: STREAM IT. Mo Willems and The Storytime All-Stars Present: Don’t Let The Pigeon Do Storytime! may have a clumsy title, but it’s light and celebratory, bringing Willems’ silly visions to life on stage, and it’ll be something you watch with your kids many, many times.

Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.

Stream Mo Willems and The Storytime All-Stars Present: Don't Let The Pigeon Do Storytime! On HBO Max