Lucky me! I was hoping my last review for City Paper (after 14 years!) could be a good one, but what a pleasure to see a show that calls for an unqualified rave. With enough imagination and talent on Lantern's tiny stage to fuel a dozen Broadway shows, The Foocy is an hour and a half of pure theater. (Memo to marketing: Why, on a snowy Sunday afternoon, were there no children in the audience?) The cast of five, under Matt Pfeiffer's fine direction, is a theatrical collective called Ugly Stepsister from which we can hope for more.

The stage is bare except for tall, leafless trees, apparently wrapped in masking tape. Into this expectant space comes a wooden wagon, crammed with ropes and boxes and people singing a Russian folk song, accompanied by Rainey Lacey on violin and Aaron Cromie on guitar. They jump off the wagon, and while Anthony Lawton (who wrote the show) narrates the story, Seth Reichgott and David Jadico clamber up the trees, attaching ropes that will magically, cleverly, hoist into visible being the tiny Russian village of Vrinsk. (It will turn out that among the cast's surprising abilities, Jadico can play the accordion and Reichgott, the tuba.)

This is the story of a witch called Foocy, who, with her giant golem, terrorizes all the villages of Russia. Her much-feared arrival is heralded by bats and buzzards; she is hideous to look at and mind-shattering to listen to, but worst of all is her smell—her breath alone can wither oak trees. And, if she is displeased by the hospitality offered, she will destroy the village. Vrinsk has posted a watchman for 50 years to warn of her approach; as a child, this old man saved Vrinsk last time Foocy turned up by eating a mouse.

He tells his story to the town's children over and over again—the watchman and the children are played by puppets ingeniously designed by Cromie—and the story he tells is, in turn, played out by puppets on a tiny stage on top of a box. Most astonishing of all is the five-priest puppet, a combination of Cromie in a mask wearing four very individualized heads, which nod and seem to listen independently. When the actors become characters in the folktale, they wear half-masks (also designed by the endlessly inventive Cromie), transforming them with astonishing thoroughness.

A child's courage and defiance are finally rewarded, but only after a barn has been raised and then razed onstage before our enchanted eyes. Another song is sung, the wagon is reassembled and the magic ends—until the next performance.

Who could ask for a better send-off? Thanks, guys.

THE FOOCY

Through Jan. 1, Lantern Theater Co. at St. Stephen's Theater, 10th and Ludlow sts., 215-829-9002, www.lanterntheater.org