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The New York Times

Curiosity may have killed the cat, but it’s ensured a long, fruitful life for an enterprising little monkey. That’s Curious George, hero of H. A. and Margret Rey’s picture book series, who first appeared on the printed page in 1941 and has gone on to star in films, a PBS Kids TV series, a world of toys and now a traveling museum exhibition for young fans.

The show, “Curious George: Let’s Get Curious!,” at the Children’s Museum of Manhattan, both celebrates the books and goes beyond them. Created by the Minnesota Children’s Museum, it portrays George’s exploratory enthusiasm as the very spirit of scientific inquiry. This may not be quite faithful to the cheerful anarchy of the Reys’ tales, but it works in a context that depicts George’s protector, the Man in the Yellow Hat, saying, “It’s all in a day’s play. … Children do science every day.”

And children do science here. One exhibit, inspired by “Curious George Takes a Job” (1947), lets them turn cranks to operate pulleys that send a window-washing cutout of George swinging across a building facade. At another station they can make a building, loading foam blocks onto a conveyor belt that sends the blocks traveling along a Rube Goldberg-type structure.

The show has exhibits on light and on wind energy, in which children can make simple pinwheels and wind socks and see more sophisticated examples in motion. H. A. Rey, who was interested in alternative power sources, was also prescient in sending George into space in 1957 in “Curious George Gets a Medal”; a year later the United States launched a rocket carrying a monkey. Here little visitors can climb inside a model of the Reys’ spacecraft.

Although the show’s developers aim at children under 10, I wish they had provided more text about, say, the physics of pulleys. Fortunately, they don’t stint on information about the Reys’ marriage and creative collaboration. (Jews living in France in 1940, they barely escaped the Nazis.) An exhibit includes their photos, sketches and letters, including a boy’s 1963 fan note saying he’d read one of their books “because Curious George is bad, and so am I.”
Well, not bad. Just curious.

(Through Sept. 25 at the Tisch Building, 212 West 83rd Street, 212-721-1223, cmom.org; daily from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m.; until 7 p.m. on Saturdays. Free with admission: $11; $7 for 65+; free for under 1 and members.)

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By LAUREL GRAEBER