pupp37 pl4y
This won’t do you any good as a review, as I maintain my practice of withholding pertinent details in order to maintain my anonymity.
My wife and I went to a play Friday, a musical about two hobos in a graveyard, told with people and puppets and projections of woodcuts and things. Parts were very good, the puppets were effective (the dead baby puppet was effectively creepy), the sound-collage incidental music worked very well, some of the singing was impressive, the premise itself had a great deal of promise, potential for explorations of the psyche using deep metaphor.
But. The way they wrote the narrative leaned toward maudlin, the male lead’s over-enunciation screamed “I’m not really a bum,” and the lyricist seemed to care more about nailing a perfect rhyme than conveying some real meaning.
The space itself was worth the price of admission, with weird art, bicycle-car frames with forks, a puppet theater on wheels with at least a dozen backdrops of street scenes, etc., ready to roll in on tracks when the crank is turned, chandeliers remade with shells and beads. Everything huge. Sort of like a hallucinatory vision of 70 years ago in America.
Even without the space, though, they’d have had me at creepy dead baby puppet.
