famous puppet death scenes

A few weeks ago, a friend of mine contacted me about a piece he had seen at what used to be my favorite theatre company in Calgary, Theatre Junction. I once associated the company with some of the better shows that I attended; classics were always reinvented (I can still vividly remember the 1960's acid-inspired interpretation of Moliere'sMisanthrope), and shows were generally well received among more youthful audiences.

The company has since been reinvented, and it incorporates a sort of strange, experimental approach to theatre that I admittedly don't completely understand. They did however bring Old Trout's production of Famous Puppet Death Scenes to Calgary, and I hear it was wildly popular. My friend tells me that he loved the show, and that it fits strangely into the work that I've been doing over the past two semesters.

I later discussed the show with another friend who is majoring in Theatre. She had seen it a year previously ; the creators are from the same theatre program in Victoria. I'm dying to see the piece: not surprisingly, it is not coming through Winnipeg. As a result, I'm limited to the following reviews and visuals that were published on the University of Victoria's Phoenix Theatre Program's website. The full article can be found here.

The show is a collection of short pieces which represent the collected death scenes from a (fictional) canon of famous puppet shows through history; each one is presented as if it is a scene from a real show, radically expurgated, so that we are seeing only the last moment of a main or sub-character. The broader plot of the shows from which they have been derived is left up to the imagination of the audience; the effect, we hope, is like viewing a painting in a gallery, finding an old photograph, or being parachuted into a four hour long opera, just at the climactic bit.

In any case, I want one of these puppets.

Labels: theatre

posted by chelsea @ 10:44 AM