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From TV to the movies to the opera hall, you can't escape puppets!
Like a ragtag army of automatons, puppets of every contraption are infiltrating the power centers of the entertainment world.
By John Habich
Newsday
While the hand-puppet cynics of Avenue Q and the stick-puppet animals of The Lion King entertain sold-out houses on Broadway, the man-eating plant in Little Shop of Horrors is gobbling up box-office bucks on a new national tour. Meanwhile, the creators of TV's South Park are preparing Team America: World Police, an action-adventure political satire starring marionettes, due in theaters Oct. 15, and the Sci Fi Channel is reprising its space series Farscape, with aliens from Jim Henson's Creature Shop (part of the Muppet entertainment empire), in a miniseries Oct. 17.
At the same time, the Metropolitan Opera is rehearsing a new production of Mozart's The Magic Flute that features a bird-puppet ballet, staged by Lion King doyenne Julie Taymor. Last season, the Brooklyn Philharmonic welcomed life-size puppets to inhabit its performances of Richard Strauss' Don Quixote; in the spring, a Gotham Chamber Opera production will use marionettes for Respighi's Sleeping Beauty.
An ad-hoc "Puppetry in NYC" festival is taking over several Manhattan venues this fall, with offerings as diverse as foam-rubber dolls exploring depression, inch-high ninja action figures doing Shakespeare's Hamlet, and the reprise of the cult hit Symphonie Fantastique, in which six hidden puppeteers in wet suits maneuver abstract shapes in a 1,000-gallon tank to an orchestral score by Berlioz.
"I never knew so many people were doing puppets," says Ellen Stewart, founder and artistic director of the trailblazing La MaMa theater in Greenwich Village, which has included puppets in its eclectic mix of shows since 1962.
Although puppets will probably never be as common as moonlighting TV and movie stars at the nation's playhouses, they have moved from the margins of avant-garde and ethnic theater into the mainstream. The eccentric geniuses who create and manipulate puppets credit their growing popularity to a paradox.
On one hand (so to speak), puppets embody age-old curiosity about magic and the nature of being. "It's not an innocence particular to children," says the acclaimed puppet-artist Basil Twist, creator of the underwater Symphonie Fantastique, "but a deep part of our souls that sees the life in lifeless things." On the other hand, puppets feed the contemporary preoccupation with robots and artificial intelligence.
Jane Moss, vice president for programming at Lincoln Center, hasn't noticed a surge in the number of puppet artists or audiences, but she has perceived a shift in the way people perceive puppets: no longer as kid stuff, but as objects of fascination. Perhaps they fit the vogue for fantasy whose appeal crosses age barriers in an era enamored of Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings, she surmises.
Perhaps audiences' enchantment with puppetry also owes to the satisfaction of knowing, for a change, what is being manipulated and by whom.
http://www.sun-sentinel.com/features/lifestyle/sfl-puppetpowersep26,0,966365.story?coll=sfla-features-headlines
Like a ragtag army of automatons, puppets of every contraption are infiltrating the power centers of the entertainment world.
By John Habich
Newsday
While the hand-puppet cynics of Avenue Q and the stick-puppet animals of The Lion King entertain sold-out houses on Broadway, the man-eating plant in Little Shop of Horrors is gobbling up box-office bucks on a new national tour. Meanwhile, the creators of TV's South Park are preparing Team America: World Police, an action-adventure political satire starring marionettes, due in theaters Oct. 15, and the Sci Fi Channel is reprising its space series Farscape, with aliens from Jim Henson's Creature Shop (part of the Muppet entertainment empire), in a miniseries Oct. 17.
At the same time, the Metropolitan Opera is rehearsing a new production of Mozart's The Magic Flute that features a bird-puppet ballet, staged by Lion King doyenne Julie Taymor. Last season, the Brooklyn Philharmonic welcomed life-size puppets to inhabit its performances of Richard Strauss' Don Quixote; in the spring, a Gotham Chamber Opera production will use marionettes for Respighi's Sleeping Beauty.
An ad-hoc "Puppetry in NYC" festival is taking over several Manhattan venues this fall, with offerings as diverse as foam-rubber dolls exploring depression, inch-high ninja action figures doing Shakespeare's Hamlet, and the reprise of the cult hit Symphonie Fantastique, in which six hidden puppeteers in wet suits maneuver abstract shapes in a 1,000-gallon tank to an orchestral score by Berlioz.
"I never knew so many people were doing puppets," says Ellen Stewart, founder and artistic director of the trailblazing La MaMa theater in Greenwich Village, which has included puppets in its eclectic mix of shows since 1962.
Although puppets will probably never be as common as moonlighting TV and movie stars at the nation's playhouses, they have moved from the margins of avant-garde and ethnic theater into the mainstream. The eccentric geniuses who create and manipulate puppets credit their growing popularity to a paradox.
On one hand (so to speak), puppets embody age-old curiosity about magic and the nature of being. "It's not an innocence particular to children," says the acclaimed puppet-artist Basil Twist, creator of the underwater Symphonie Fantastique, "but a deep part of our souls that sees the life in lifeless things." On the other hand, puppets feed the contemporary preoccupation with robots and artificial intelligence.
Jane Moss, vice president for programming at Lincoln Center, hasn't noticed a surge in the number of puppet artists or audiences, but she has perceived a shift in the way people perceive puppets: no longer as kid stuff, but as objects of fascination. Perhaps they fit the vogue for fantasy whose appeal crosses age barriers in an era enamored of Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings, she surmises.
Perhaps audiences' enchantment with puppetry also owes to the satisfaction of knowing, for a change, what is being manipulated and by whom.
http://www.sun-sentinel.com/features/lifestyle/sfl-puppetpowersep26,0,966365.story?coll=sfla-features-headlines
