Puppets

Subterms

    Latest story

    150 Shares109 Views

    Mark Dodson, Voice of ‘Star Wars’ and ‘Gremlins’ Characters, Dies at 64

    by

    He voiced Salacious B. Crumb, the monkey-lizard pet of Jabba the Hutt in “Return of the Jedi,” as well as Mogwai in both “Gremlins” films.Mark Dodson, who voiced strange puppet creatures in “Star Wars,” including Salacious B. Crumb, the cackling monkey-lizard pet of Jabba the Hutt, and “Gremlins” films, died on Saturday. He was 64.His death was confirmed in statements on social media by his agent, Peter DeLorme, and the Evansville Horror Con, the Indiana fan convention where he had been scheduled to appear over the weekend. No cause of death was given.Mr. Dodson’s voice acting career began in 1983 on “Star Wars: Return of the Jedi,” when he voiced Salacious B. Crumb, the court jester of Jabba the Hutt that was known for its maniacal laugh, as well as some of the furry forest creatures known as Ewoks.In a 2020 interview with “Screaming Soup!,” Mr. Dodson explained how he had gotten the Crumb role by accident.He was auditioning for Adm. Ackbar, a leader during the Clone Wars, but was so nervous that he asked for a break to compose himself, he said. He was then overheard using a deranged voice that the casting director thought was perfect for Crumb.That led Mr. Dodson to voice several of the Mogwai in “Gremlins,” the 1984 comedy-horror film about a young man who accidentally unleashes a horde of malevolently mischievous monsters on a small town on Christmas Eve.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    More stories

    • 188 Shares159 Views

      in Theater

      ‘Life & Times of Michael K’ Review: An Arduous Trek That’s a Marvel to Watch

      by

      This captivating adaptation of J.M. Coetzee’s novel, a collaboration with Handspring Puppet Company, follows a man and his ailing mother during a civil war in South Africa.His chin is pitched forward, his ears protrude and his brow is furrowed over glinting black eyes. The protagonist of “Life & Times of Michael K,” which opened on Monday at St. Ann’s Warehouse in Brooklyn, has the countenance of a man in perpetual pursuit. A refugee trapped in his own country, he is a puppet manipulated by forces beyond his control.Even as his wood-carved features remain placid, he is an extraordinary embodiment of human reflex and interiority created by the Handspring Puppet Company. When he collapses into a crumpled heap of disjointed limbs, or gambols triumphantly to a playground refrain, his figure demonstrates operatic feeling with delicate precision. It is a marvel to behold.So is the entirety of this captivating and transportive production, adapted and directed by Lara Foot from the Booker Prize-winning 1983 novel of the same name by J.M. Coetzee. Set amid a fictional civil war in South Africa, the story charts a journey undertaken by Michael K and his ailing mother, Anna, from a besieged Cape Town to her rural birthplace, Prince Albert. What begins as a fulfillment of Michael’s filial duty evolves into a philosophical pilgrimage, away from civilization’s destructive conflicts toward direct communion with nature.But first Michael has to load his mother into a souped-up wheelbarrow and cart her out of the city. Stooped over with age and illness, Anna has a raspy, giddy laugh that lends an air of adventure to their escape from bombardment and destitution. Mother and son are each maneuvered, bunraku-style, by up to three puppeteers at once, animated by a combination of intricate movement and vocalizations that include not just dialogue, but grunts, sighs and heaves of effort.The puppetry, created and designed by Adrian Kohler, and directed here by Kohler and Basil Jones, both Handspring founders, achieves a manner of artistic transcendence. How is it possible to render the cascading traumas of displacement, loss and captivity into a legible aesthetic experience? There is a distancing mechanism inherent to the form that allows for these figurines — assemblies of wood, cane and carbon fiber — to illustrate feelings and circumstances otherwise too extreme and dire to visualize with actors onstage. Projection design by Yoav Dagan and Kirsti Cumming, in addition to depicting shifts in landscape, magnifies the characters’ etched faces in detail.The production smartly emphasizes the Odyssean incidents of Coetzee’s novel and adheres closely to Michael’s point of view, our critic writes. The cast includes, from left, Billy Langa (standing in the background), Craig Leo, Carlo Daniels, Faniswa Yisa and Roshina Ratnam.Richard TermineAnd each puppet, including a brave but ill-fated goat and three curious children, is the sum of magnificent, multipronged performances, led by the puppet master Craig Leo, who handles adult Michael alongside Markus Schabbing and Carlo Daniels. When a ravenous Michael is offered a chicken pie, each one of his puppeteers tears off a furious bite. And when a restless Anna keeps Michael awake at night, her fussing and fidgeting are a symphonic collaboration between Faniswa Yisa, Roshina Ratnam and Nolufefe Ntshuntshe.Foot’s adaptation, presented here by Düsseldorfer Schauspielhaus and Baxter Theater Centre, where Foot is the artistic director, smartly emphasizes the Odyssean episodes of Coetzee’s novel and adheres closely to Michael’s point of view. Third-person narration is delivered to the audience by multiple performers, including Andrew Buckland, Sandra Prinsloo and Billy Langa, a shuffle of voices that gives the production’s uninterrupted two hours a sustained sense of urgency and momentum. (The show was also presented this summer at the Edinburgh Fringe.)The inventive and atmospheric stagecraft captures the spartan, poetic quality of Coetzee’s prose. The sunrise ambers and midnight blues of Joshua Cutts’s lighting design illuminate Michael’s states of mind as much as they do time and place. Kyle Shepherd’s score is rich with both ominous and aching strings and piano, while David Classon’s sound transports Michael from the chaos of a war-torn metropolis to the swishy silence beneath a river’s surface. Patrick Curtis’s versatile soot-colored set and the earth-toned streetwear designed by Phyllis Midlane facilitate the production’s expansive canvas.The race of Coetzee’s itinerant hero, written during South Africa’s apartheid, is only lightly specified in the novel, where Michael is classified in official documents as “CM,” or colored male. Onstage, Michael and Anna’s features offer a similarly subtle indication of their background. It is a radical artistic gesture, given the narrative’s setting, that posits Michael K as a symbol of human existence. It’s a timely one, too, to consider the possibility of a connection with one’s homeland that surpasses earthly conflicts.Life & Times of Michael KThrough Dec. 23 at St. Ann’s Warehouse, Brooklyn; stannswarehouse.org. Running time: 2 hours. More

    • 100 Shares119 Views

      in Theater

      A Wood-Carved Protagonist, Enduring the Brutality of War

      by

      Mid-morning on Tuesday at St. Ann’s Warehouse in Brooklyn, a puppet named Michael K had just grabbed a mug when the director Lara Foot called a pause to the action onstage.“Let’s stop here,” she said, and he did so instantly.Still clasping the mug in his right hand, he gazed at her with black, glass-bead eyes like someone who had been taken by surprise. Even frozen mid-gesture, he was subtle, human, uncanny — a striking alchemy of art and imagination.In “Life & Times of Michael K,” based on the 1983 novel of the same name by the South African-born Nobel laureate J.M. Coetzee, this puppet is the sinewy, carved-wood star, designed and created by Adrian Kohler of Handspring Puppet Company. At two-thirds the size of an average adult human, Michael is operated bunraku-style by a team of three puppeteers. Craig Leo, the show’s puppet master, is in charge of Michael’s head and right arm.The puppeteers Markus Schabbing and Carlo Daniels with Michael K. The story is set amid a fictional civil war, whose Kafkaesque landscape Michael navigates with his ailing mother, Anna.Amir Hamja/The New York TimesManipulation is not the job, though. To Leo, it’s more a matter of following the puppet’s lead.“There’s something strange that happens,” he said in an interview in the lobby of St. Ann’s, game to chat despite feeling under the weather. “You have these moments — and you kind of aim for them, and you hope that you can do it as much as possible — where he just comes alive. It’s when the synchronicity really clicks in between the three puppeteers, and then all of a sudden you’re holding him and he becomes incredibly light. And he’s suddenly almost moving on his own.”Coetzee’s Booker Prize-winning novel is set amid a fictional South African civil war, whose Kafkaesque landscape Michael navigates as he attempts to take his old and ailing mother, Anna, on the long journey from Cape Town back to the countryside she loved as a girl.Foot, the artistic director of the Baxter Theater Centre at the University of Cape Town, adapted the novel in collaboration with Handspring. Kohler and Basil Jones, a fellow Handspring founder, directed the production’s puppetry. At the Edinburgh Festival Fringe in August, the show impressed critics, with The New York Times calling it “stylish” and a “standout.”The puppeteers Faniswa Yisa and Roshina Ratnam with Michael K’s mother, Anna.Amir Hamja/The New York TimesA young Michael K, with the puppeteers Markus Schabbing and Andrew Buckland.Amir Hamja/The New York Times“Puppets hold philosophy in them, and poetry,” Foot said in a separate interview. “Coetzee’s work, some of his work, lends itself to that because there’s a lot of thought-provoking narrative.”Having long wanted to work with Handspring, she thought a puppet would be perfect to embody Coetzee’s Michael — a gardener whose cleft lip makes people think him inferior — as a kind of everyman confronting existential questions.“When I sent ‘Michael K’ to Basil and Adrian,” she said, “Adrian had already read it and it was one of his favorite novels. We agreed that it would just be Michael, his mother, the children and the animals that would be puppets. And the rest of the world would be the context of the war.”So the company also includes five actors. One of its four puppeteers, Leo, arrived in New York this week from Mexico. That was the terminus of his nearly three-month tour across North America with the giant child refugee puppet Little Amal, who along with the horses of “War Horse” — another show on Leo’s résumé — is among Handspring’s most famous creations.“If you look at his left side of his face and his right side of his face, there are different expressions,” said Craig Leo, the show’s puppet master.Amir Hamja/The New York Times“He has kind of a tortured look on the one side,” Leo said. “From the other side, he’s actually very beautiful. In the light, his expression changes all the time.”Amir Hamja/The New York TimesAfter stilt walking to operate Amal from the inside, unable to see what her face was doing, Leo was palpably pleased to be reunited with Michael, a puppet he has worked with on and off for more than two years, and one he could keep his eye on from the outside.“If you look at his left side of his face and his right side of his face, there are different expressions,” he said. “He has kind of a tortured look on the one side; I don’t know how else to describe it. From the other side, he’s actually very beautiful. He’s a really handsome man. In the light, his expression changes all the time. It catches all those carved lines in the wood.”“He holds the pathos,” Craig Leo, the show’s puppet master, said of Michael K. “He holds it even when he’s hanging on his puppet rack.”Amir Hamja/The New York TimesOf the dozen-plus puppets in the play, there are four Michaels: a baby, glimpsed only briefly yet made, Foot said, with legs fully capable of kicking; a child; a miniature adult; and the main adult, with a head carved from Malaysian jelutong, legs of carbon fiber and ribs of Indonesian cane.“The joints are very finely made,” Leo said. “It breaks fingers because they’re so delicate. We just glue them back on. But as a whole, the puppet has never broken.”Which is lucky, because there is only one of him, no backup.“I’ve thought about that often, actually,” Leo said. “Should we be locking him up at nights? It’s a work of art, you know.”To him, Michael is also a magnet for empathy, as puppets are generally — and a portal into the story in a way that a human actor would not be.“He holds the pathos,” Leo said. “He holds it even when he’s hanging on his puppet rack.” More

    • 125 Shares199 Views

      in Television

      Nom Nom Nom. What’s the Deal With Cookie Monster’s Cookies?

      by

      If you have ever wondered what the “Sesame Street” muppet is really eating, we have the answer.Years ago, a reader wrote probing for details on a mystery that had vexed him: What’s the deal with the cookies that Cookie Monster eats?The email said nothing else. I chuckled and filed the note in the cupboard of my brain where such things go. Until I realized something: Me want cookies. And me want answers.Cookie Monster, for those of you who skipped childhood, is a classic muppet on “Sesame Street.” He is a scraggly, blue fellow with bulging eyeballs, who has for decades been singularly obsessed with chaotically chowing down on cookies. The crumbs end up almost everywhere except his mouth, an effect that looks like a high-speed blender without a top.The character was created in the 1960s by Jim Henson, the creator of the Muppets, for a General Foods Canada commercial. Cookie eventually moved to “Sesame Street,” where he presumably found a good rent-stabilized apartment.It turns out the cookies are real — sort of.They are baked at the home of Lara MacLean, who has been a “puppet wrangler” for the Jim Henson Company for almost three decades. MacLean started as an intern for Sesame Workshop in 1992 and has been working for the team ever since.Lara MacLean, a puppet wrangler for the Jim Henson Company and the maker of the cookies that Cookie Monster eats, at the company’s offices in Queens.Carey Wagner for The New York TimesOne of the ingredients: instant coffee. Also: pancake mix, Puffed Rice and Grape-Nuts.Carey Wagner for The New York TimesMacClean dips her hand in water and flattens the cookies. They need to be thin enough to explode in a shower of crumbs.Carey Wagner for The New York TimesThe recipe, roughly: Pancake mix, puffed rice, Grape-Nuts and instant coffee, with water in the mixture. The chocolate chips are made using hot glue sticks — essentially colored gobs of glue.The cookies do not have oils, fats or sugars. Those would stain Cookie Monster. They’re edible, but barely.“Kind of like a dog treat,” MacLean said in an interview.Before MacLean reinvented the recipe in the 2000s, the creative team behind “Sesame Street” used versions of rice crackers and foams to make the cookies. The challenge was that the rice crackers would make more of a mess and get stuck in Cookie’s fur. And the foams didn’t look like cookies once they broke apart.For a given episode, depending on the script, MacLean will bake, on average, two dozen cookies. There’s no oven large enough at Sesame’s New York workplace, so MacLean does almost everything at home.This leads to the occasional awkward interaction, such as when MacLean once had to make huge batches of cookies for a series of Cookie Monster film spoofs.“My landlord came in my apartment at that time and I had all these cookies around and I was like, ‘I’m really sorry, I can’t offer you a cookie.’ And he probably just thought I was really mean,” she said.After baking.Carey Wagner for The New York TimesApplying hot brown glue for the cookie’s chocolate chips.Carey Wagner for The New York TimesOn set, when Cookie is shooting, MacLean said the “best-case scenario” was for the crumbs to end up all over the place.Sal Perez, the executive producer of “Sesame Street,” said, “You’ve got to be careful for the shrapnel that comes out when he’s munching on the cookie.”Cookie has been portrayed since 2001 by David Rudman, who took over the role from Frank Oz. Rudman’s right hand moves the mouth, which is eating, and his left hand holds the cookies. Both work in concert to break the cookies, which means the cookies have to be soft enough to fall apart.Jason Weber, the workshop’s creative supervisor, recalled Rudman complaining about a tough batch: “My hands are so sore. Don’t make them like this ever again.”Rudman said soft cookies are best, adding, “The more crumbs, the funnier it is.”“If he eats the cookie, and it only breaks into two pieces if it’s too hard, it’s just not funny,” he said. “It looks almost painful. But if he eats a cookie and it explodes into a hundred crumbs, that’s where the comedy comes from.”MacLean has perfected a recipe that is “thin enough that it’ll explode into a hundred crumbs.” Rudman said. “But it’s not too thin that it’ll break in my hand when I’m holding it.”The finished cookies. Not everyone realizes they are meant only for muppet consumption.Carey Wagner for The New York TimesSometimes shoots don’t go as planned. Cookie appeared on “Saturday Night Live” in 2010 when Jeff Bridges was hosting. During the opening monologue, Bridges sang a duet with Cookie. The cookie that Bridges was supposed to offer Cookie broke in Bridges’s pocket, so when he took it out, he only had half the cookie. So Bridges pulled out the other piece and improvised.“Not only a half, but a whole cookie!” Bridges said.Rudman responded as a delighted Cookie: “Twice as good!”Cookie doesn’t just eat the cookies. He eats the plate they are on and has recently expanded the menu to include fruits and vegetables. Occasionally he devours inanimate objects like mailboxes. There is a small gullet in his mouth, so Cookie can actually eat something the size of a small fist. Bananas, apples and small hats go down easy, but most of the cookie crumbs end up outside his mouth.Not everyone realizes that the cookies aren’t meant to be eaten. Adam Sandler appeared on a 2009 episode of “Sesame Street” and decided to share in Cookie’s delight by spontaneously eating a cookie with him on set.“As soon as the cameras cut, he was like, ‘Bleeeech,’” MacLean said.Rudman said he told Sandler not to eat the cookies: “I think he got caught up in the moment,”It’s hard not to. The 54th season of “Sesame Street” just premiered on Max. Cookie is almost 60, but the core of his character endures.“He has sort of this base instinct that I think all of us have, even the youngest of us have,” Perez said. “One of our first instincts is like: ‘We see a cookie. We see a thing that we love and we just want it.’” More

    • 150 Shares169 Views

      in Television

      Marty Krofft, Who Created Fantastical TV Shows With Brother, Dies at 86

      by

      Marty Krofft, who, with his brother Sid, created a string of television shows that captured audiences from Saturday morning to prime time, including fantastical children’s fare, like “H.R. Pufnstuf” and “Land of the Lost,” and variety shows, like “Donny and Marie,” died on Saturday in Los Angeles. He was 86.His publicist, Harlan Boll, said the cause was kidney failure.The Kroffts said they came from a line of puppeteers, and Sid, who as a child traveled the world performing an elaborate puppet show, was usually the creative force behind the partnership.But Krofft shows, which featured extravagant puppets and scenery, were often expensive to produce and sometimes had premises that could be a hard sell; one show, for instance, focused on magical, talking hats. Marty’s business acumen and ability to woo studio executives ensured that some of the strangest programs ever to appear on the small screen actually got made.“Sid was always ‘the artist,’” Marty was quoted as saying in “Pufnstuf & Other Stuff: The Weird and Wonderful World of Sid & Marty Krofft” (1998), by the critic David Martindale. “He never did have a business sense. So I came in and filled that vacuum.”The shows often had psychedelic sets and a trippy feel, leading many older viewers to read drug references in them. The Kroffts said that had never been their intention.The first Krofft television show, debuting on NBC in 1969, was “H.R. Pufnstuf,” which was about a boy who is spirited away to a magical island by a witch who wants to steal his talking flute. On the island the boy meets H.R. Pufnstuf, the dragon mayor of a town where virtually all the animals and objects can speak. Pufnstuf and island denizens try to help the boy get home in spite of the machinations of the witch and her doltish minions.Only 17 episodes were filmed, but they aired as reruns for years and in time inspired a made-for-TV movie, an ice show and extensive children’s merchandise.“He’s our Mickey Mouse,” Mr. Krofft said of Pufnstuf.“Pufnstuf’s” success also proved to studios that far-out Krofft programs could draw viewers.Mr. Krofft on the set of “H.R. Pufnstuf.”Photos Courtesy of Sid & Marty Krofft Pictures ArchiveThe Kroffts went on to produce “Sigmund and the Sea Monsters,” about a tentacled lump of seaweed who befriends humans; “The Bugaloos,” about a rock group made up of teenage insects; and “Lidsville,” about the hats.Those shows were all lighthearted fantasy. The next show the Kroffts produced, “Land of the Lost,” was more serious.In “Lost,” which premiered on NBC in 1974, a family plunges into another dimension populated by dinosaurs, primates called Pakuni and dangerous lizard-men called Sleestaks. Like “Pufnstuf,” the show was about the family’s attempts to get home while navigating their strange new surroundings.Episodes were written by seasoned science fiction writers like Ben Bova, Larry Niven and Norman Spinrad, and a linguist developed a language of sorts for the Pakuni.The Kroffts produced new episodes of “Lost” until 1977, and simultaneously made several other children’s shows, which starred, among others, the actors Bob Denver (“Far Out Space Nuts”), Ruth Buzzi and Jim Nabors (both in “The Lost Saucer”).A scene from the Kroffts’ science fiction show “Land of the Lost,” which premiered in 1974. Ron Tom/NBCU Photo Bank, via NBCUniversal, via Getty ImagesThey also went into prime time with the popular variety show “Donny & Marie,” starring two siblings from the singing Osmond family act. It premiered on ABC in 1976 with guest appearances by Farrah Fawcett, Vincent Price and Lee Majors.New episodes of “Donny and Marie” were produced for four years. But later Krofft prime time offerings had far shorter runs, like “The Brady Bunch Hour” (1976), which featured much of the cast of the sitcom singing and dancing. As a series, it lasted eight episodes.“It was like a freak show,” said Susan Olsen, who played Cindy Brady.Marty Krofft was born in Montreal on April 9, 1937, the youngest of four brothers born to Peter and Mary (Yolas) Krofft. Sid, who learned puppetry from their father, was already touring professionally by the time Marty could walk.Marty Krofft displaying some of the marionettes of Les Poupées de Paris, an early signature production by the Krofft brothers, backstage at the 1962 Seattle World’s FairPublicity PhotoThe brothers officially became partners in 1959, and the next year they debuted their signature production, “Les Poupées de Paris,” a risqué extravaganza that initially required 12 puppeteers working 240 marionettes.Les Poupees ran alongside the New York World’s Fair in 1964 and ’65, and traveled to Australia and Japan before closing in 1967. It also caught the eye of Angus Wynne, who owned the Six Flags amusement park chain; he asked the Kroffts to create a puppet show for his parks.The Kroffts went on to design puppets, costumes and props for clients like the Jackson 5, the Ringling Brothers Circus and the Ice Capades, working for a time out of a former airplane hangar in Southern California. Years later, they briefly opened their own theme park, “The World of Sid and Marty Krofft,” at the Omni Hotel in Atlanta.Marty Krofft, right, and his brother Sid in 2020, when they were honored with stars on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. Nina Prommer/EPA, via ShutterstockMany Krofft programs had short initial runs but resurfaced decades later, first as reruns on networks like Nick at Nite and as streaming options for nostalgic Gen-Xers. For instance, a “Land of the Lost” feature starring Will Ferrell, Danny McBride and Anna Friel was released in 2009; and in 2017 Amazon rebooted “Sigmund and the Sea Monsters,” starring Rebecca Bloom and David Arquette.Mr. Krofft’s wife, the former Playboy playmate Christa Speck, died in 2013. He lived in Los Angeles and is survived by his brothers Sid and Harry; his daughters Deanna Krofft-Pope, Kristina Krofft and Kendra Krofft; five grandchildren; and one great-grandchild.Mr. Krofft’s daughters continued the family business, guided by their father, who kept working until recently. More

    • 138 Shares169 Views

      in Television

      Who’s That Wonderful Girl? How “Nanalan’” Found New Success on TikTok

      by

      She’s Mona, the puppet heroine of “Nanalan’,” an old Canadian children’s show that has found a new audience on TikTok.“Nanalan’” hasn’t been on TV in years, but it’s the hottest show on TikTok.A Canadian children’s program that made its debut in 1999, it has had a resurgence in recent weeks, thanks to its growing popularity on the social media platform, where it has been watched millions of times.A big part of the show’s appeal lies in its fiendishly catchy songs. One of them includes the lines: “Who’s that wonderful girl? Could she be any cuter?”The girl in question is Mona, a little green puppet with pigtails sticking out from both sides of her head. No, she could not be any cuter.The “who’s that wonderful girl?” earworm comes from a scene in which Mona enters a room dressed as a princess. Her grandmother, Nana, is singing the song while accompanying herself on organ. Nana’s dog, Russell, then appears in the garb of a royal courtier.The clip took off in mid-October, after a TikTok user posted it with the caption “When the clothes you ordered arrive and you treat the family to a fashion show.” The video has been viewed over 9.5 million times.

      @nanalanofficial Thewhole video can be viewed on Nanalan Official yu Tube #whosethatwonderfulgirl #wonderfulgirl #nanalan #princess #barbie ♬ original sound – nanalan’ official “Nanalan’” joined TikTok, YouTube and other social media platforms this year. But it didn’t make much of an impression until the video of Mona in her princess regalia began circulating, said Jamie Shannon, who created the show with Jason Hopley. The pair started making “Nanalan’” shorts in 1999, and the series ended up airing on CBC, Nickelodeon and PBS for Kids.In addition to reposting old content, Mr. Shannon, 51, has started making new videos with the “Nanalan’” puppets for social media. He discussed the show’s newfound audience and weighed in on why nostalgia reigns supreme online. The conversation has been edited and condensed.How did you get into the puppet business?I was traveling in Europe, I think it was 1990, and Jim Henson passed away. He was such a big part of my childhood. And I was like, “Well, that’s exactly what I want to do.” I was already kind of a puppet maker and an actor. So I kind of combined it all.For many people online, this is their introduction to your show. What should they know?It’s wild. Fifty-two percent of our audience on TikTok is American. “Nanalan’” is short for Nana Land, which is what I called my nana’s backyard. It’s about a little girl in that backyard. Mom drops Mona off at her nana’s everyday and goes to work, just like a lot of people’s situations. We were so lucky to do it without scripts, improvised.When did the show end?In 1999, we made the original set of three-minute shorts. We did that again in, I think, 2000. In 2003, we made a bunch of half-hour episodes, and that was it.Jason Hopley, left, and Jamie Shannon, the creators of “Nanalan’,” film a scene featuring the puppets Nana and Mona.via Jamie ShannonUntil social media discovered “Nanalan’.”We had a huge viral breakout in 2016 as well. Somebody did this hilarious thing. In one of the three-minute episodes, Mona’s describing the garden to Russell: “There’s a cooshie and a peepo.” Someone put the words up on the screen, just the silly words and then it went crazy on Tumblr. It became one of these things where people were like, “Try not to laugh.”Sorry — a peepo?A pea pod. I’m trying to imitate a kid imitating what a parent told them, but they don’t quite remember the word.Why do you think TikTok has embraced Mona?The world is so, so difficult and scary right now, and the show’s very comforting. Everything looks soft. There’s no special effects. It heralds to what I think people want to see, which is just something that’s real and authentic in the, you know, fake, fake, fake world. Everything’s A.I., and people don’t know what’s real.

      @nanalanofficial Replying to @Brooke backyard dance party #nanalan #dance #puppets #deli #delidancechallenge ♬ original sound – BREANNA🩷 Mona recently joined Cameo, a platform that allows celebrities to send video messages to fans for a fee. What’s that like?I was trying to join Cameo so long ago, and I guess they weren’t accepting puppets. It’s great, I love it. It’s like four or five videos a day. Touching stuff, too. People say, “Grandma died, can you …?” So I do a lot of pep talks. More

    • 125 Shares99 Views

      in Theater

      Tales That Crackle With Vitality, With or Without a Puppeteer

      by

      La MaMa Puppet Festival and other stage works this fall highlight the power of storytelling through puppetry.In a crisp white gallery space on Great Jones Street, in Manhattan’s East Village, a large wooden box contains a meticulous mise-en-scène: a midcentury roadside motel room constructed at puppet scale, which means it’s half of human scale. Standing on a step built into the outside of the box, spectators can gaze down into the installation, a time-capsule environment called “Motel,” by the master puppet artist Dan Hurlin.It has just one puppet inside — a motionless woman in an armchair in the corner, dressed with almost ostentatious modesty, one dark strand of hair hanging loose from her ponytail, a crucifix dangling from the chain around her neck. On the tabletop beside her, the key to Room 15 lies next to an envelope spilling $20 bills. On one of the double beds, the rust-orange spread is rumpled; outside the door to the bathroom, there is water in the sink. And on the desk, near the room phone and a stamped envelope, a letter is balled up.“Motel,” by the master puppet artist Dan Hurlin, freezes an anonymous American moment. It can be viewed at La MaMa Galleria through Nov. 18.Zach HymanOrdinarily, nothing seems more lifeless than a puppet without a puppeteer. But in freezing an anonymous American moment from a decade that might as easily be the 1970s as the 2020s, “Motel” absolutely crackles with an intriguing, unsettling vitality.The installation, on view through Nov. 12 at La MaMa Galleria, is a standout at this year’s La MaMa Puppet Festival — for the fastidious detail of Hurlin’s motel-room re-creation (wall-mounted bottle opener; wood-grain-patterned paneling; lampshade gone cockeyed; Bible, of course) but also because it poses a challenge beyond puppetry’s usual ask that we conspire in the illusion. Hurlin and his sound designer, the superb Dan Moses Schreier, are inviting us to take in their clues and envision a story as well.From the clock radio on the bedside stand, we hear intermittent voices giving and eliciting testimony, but they are from different nation-rocking scandals: Watergate and the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol. What decade is the puppet woman stuck in? Is she in danger or distress? Perhaps on the run? And why does her prim, princess-sleeved dress seem from a different wardrobe than the clothes hanging up?Dogs bark, crickets chirp, cars zoom past — all in Schreier’s subtle soundscape — and we peer ever more closely at the drab little room, imagining what trouble might have brought her here, and what all might be going on out there.***Over at La MaMa proper, on nearby East Fourth Street, my favorite festival performance of last weekend was Tom Lee’s mesmerizing “Sounding the Resonant Path,” upstairs at the Ellen Stewart Theater. (Its brief run has ended, I regret to say.)The principal character is a puppet called the Woodcutter. Entering with an ax slung over one plaid-shirted shoulder, he walks slowly and deliberately along a curving wooden track, ostensibly alone. Never mind the puppeteer (Lee) seated just behind him, dressed in black and scooting along on a small, wheeled box. That is part of the Japanese kuruma ningyo style, a relative of bunraku.This charming, funny Woodcutter fells trees to carve and shape; in his studio, we see him transform blocks of wood into art. (Eventually, we also see him carrying an actual flaming torch, which is one way of getting us to worry about a puppet’s mortality, even if that is not the point.)Solitary and self-sufficient, the Woodcutter is possessed of the ineffable quality — a kind of projectability — that can make puppets profound and delicate vessels for embodying human vulnerability. His is the microcosmic life at the center of the show’s macrocosmic evocations.Because what “Sounding the Resonant Path” sets out to do is briefly, bountifully recap all of our planetary history. Its inspiration is the August 1977 launch of the Voyager 2 space probe, which carried the golden record of images, speech and music meant to explain Earth to any extraterrestrial life.Maria Camia’s ambitious musical, “The Healing Shipment,” features extraterrestrial puppets whose torsos frame the faces of the puppeteers inside. Richard TermineThis show’s version includes minimal speech but many intricate projections (by Chris Carcione) and shadow puppets (by Linda Wingerter), as well as live music (by Ralph Samuelson, Perry Yung, Julian Kytasty and Yukio Tsuji) whose bandura, drums and haunting shakuhachi flute reach in and grab you by the soul. To mimic exquisitely the deep, shivery sound of rushing water, the show uses the “Rain Making Machine,” a kinetic artwork by La MaMa’s longtime resident set designer Jun Maeda, who died of Covid in April 2020 and to whom the production is dedicated.The cavernous Ellen Stewart Theater is an excellent space for contemplating vastness — of space, of time — but Lee and his Woodcutter do it especially affectingly, under an impossibly huge, star-pricked sky. (Lighting is by Federico Restrepo.) There is, at show’s end, a clear and lingering consciousness of being minuscule in the universe, and terribly, beautifully human.***Puppet-wise, New York is having a strong fall. Up at City Center, in Manhattan Theater Club’s production of Qui Nguyen’s “Poor Yella Rednecks,” winsome child-size puppets (by David Valentine) play a principal character named Little Man — more than one being necessary to pull off a comic action sequence in particular.Later this month, at St. Ann’s Warehouse in Brooklyn, the venerable Handspring Puppet Company — known for “War Horse” and Little Amal — is slated to return with a puppet adaptation of J.M. Coetzee’s novel “Life & Times of Michael K.”And there is the rest of the La MaMa festival, part of the point of which is to nurture puppet artists at different stages of their careers.Last weekend I saw two other shows there whose runs have already ended. One was an ambitious puppet musical, Maria Camia’s “The Healing Shipment,” whose puppet design was a lot of fun: humans with Smurf-blue skin and shocking white hair; extraterrestrials whose bright yellow torsos framed the faces of the puppeteers inside. The plot, though — involving potato spaceships and intergenerational time travel — was overly complicated and insufficiently interesting. The other was Charlotte Lily Gaspard’s “Mia M.I.A.,” a work-in-progress shadow-puppet musical with some very clever 3-D puppets. Coincidentally, it also had a space-travel theme, making the shows three for three on that.Of all the elements for puppet pieces to have in common — outer space, really? Makes a person want to hunker down in some retro motel room and listen to the radio.La MaMa Puppet FestivalThrough Nov. 18 at La MaMa and La MaMa Galleria, Manhattan; lamama.org. More

    • 150 Shares199 Views

      in Theater

      Hundreds of Shadow Puppets Were Stolen. A Bystander Helped Crack the Case.

      by

      Many of the puppets were still missing, however, after the theft of a U-haul truck in San Francisco holding props for the critically acclaimed Persian epic “Song of the North.” It was unclear if the show would go on.Inside the U-Haul were nearly 500 handmade shadow puppets and dozens of masks, costumes and backdrops — the culmination of three years of painstaking labor, which, on Sunday evening, came to life in a balletic performance before a crowd of hundreds at a theater in San Francisco.On Monday morning, the puppeteers awoke to find the truck gone.At first, they hoped the truck, parked at a Comfort Inn in the city’s northeast, had been mistakenly towed, said Hamid Rahmanian, 55, an Iranian American artist and the creator of the show “Song of the North,” an adaptation of the Persian poet Ferdowsi’s 10th-century epic “Shahnameh” that combines shadow puppetry, animation and music.But when hotel employees reviewed the security camera footage, it quickly became clear that the truck had been stolen. “My face dropped — my hands became cold,” Rahmanian said. Then, more than 48 hours later, on Wednesday morning, he received a call: A resident had spotted the truck in the city’s west, and notified the police. Rahmanian rushed to the scene to find years of careful work strewn about the truck in a “shamble.”The thieves appeared to have rifled through the boxes inside the truck, throwing some things away, and destroying others, he said, noting that while the full scale of the damage was unclear, at least 200 puppets were missing, and all of the costumes were gone.The next stop on the show’s global tour was Seattle, where a performance was scheduled for Friday. It was unclear whether the show would go on.The San Francisco Police Department said that it had received a call Wednesday morning from a resident in Richmond, northeast of San Francisco, about a “possible recovered stolen vehicle.”The police confirmed it was the same U-Haul and were investigating. No arrests had been made. The department did not offer more information about the contents of the security camera footage.Rahmanian, who moved from Iran to New York three decades ago to pursue a career in graphic design, said he had created “Song of the North” over several years in an endeavor to adapt the “Shahnameh,” or “Book of Kings,” for a Western audience. “There is a misrepresentation of Iranian culture, and everything is very much politicized,” he said. “Iran is like a symphony. But we only hear one note.”His work has garnered glowing reviews and audiences in places including China, Poland and Iowa. The puppet performances can take years to lay out in storyboards and to design and choreograph, Rahmanian said, noting that “Song of the North” involves 352 frames and an ensemble of nine people whose actions must be precise to the inch. For the 83-minute duration of the show, he added, “they work like a Swiss watch.”The laborious, costly work has not been very lucrative, he said, noting that he preferred to keep ticket prices affordable so that families could attend the shows. “There is no sane person” who would do this kind of work, he said. “The math doesn’t work.” In part, that is why he and his team decided to rent their own U-Haul instead of hiring outside contractors, he added, saying, “We thought we’re going to save a little bit of money.”The puppets don’t “have any value for these thieves,” their creator, Hamid Rahmanian, said through tears.Richard Termine Just after 8:30 p.m. on Sunday, he and his team loaded their wares into the truck, which was parked near the Fort Mason Center for Arts and Culture, where Sunday’s show was held. They drove it less than a mile to the Comfort Inn, where they arrived at 9:13 p.m., Rahmanian said, noting he had felt anxious, given San Francisco’s reputation for crime, but told himself it was going to be fine in a parking lot.The next morning, the truck had disappeared.U-Haul did not immediately respond to requests for comment on Tuesday evening, but Rahmanian said that after the truck was stolen, the company had told him that it was not fitted with a GPS device and that it could not be located. Choice Hotels, which manages the Comfort Inn, also did not immediately respond to requests for comment.Abbas Milani, a professor of Iranian studies at Stanford University, said in an email that Rahmanian’s work offered an “antidote to the dangerous delusions of stereotypes” through an empathetic portrayal of Iranian culture. Rahmanian’s adaptations of the Shanameh, he added, “offered a rich tapestry of the joyous, even epicurean culture of Iran.”Rahmanian said he was particularly buoyed on Sunday evening, as the audience lingered in the lobby to discuss the show — which begins with a warrior imploring two armies to stop fighting. Two of the enemies then fall in love, he said, noting that “Song of the North” was ultimately a tale of forgiveness.It felt “cosmic,” he added, to wake up the next morning to find that even art didn’t appear to be safe from the ugliness of the world. “It doesn’t have any value for these thieves,” he said through tears on Tuesday evening, before the truck was located. “They’re going to open it up and realize, oh my god, it’s just puppets.”On Tuesday, Rahmanian said he would not press charges against those who stole the truck. He added, “I forgive you.” More

    • 100 Shares149 Views

      in Theater

      At Edinburgh Fringe, Small Shows With Big Ambitions

      by

      This year, the stronger productions in the open-to-all event were on a par with many in the more prestigious, curated Edinburgh International Festival.Shortly after I arrived in Edinburgh for this year’s festival, I had lunch with a Scottish friend and her young son. The boy was enthralled by the colorful posters plastered all over the city advertising upcoming shows in the Fringe, the scrappy sidebar to the highbrow Edinburgh International Festival. This year, the Fringe — which runs through Aug. 28 — comprises over 3,000 shows, and many posters featured eye-catchingly silly titles. My friend’s son was particularly amused by “Sex Job,” “My Sleepybum” and “A Shark Ate My Penis.” His delighted guffaws were a fitting prelude to my stint in Edinburgh.There was plenty of laughter at “Hello Kitty Must Die,” a musical inspired by Angela Choi’s cult novel of the same title. In this zippy farce, Sami Ma plays Fiona Yu, a Chinese American lawyer fed up with being fetishized by white people and shouldering the unrealistic expectations of her out-of-touch parents. She reconnects with a mercurial childhood friend, Sean (Lennox T. Duong), and they embark on a ludicrous killing spree reminiscent of the movie “Heathers,” with musical numbers including a hymn to a silicone dildo.The all-female cast is hugely talented, and their portrayals of obnoxious men were particularly striking for their impressively rendered physicality, whether the swaggering gait of a self-styled Lothario, the slumped posture of a feckless gamer, or the pompously militaristic bearing of the protagonist’s father.“Hello Kitty Must Die,” is another adaptation of a novel, with musical numbers and a standout all-female cast.Justine BarbinElsewhere, two dance productions explored somber subject matter with impressive subtlety. “Woodhill,” by the activist theater company LUNG, examines the failings of a real British prison where a conspicuously high number of inmates have died by suicide. The story is told in a series of fragmentary voice-overs — interviews with lawyers, prison staff and bereaved relatives — while performers act out the relatives’ grief through dance, set to thumping electronic beats and strobe lighting. It’s a powerful spectacle, and the message — that Britain’s prisons need urgent reform — hits home.“Party Scene,” by the Dublin troupe, THISISPOPBABY, has a similar aesthetic. It depicts four gay Irishmen who are active in the “chemsex” scene, in which people hook up for sex under the influence of methamphetamines. The men’s choreographed dancing is pointedly joyless in its zombified roboticism; for all their synchronicity, they seem lonely and abstracted. The show evokes the existential bleakness of a comedown, of morning-after remorse and shame. And yet it doesn’t lapse into preachiness: The nightclub atmospherics are sufficiently appealing, in themselves, to suggest good times. (On the way out I overheard a theatregoer say to his friend: “I felt like it made me want to do chemsex …”)From left: Liam Bixby, Anderson de Souza, Carl Harrison and Matthew Morris in “Party Scene.”Olga KuzmenkoFor budgetary and logistical reasons, many Fringe shows are relatively small productions, and there are always many for solo performers. One of these is “The Insider,” by the Danish company Teater Katapult, in which Christoffer Hvidberg Ronje plays a lawyer implicated in a huge tax fraud. We find him in a transparent interrogation cell, weighing up whether to spill the beans in return for a reduced sentence. He does lots of sweating, writhing and shaking while oscillating between hubris and remorse. The protagonist’s back story provides some intriguing psychodrama — an obsession with transcending his modest provincial origins led him to embrace a ruthless social Darwinism — his uncomplicated moral abjectness makes for a one-dimensional portrait. It’s an open-and-shut case, in every sense.In another one-man-show, “The Ballad of Truman Capote,” Patrick Moys plays the renowned American author as he prepares to host a masked ball in 1966. Written by the Scottish novelist Andrew O’Hagan, the play is a maudlin monologue in which Capote muses gnomically on his childhood and career. (“Being published is not like being loved”; “My creative life is an unmade bed.”) The problem is not the lack of action per se, but the monotonous timbre of the reminiscences: Capote’s elliptical inwardness makes for dull company.Holding the audience’s attention is a perennial challenge with a single actor onstage. In a smart revival of Cyriel Buysse’s Flemish classic, “The Van Paemel Family” by the Antwerp troupe SKaGeN, the actor Valentijn Dhaenens sidesteps this difficulty by playing all the play’s roles. He takes three of the 13 characters in the flesh, and the rest appear in the form of prerecorded scenes digitally projected onto a screen.The story revolves around a farmer who falls out with his two sons after they side with striking farmworkers during a period of social unrest. Mr. van Paemel is slavishly loyal to the landowner for whom they all work, and believes organized labor is a scourge. Even when he and his family are driven off their farm by rent hikes, and his daughter is cruelly taken advantage of by the landowner’s son, he prefers to maintain his beef with his sons, rather than focus on those responsible for his plight.There was something uncanny about seeing the real-life Dhaenens interact with his vaguely spectral digitized selves. This eerie visual texture, neatly complemented by the doleful tones of an accordion, made for a memorably unique aesthetic. The play dates from 1903, but the story’s central character is a timeless archetype: The embattled patriarch who clings stubbornly to every reactionary shibboleth even as he gets shafted from all directions.The standout Fringe show was Lara Foot’s stylish adaptation of “The Life and Times of Michael K.,” J.M. Coetzee’s Booker Prize-winning 1983 novel about the struggles of a poor man during a fictional civil war in South Africa. The play is a collaboration with Handspring Puppet Company, best known for its work on “War Horse”, and Michael K. and his elderly mother are represented by puppets that are manipulated and voiced by onstage performers.The interplay between puppets and actors made “J.M. Coetzee’s The Life and Times of Michael K.” a Fringe standout.Fiona MacPhersonMichael K. is a borderline simpleton, kindhearted and determined, but naïve; something about the puppet’s plaintive expression and scrawny frame evokes a pathos that fits the story perfectly. Yet this somewhat desolate tale is mitigated by moments of humor, such as when the famished Michael comes unstuck trying to eat a sandwich. Being a puppet, he can’t actually do it, so the three men controlling him hungrily take a bite each, on his behalf.People think of the Fringe, which is open to anyone who can pay the accreditation fee, as defined more by quantity than quality. Yet the stronger Fringe shows were pretty much on a par — in intelligence, aesthetic ambition and technical execution — with several of the productions I saw at the more prestigious, curated International Festival. The difference was mainly a question of scale.For all its bustling, chaotic energy and anything-goes philosophy, the Fringe’s organization was impressively slick, although there was, inevitably, the occasional blip. My heart went out to the cast of “Exile for Two Violins,” whose performance at the French Institute was marred by noise pollution from a street party next to the venue, complete with a P.A. system blasting pop music. This delicate meditation on the life and work of the Hungarian composer Bela Bartok could probably have done without the accompaniment of loud rhythmic clapping, periodic cheers and whistles, and the booming strains of the White Stripes’ garage rock anthem, “Seven Nation Army.” The performers plowed on — heroes, one and all.Edinburgh Festival FringeThrough Aug. 28 at various venues in Edinburgh; edfringe.com. More