Muppetfreak
Well-Known Member
- Joined
- Nov 19, 2002
- Messages
- 381
- Reaction score
- 3
I thought I would start a little chat about this. Have you ever seen, or been in, a production with excellent puppetry, but that was just perfectly aweful?
Here is my story: In college, they announced a play with puppetry elements. I volunteered as a puppet builder and puppeteer. I ended up playing a shadow puppet baby fawn who had her own little starring scene, a puppet essentially made out of a lightning gel that we projected using a transparency projecter and a baby lion cub that was an actual physical puppet. I was on stage for the Lion cub bit and had to interact with a small child as the puppet who was a bit annoying. The puppets were visually amazin, BUT....
This aforementioned play was Shakuntala, an ancient sanscrit Indian play. That is all well and good and while the customs and puppets were gorgeous, the plot read like it had been hacked together by monkeys. They tried to splice like 7 different translations together and combine characters and the result made no sense at all.
Even worse, i went to school in the middle of central pennsylvania, so the entire cast was white except for this one random Indian girl we found who couldn't speak english (which was a problem because the play was in english).
It was a travesty.
Hill
Here is my story: In college, they announced a play with puppetry elements. I volunteered as a puppet builder and puppeteer. I ended up playing a shadow puppet baby fawn who had her own little starring scene, a puppet essentially made out of a lightning gel that we projected using a transparency projecter and a baby lion cub that was an actual physical puppet. I was on stage for the Lion cub bit and had to interact with a small child as the puppet who was a bit annoying. The puppets were visually amazin, BUT....
This aforementioned play was Shakuntala, an ancient sanscrit Indian play. That is all well and good and while the customs and puppets were gorgeous, the plot read like it had been hacked together by monkeys. They tried to splice like 7 different translations together and combine characters and the result made no sense at all.
Even worse, i went to school in the middle of central pennsylvania, so the entire cast was white except for this one random Indian girl we found who couldn't speak english (which was a problem because the play was in english).
It was a travesty.
Hill