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LOS ANGELES TIMES—THEATER REVIEW
Old Trout Puppet Workshop's 'Famous Puppet Death Scenes'
The Canadian group visits Orange County with a lively bunch of puppets contemplating mortality.
By David Ng, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer
Mar 20, 2008
(link to original story)
Puppets don't bleed. At least not real blood. This anatomical axiom means the violence in "Famous Puppet Death Scenes" is safe enough for children -- with some reservations.
Children will no doubt find a lot to enjoy in this darkly comic play, which ends its three-night engagement this evening at the Samueli Theater at the Orange County Performing Artscenter. But adults will probably enjoy it even more. Beneath the amusing puppet antics churns a mature existentialism: Why do we die? Is it necessary? What is eternity? You might say this is a play that prepares you for that doctorate in puppet metaphysics that you've always wanted. An intellectual puppet show? Yes, but don't let that scare you away. "Famous Puppet Death Scenes" knows how to mask its bevy of ideas in ways that are visually stunning and endlessly entertaining.
Produced by the Alberta, Canada-based Old Trout Puppet Workshop, the play is neatly divided into 22 "scenes," each an excerpt from a notable puppet-theater classic. Of course, none of these classics really exists -- the show is a faux anthology that culls from an imagined theatrical canon. For example, in an episode called "The Feverish Heart by Nordo Frot: Act 1, Scene 3," an unsuspecting hand puppet falls victim to a giant fist that comes crashing down from out of nowhere onto its cute little head.
The show moves swiftly from one visual punch line to another. Two German puppets must choose between doors labeled "Ja" and "Nein" as part of a diabolical game show in "Das Bipsy und Mumu Puppenspiel by Freulicher Friedrich: Episode 43 'Bipsy's Mistake.' " (The segment titles alone are priceless.) Later, an innocent street urchin turns the tables on his bloodthirsty mugger in "The Beast of Muggditch Lane by August Stainbrook: Act 1, Scene 1."
Performed almost entirely in a specially constructed wooden proscenium, "Famous Puppet Death Scenes" is a puppet show that interrogates the artifice of puppetry, which is to say that it's a self-reflexive play. In one brilliantly inventive scene, a pair of marionette legs dangling from the ceiling suggests a recent suicide. But we soon learn through a macabre series of events that things are hardly what they seem and that fooling the viewer is an important, if not fundamental, part of puppetry.
The play's most memorable scenes aren't necessarily the goriest or most violent, but those that quietly ponder what it means to be a puppet as well as the person behind it who gives it life. In a scene titled "The Cruel Sea by Thorvik Skarbarg: Hour 14," the corpse of an old mariner slowly decomposes before our eyes, each body part floating away to reveal the wooden core beneath the costume and paint. This simple tableau provides a chilling X-ray into the heart of puppetry. The art form, it seems to say, consists merely of inanimate objects brought together by dexterous hands and the audience's willingness to suspend disbelief.
Directed by Tim Sutherland, "Famous Puppet Death Scenes" provides so much visual stimulus that it's easy to simply sit back and marvel. The democratic assembly of puppets includes wooden creations of all shapes and sizes. Much of the magic should be credited to the four puppeteers who perform the show -- Peter Balkwill, Mitchell Craib, Pityu Kenderes and Judd Palmer.
But the play's real achievement isn't visual but rather philosophical and even epistemological in nature. These puppets think deeply about death and the afterlife. They ponder, ruminate and even despair about the unknowable universe.
Odd as it may sound, these puppets often seem more recognizably human than the humans they are meant to imitate.
david.ng@latimes.com
CBC NEWS—REVIEW
Lethally funny
The Old Trout Puppet Workshop laughs in the face of death
By Martin Morrow
October 24, 2007
(link to original story)
They’re killing puppets at Toronto’s Young Centre this week. “They” are Calgary’s Old Trout Puppet Workshop, and their lovingly carved wooden characters are meeting the Reaper in all kinds of grisly ways: they’re being hanged, shot, drowned or disemboweled, ravaged by a cruel sea, dismembered by a wicked wind or pummeled by what appears to be the Fist of Fate.
Famous Puppet Death Scenes, making its Toronto debut as part of the Old Trouts’ current U.S.-Canada tour, is a delightfully macabre little show that simultaneously riffs on mortality and spoofs theatrical genres. In the space of 90 minutes, it features no less than 22 morbid vignettes from such imaginary puppet classics as The Feverish Heart, a melodrama by one Nordo Frot (whose dumpy little hero is imperiled by the aforesaid Fist); Das Bipsy und Mumu Puppenspiel, a cheerfully violent German children’s show that would give Itchy & Scratchy a run for their money; and The Cruel Sea by Thorvik Skarsbarg, a glacially paced 14-hour Norwegian play in a style aptly known as “Theatre of the Insufferable.” Among the 50-odd puppets slain in this medley of bizarre works: an opera-singing priest and his monkey, a frustrated lover, a barn full of Fisher-Price farm animals, a lugubrious whale and a gaggle of aliens that look like Johnny Depp.
It’s a veritable feast of puppet annihilation, made gruesomely delicious by the Old Trouts’ fertile imaginations. For the uninitiated, it’s also a perfect introduction to these splendidly freaky puppet masters, who combine a passion for the baroque and surreal with a visual esthetic poised somewhere between Hieronymus Bosch and Edward Gorey. Not to mention a penchant for wearing their puppets on their heads.
Their latest and most popular work to date, Death Scenes has been gathering plaudits since it premiered to sold-out houses at Vancouver’s PuSh International Theatre Festival last year. Having already toured across Western Canada and to Ottawa’s Magnetic North fest, it’s on the road again this season, playing a string of gigs in the eastern U.S. as well as a handful of Canadian dates.
“It seems to be our breakout show, insofar as getting into the States,” says Judd Palmer, a company co-founder and one of the production’s creator-performers. “I guess people want to see puppets dying.”
Americans are finally getting a taste of what Canadian theatregoers — and especially Calgarians — have been savouring since 2000. That was the year the Trouts made their critically acclaimed debut with The Unlikely Birth of Istvan, an obscure life-cycle allegory that involved murder, nudity and the slaughter of a pig — and still managed to be witty and charming. Since then, the troupe has turned out a succession of equally unlikely adult puppet shows, from a wordless version of the medieval Beowulf poem to a biography of 19th-century French chef Antonin Carême. For family audiences, they’ve also brought their skewed sensibilities to an original fantasy called The Tooth Fairy and traditional favourites like Pinocchio.
Palmer says the idea for Death Scenes came in 2004 when the Trouts unveiled their award-winning version of Pinocchio — a dark, anti-Disney adaptation in which the boy-puppet’s “conscience,” the annoying talking cricket, is smashed to death with a hammer, as in the original Carlo Collodi novel.
“There we were, murdering the cricket onstage, and the audience ran the gamut of emotions,” Palmer says. “You could hear the first gasp of, ‘Oh my God, can they really be doing that?’ Then they started to laugh. We realized there was something absurdly compact about the act of a puppet dying; it can be funny, tragic, offensive and absurd, all in one blow of the hammer.”
Death Scenes purports to be a compilation of such memorable moments from the world’s greatest puppet plays, as collected and introduced by an elderly puppet thespian named Nathanial Tweak. A dry old stick (quite literally) with a mad-professor’s shock of white hair and a fondness for rhetorical excess, Tweak hosts this puppet Ars moriendi as a lead-up to his own tour de force, a promised death scene to outdo all the others. “He’s been practicing it since time immemorial,” says Palmer, who provides Tweak’s voice, “and once he’s prepped us with this whole notion of the towering achievements of great puppet art, he’s going to cap it all off.”
The show is an excuse for the Trouts to indulge their love of the arcane by wholly inventing a canon of supposed puppet masterpieces. Palmer says they had a great time dreaming up what the classic plays might be. “The inspiration came from everywhere. You know, you’re watching Barbarella and you suddenly think, ‘Oh my God, there has to be some kind of famous puppet science fiction movie from the ‘60s.’ Or you think, ‘What would a German children’s television puppet show look like, viewed drunk in a Düsseldorf hotel late at night?’”
It also allowed the Trouts to dabble in — and send up — different theatrical styles, from the Victorian morality tale to the bleak, Sean O’Casey-type Irish domestic drama to the kind of excruciatingly slow and uneventful spectacle usually identified with avant-garde director Robert Wilson. “It’s one thing to do an existentialist, 14-hour-long piece of experimental theatre with humans,” Palmer says, “but when you do it with puppets, it makes its absurdity self-evident.”
The production is directed by Tim Sutherland and performed by original Trouts Palmer, Peter Balkwill and Pityu Kenderes, along with newcomer Mitchell Craib. The lineup has changed a few times since 1999, when a 27-year-old Palmer and a bunch of his puppet-loving friends founded the troupe while living collectively on his grandfather’s ranch south of the city.
As teenagers, Palmer and his pals had all been afflicted with, in his words, “this classic Calgary self-loathing,” and had scattered elsewhere — Palmer himself headed to Toronto to work as a television puppeteer. But with Y2K looming, it seemed a good time to get their priorities straight. “Everyone was turning to this introspective place, thinking, ‘What do I really value in this world? Wouldn’t I rather be amongst my greatest friends?’” Palmer recalls. “The ranch suddenly illuminated itself to us all as being an aspect of Alberta that we really did love, that was part of us.”
Their rural retreat turned out to be a kind of puppeteers’ Big Pink where, between chopping wood and carrying water, their creative energies flowed. It was there that they perfected their signature mask puppet, worn on the puppeteer’s head and face. And it’s there that they conceived and built Istvan, performing it first for an audience of bemused local Hutterites before taking it to Calgary’s High Performance Rodeo. Unlike the Hutterites, audiences there were accustomed to innovative puppetry, thanks largely to native son Ronnie Burkett; nonetheless, they were blown away.
The Trouts eventually abandoned their neo-hippie experiment on the ranch and moved back to the city. “We lost our minds down there, living together in a coal-heated shack,” Palmer admits. “You can only handle so much of the sound of another guy chewing his granola.” New owners have recently bought the building housing their Calgary studio, forcing them to pull up stakes again.
Palmer says they’re taking advantage of the situation by relocating temporarily to Guanajuato, Mexico, after this tour. There, they’ll spend several months creating their next ambitious puppet work, based on the legend of Don Juan. “We’ll lodge ourselves in some grand, cheap hacienda,” he says. “It’s a beautiful opportunity to return to the puppet-making adventure we began with.”
Famous Puppet Death Scenes plays Toronto Oct. 24 to 27. Other upcoming Canadian dates include Whistler, B.C., from Jan. 3, 2008, to Feb. 2, 2008, Kelowna, B.C., from Feb. 3 to Feb. 9 and Edmonton from Feb. 12 to March 2.
Martin Morrow writes about the arts for CBCNews.ca.
NOW TORONTO MAGAZINE—REVIEW
This Old Trout leaps high
by Jon Kaplan
October, 25, 2007
If clowns of terror Mump and Smoot -- we miss them dearly -- were to do a puppet show, the result would look a lot like Famous Puppet Death Scenes, playing only until Saturday at the Young Centre.
Presented by Calgary's Old Trout Puppet Workshop, the piece is, on the surface, the work of philosophical narrrator (and puppet) Nathanial Tweak, an old-timer who collected the episodes from around the world to remind us of the imminence of death in our lives and suggest the importance of confronting our own mortality.
Yeah, it sound like a therapy session, but the show isn't the sort of lifestyle seminar you'd go to on a weekend retreat. It's often very funny and dark, with some surprisingly tender moments to offset the laughter.
In 20-plus brief scenes, Tweak provides a survey of shows by the likes of Samuel Groanswallow, Thorvik Skarsbarg and the never-say-die Nordo Frot, whose The Feverish Heart makes no fewer than four appearances during the 80-minute show.
Don't look these writers up in a dictionary of puppet playwrights. They're the brainchildren of the Old Trout collective -- Peter Balkwill, Mitchell Craib, Pityu Kenderes and Judd Palmer, all dressed in funereal black -- the sometimes visible manipulators who work the puppets, which are a combination of rod puppets, hand puppets, heads and torsos.
Working with director Tim Sutherland, the creators are endlessly inventive in the stories they tell and the kinds of puppets they use. One of my faves is the German-language Das Bipsy Und Mumu Puppenspiel, featuring a pair of brightly coloured, single-eyed cones with tiny hands and a tuft of hair. Their tale, a show for children (as if), is a take on the classic Lady And The Tiger story.
Yet we're also treated to the sad ending of The Last Whale, and the touching, visually impressive King Jeff The Magnificent, in which the title character take an unusual, celestrial trip on New Year's Eve.
Oh, yes, and there's that series of Frot pieces, featuring a bulbous-headed puppet who can't seem to escape a malicious fist intent on squashing him. You know that the episodes are drawn from a mammoth work when you get to Act 19, Scene 78; thankfully we're only treated to a few select moments.
Not every scene in the show works, but they're all so short that if one doesn't succeed you're quickly on to another.
The company is masterful at creating expressiveness in inanimate objects, partly through how they're sculpted but also through their movements and the use of emotionally resonant soundscapes.
Not only do they use the three "stage" areas but bring out trunks, oversized books and other settings filled with magical surprises.
Famous Puppet Death Scenes plays only until Saturday at the Young Centre. See Continuing in theatre listings for details.
TORONTO STAR — REVIEW
Laugh, cry . . . and watch 22 doomed puppets die
BY RICHARD OUZOUNIAN, THEATRE CRITIC
October 24, 2007
Famous Puppet Death Scenes
4 STARS (out of 4)
Written and performed by The Old Trout Puppet Workshop. Until Oct. 27 at the Young Centre for the Performing Arts, 55 Mill St. 416-866-8666
In The Hostage, Brendan Behan once asked "Oh death, where is thy sting-a-ling-a-ling, or grave thy victory?"
I wonder what he would have thought about Famous Puppet Death Scenes, which opened last night at the Young Centre for the Performing Arts, because its subject is death, its sting-a-ling-a-ling is considerable and yet, somehow, the grave still claims its victory at the end.
All of this is by way of saying that this work presented by The Old Trout Puppet Workshop is shockingly funny, blissfully irreverent, definitely outrageous and yet somehow truly touching.
The framework is seemingly simple, yet subterraneanly baroque. We are supposedly witnessing 22 of the most famous "puppet death scenes" in history. Since the entire piece takes just 80 minutes to perform, you have some idea of the brevity of the scenes involved.
Indeed, some of them are almost afterthoughts: blink and you miss them.
But enough of them have satirical heft and stylistic skill to allow you to admire them both as conception and execution.
The Trouts (Peter Balkwill, Mitchell Crab, Pityu Kenderes and Judd Palmer, with Tim Sutherland directing) are not like any puppet ensemble you may have ever seen.
They have a flair for operatic parody, linguistic games and classical allusions that give these vignettes some intellectual zing, but yet they never forget their origins in the Punch and Judy shows of ancient puppetry.
And ultimately, they realize when all is said and done, nothing is as funny as watching one character get bashed on the head by another.
There are sequences with names like Das Bipsy und Mumu Puppenspiel or Funeral Ritual of the Sugawara Denju, which have to be seen for their sheer anarchic humour to be appreciated.
But then, when you are least expecting it, comes The Perfect Death Scene, in which these masters shove our laughter back in our throats, defy the odds and offer us a truly moving meditation on what it means to die.
If the best art is unique and the unique is indescribable, then let my feeble words do what they can to convince you see The Old Trout Puppet Workshop and their masterful Famous Puppet Death Scenes in action.
It's only here through Saturday at the Young Centre for the Performing Arts and – believe me – you'll be sorry if you miss it.
BOSTON GLOBE—STAGE REVIEW
Puppet deaths brim with lively wit
By Terry Byrne, Globe Correspondent | October 20, 2007
Alien puppets with Johnny Depp faces, a detailed home interior complete with photos hanging on the wall, an adventure on the high seas - Old Trout Puppet Workshop has it all in the terrifically twisted "Famous Puppet Death Scenes," which plays through tonight at the Institute of Contemporary Art.
Led by our host, a spindly wooden puppet named Nathaniel Tweak, more than a dozen puppets gamely reenact 22 death scenes that Tweak tells us are culled from the greatest moments in puppet theater history. The scenes, which actually spring from the imaginations of the Calgary-based puppet troupe, range from the sublime, Edward Gorey-influenced "The Ballad of Edward Grue," in which Edward has the unfortunate habit of dressing up as a deer (during hunting season), to the absurd "Bipsy's Mistake," a bizarre take on a German children's TV educational show (à la "Teletubbies"), in which making the wrong choice has deadly consequences.
Old Trout's decidedly quirky approach to puppetry is both dramatically engaging and visually stunning. Although most of the action happens on a traditional puppet stage with curtains, as well as two smaller side stages, the action also spills out onto the broader stage when various puppeteers (including Peter Balkwill, Mitchell Craib, Pityu Kenderes and Judd Palmer) wheel out other puppet props. In addition to a wonderfully adaptive trunk that opens up to a stormy sea for "How the Spirit Entered Me" and a pop-up book whose changing perspective takes us closer and closer to a scene of domestic violence ("Never Say It Again"), there's also a puppet-free toy barnyard right out of Fisher-Price, which becomes a scene of devastation with Palmer, fully visible, acting out the sounds of the toy players.
The carved puppets, with their detailed beauty, balance with the wonderfully weird inflatable puppets that make recurring appearances in the superbly strange "The Feverish Heart." Without any words, these puppets manage to communicate desire, fear, joy, and desperation in scenes that escalate in absurdity even as they develop the story. The long arm of Fate that returns relentlessly is reminiscent of Monty Python's classic animated sequences, as are the flying body parts in "The Forgotten Dish" and "The Cruel Sea." What makes them even more breathtaking is knowing that each part of the disintegrating puppet must be carefully pieced together so that it can be effortlessly torn apart.
Director Tim Sutherland keeps the death scenes coming quickly, even as the movement of the puppeteers (elegantly dressed in "Men in Black" suits) is choreographed with graceful precision. The snapshot stories work whether they're framed as a silent movie ("The Beast") or in a foreign language ("La Nature") with the company's sly sense of humor always rising above the bleak themes.
Cimmeron Meyer's extraordinary lighting and Mike Rinaldi's imaginative sound design, which includes flamenco music, "Star Trek" sound effects, and Mozart's "Requiem" among other wide-ranging musical selections, adds to the sense that this is much more than a simple puppet show. "Famous Puppet Death Scenes" may not be "medicine for your fears," as Tweak promises, but it is a surprisingly sensory experience.
CALGARY HERALD—THEATRE REVIEW
Death becomes these doomed puppets
Old Trouts produce a twisted treat
by BOB CLARK
It’s not often we get to laugh at mortality and feel good about it. But in the case of the show that opened Thursday at the Big Secret Theatre, you can’t help it. The Old Trout Puppet Workshop’s Famous Puppet Death Scenes is probably the funniest, wisest and most bizarrely clever show the Calgary collective has ever done — which is saying a lot, in light of the kind of wonderfully literate, inventive and twisted stuff the Old Trouts have delighted us with in the past.
In only 80 minutes, we are treated to more than two dozen instances of theatrical puppet demise, purportedly culled from some of the greatest puppet shows in history.
“The scenes have been recreated as similarly as possible to the originals,” our venerable white-haired puppet host, Nathaniel Tweak, tells us in the printed program.
“Of course, we cannot view them in the original contexts, so that must be left largely up to your imagination.”
Tweak goes on to say that he took pains to seek out the original cast members, too, only to find that some of them were “very old, and (that) many had been lost for many years.
“I scoured the world, and found them in mouldering crates, shadowed attics and ship bilges.”
The scenes in which these resurrected characters re-enact their final moments take place either in the main puppet theatre (and its flanking smaller theatres), or in front of it, on portable stages wheeled in and opened by one or two of the Old Trout puppet masters — Peter Balkwill, Don Brinsmead, Pityu Kenderes and Judd Palmer.
Among the fascinating vignettes of sudden fatality by murder, accident or suicide unfolding before our very eyes: A surreally brutal German children’s show in which two conic oneeyed gobs of goo contestants named Bipsy and Mumu must choose between doors labelled Ja and Nein; recurring segments featuring an eggshaped puppet named Nordo Frot at the mercy (in The Feverish Heart) of the long arm of implacable Fate; a string of working-class suicides that culminate in a grotesquely comic twist at the end; and a dig at cryogenic immortality, featuring four aliens with Johnny Depp faces. Not only are the puppets as boldly and uniquely conceived as ever, but the puppeteers themselves occasionally play a role that is apart from even the visible manipulation of their creations. Palmer, for example, wheels out a toy farmyard and proceeds to make the sounds of the tiny figures he moves around in the enactment of some tragedy. Moments later, the little set is laid waste by two hideous, screaming Ninja-like creatures walked in from either side by Balkwill and Kenderes.
Other highlights? It’s difficult to choose in a show that has no end of them.
How about the portable-theatre scene straight out of the 19th century, with a fez-wearing monkey and an opera-singing prelate jammed together in a boat that’s about to capsize on the mechanical waves moved back and forth beneath them by Kenderes.
In more technical ways, the show is a joy to both hear and behold.
Both the costumes by Jen Gareau and Sarah Malik, and Cimmeron Meyer’s lighting design, help bring life to the puppets and their terminal stories — as does the carefully thought-out sound design by Mike Rinaldi, whose choice of Mozart’s Requiem in the ensemble scene, for example, adds fitting poignancy to the final moments of what is a great black comedy.
And while Famous Puppet Death Scenes may not be a show for kids, it certainly has the child in all of us at heart.
BCLARK@THEHERALD.CANWEST.COM
___________
FFWD WEEKLY —THEATRE REVIEW
by JEFF KUBIK
A good death
Old Trout Puppet Workshop’s new show is hilarious, beautiful and macabre
FAMOUS PUPPET DEATH SCENES
Old Trout Puppet Workshop
DIRECTED BY Tim Sutherland
One Yellow Rabbit
Runs until March 25
Big Secret Theatre (Epcor Centre)
That we can imagine inanimate pieces of wood with a few slivers artfully removed as living creatures is beautiful and bizarre. That Calgary’s Old Trout Puppet Workshop’s latest work, Famous Puppet Death Scenes, is built entirely on the emotional resonance and comic possibilities of taking these same lives away is simply remarkable.
Laden with a devotion so intense that it can only be described as religious –realized in his own concluding presentation of The Perfect Death Scene – emaciated curator Nathaniel Tweak guides the audience through the greatest puppet death scenes culled from a canon of the Trout’s own imagining. Leaping between the comic, the tragic and the poignant, blocks of scenes are book-ended both by Tweak’s erudite musings and by scenes from The Feverish Heart by Nordo Frost, whose egg-shaped, allegorical protagonist graces the production’s posters. From a stair-climbing scene evoking Fritz Lang’s Metropolis to the horrifyingly comic disembowelling of adorable plastic creatures, the Trout’s premise allows its latest production to switch tone effortlessly and frequently.
More than a splintered collection of scenes from their fictitious canon, Famous Puppet Death Scenes is an innovative showcase of the Trout’s ever-broadening esthetic. While the stage’s setup initially suggests a familiar puppet theatre, with three small stages framed by purple curtains, under the direction of Tim Sutherland and backed by Mike Rinaldi’s varied sound design, nearly every scene is executed with a perspective so alien to the others that the nuances of the canon might be established by sight and sound alone.
A refurbished armoire wheeled to centre stage holds a forest of spindly tree limbs in The Ballad of Edward Grue; an oversized novel composed of portraits conjures the dread of the unseen in Never Say it Again; and King Jeff the Magnificent sees the audience’s perspective bent to add a cosmic, vertical dimension to the familiar, largely two-dimensional realm of the puppet stage. Already masters of their own indulgent visual style, the Trouts have expanded their repertoire to include visual tools remarkable not only for their arresting style, but for their technical innovation.
At its best, the play produces exactly what its conceit implies, with the power of a single scene suggesting a larger work. As a dying woman’s face is literally peeled of its age in Lucille Arabesque, the audience can imagine the scene as either a conclusion or a beginning – a hauntingly beautiful image that begs the audience to consider the potential at its edges. Yet even when it fails to suggest the breadth of the canon, the show’s engaging pace and artful pauses render scenes of such wit and style that the Trouts can be forgiven for crafting vignettes too succinct to fit into larger pieces. If the production suffers, it is only when the audience makes a few initial falters in trying to determine whether they are about to be made to laugh or cry.
Famous Puppet Death Scenes offers equal measures of the hilarious and the poignant, exploring the dramatic potential of carved wood and the audience’s imagination. Just as Nathaniel Tweak is driven by his limitless devotion to the idea of puppetry as theatrical communion, the Trouts’ own creation is clearly a work of love. Coupled with a dynamic premise and the occasional, wholly welcome dose of self-conscious satire, Death Scenes is a delightful example of puppet theatre too intense to allow its audience to catch its breath, too beautiful for them to want to.
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