THEATRE REVIEW: IGNORANCE

JOHN COULBOURN,
Special to TorSun
29 NOV 2012
R: 3/5



TORONTO - “You gotta have a gimmick, if you’re gonna get ahead,” Stephen Sondheim famously wrote in his lyrics for the musical, Gypsy — and clearly, it’s advice the folks at Alberta’s Old Trout Puppet Workshop took to heart, even though they — currently and somewhat mercifully, I think — appear to have no aspirations when it comes to shucking their duds, à la the trio of strippers for whom the song was initially written.

Instead, Old Trout’s hook, in a life-affirming puppet world famously populated by Elmo, Kermit and their puppet ilk, is mayhem that seems to always end in death. Old Trout rose to prominence, you may recall, with a show titled Famous Puppet Death Scenes, which played Toronto in 2008 and featured — what else? — a parade of puppets doing everything but living happily ever after. And now they’re back with a new show, titled IGNORANCE, that opened at the Berkeley Street Theatre Tuesday and — Surprise! Surprise! — it opens with a rather whimsical encounter between a puppet and a happy-face balloon (a visual leitmotif that runs throughout the show) that ends in gruesomely comic death.

It proves to be the first of many as puppeteers Nicolas Di Gaetano, Viktor Lukawski and Trevor Leigh seemingly stumble across that special place where old elk go to die, where they stage an Old Trout-style puppet extravaganza, the purpose of which is the examination of mankind’s mostly futile search for happiness, beginning with a pair of Cro Magnon block-heads named Adam and Eve and stretching all the way to the modern day.

In this, they are assisted by an off-stage narrator (Judd Palmer) who, in the basso profondo style of the nature films of the ’50s and ’60s, offers often outrageously cynical commentary as our cave-dwelling protagonists alternately hunt for happiness and food, avoiding monsters and slaying mastodons in the process. Against a videoscape designed by Jamie Nesbitt that combines old television footage and rudimentary animation to underscore the futility of our constant search for happiness, they establish that we have indeed evolved — but not much.

The puppets are nothing if not inventive, ranging from egg-headed moppets to mastodons, apparently cobbled together from the remains of a charnel house — and happily, there are some moments of utter if perverse delight. But finally, despite what mama may have told you, IGNORANCE is not bliss, although it does offer a few blissful moments. While it manages to do a fine job of sending up society’s obsession with feel-good moments, it too often lacks focus, allowing itself instead to become bogged down in its own hijinx.

The three puppeteers, arrayed though they are in bizarre puppeteer mufti and sporting their Movember best, may come out of the gate like the Three Stooges, but finally they resemble nothing so much as little boys playing in a sandbox. And while that can provide a few delightful moments of engagement, it does not finally come together as 75 minutes of drop-dead puppet entertainment.