THEATRE REVIEW: PUPPET UP! UNCENSORED

JOHN COULBOURN, Special to TorSun,
24 OCT 2013
R: 3.5/5

TORONTO - When it comes to potty-mouthed puppets, it’s pretty old hat here in Toronto, where Ronnie Burkett and his Theatre of Marionettes have been happily and successfully stretching the envelope of good taste for years, so that it now resembles nothing so much as a bee skin stretched over a rain barrel.

Which means if you’re hoping to impress a Toronto audience by transforming family fare like the Muppets into X-rated stuff for the adult set, you’d better bring your A-game. And in many ways, that’s precisely what WestBeth Entertainment has done with PUPPET UP! UNCENSORED, which opened at the Panasonic Theatre this week, produced (and co-created with director and host Patrick Bristow) by Brian Henson, son of the late Jim Henson.

With a menagerie of puppets, obviously inspired by the Henson’s Muppet mob, six hugely talented (and oddly uncredited) puppeteers take to the stage, with Bristow at the helm, prepared to take even the most ludicrous suggestions from their audience and riff on them to the delight of just about everybody involved. Yet, very early on in Tuesday’s opening, it became very obvious that Bristow and his crew hadn’t done much in the way of homework or acclimatization, assuming apparently that Canadians were just Americans in toques and Toronto, merely New York running on an outdated Swiss movement.

In assembling the elements for one of their first improv skits, Bristow called for a political name and, surprise, surprise, Rob Ford’s was proffered with an enthusiasm this crew clearly seemed to think should reserved for John Boehner. In fact, the Ford name meant nothing to the host and his cohort of American puppeteers, until one of them dredged up a memory of an infamous video no one seems to have seen despite the international attention it has received. To be fair, it all came together in an irreverent sketch involving Hisawner dancing a pickup ballet at the Gay Pride parade, but one shudders, nonetheless, to think of what might have happened had the name of Senator Mike Duffy collided with this crew’s clearly limited vision of the world.

Still, PUPPET UP! UNCENSORED offers a new perspective on puppetry, forcing the felt, fur and tennis ball set to share the spotlight with their human underlings. Where conventional puppet shows go to great pains to conceal the puppeteer, PU! U puts the puppeteers front and centre, showing the puppets-only versions of their work on two video screens, located on both sides of the stage, often incorporating technology to turn the work of six talented artists into a cast of hundreds, And it’s all good fun — at least until it isn’t. Puppet improv, it develops, follows the same downward trajectory as regular improv, and things get pretty silly pretty fast. Happily, Henson has revived two of his father’s earlier puppet skits that, at least for a short while, serve to slow the transition from work filled with childish wonder to work filled with simple potty-mouthed childishness. Not that there’s anything wrong with that.