Another Play

Another play under my belt, or maybe I should say out from under my belt. The Salvation of Iggy Scrooge opened last Friday. The set was less complicated to paint, but I was still up to my neck in it, because I built the puppets. This play is a rock and roll take-off of Dickens' Christmas Carol, and we decided to have the parts of the children Want and Ignorance played by puppets. Although I spent many years as a dollmaker, and have extensive papier mache experience, I'm just not much of a puppet person. The director (a former puppeteer, for all you Murphy's Law fans) wanted puppets built life size in a bunraku style, so I spent a lot of Googletime looking at construction methods. Bunraku puppets are really pretty darn cool! But alas, ours needed to be operated by one inexperienced stagehand each, so the ones I built were perhaps more of an homage to bunraku than the real deal.  I took some construction photos, and will post them as soon as I gather them up in one spot. In the meantime, here is a rehearsal shot of our play, which opened to rave reviews, by the way.