Lights on for puppets.
Puppet Up! @ The State Theatre
It was slightly eerie to walk along Market Street to The State during Earth Hour. Sure the CBD away from George Street is always quite dead on weekend nights but on this particular night the city streets were, well... dead-er, would you believe. Even the glittering entrance of the State seemed less radiant. Maybe it was just because I've got this cold that's been lingering on for over a week now, everything already seemed slightly muted without CBD businesses flicking off their lights.
It's not really feasible to turn off all the lights at the State. The show must go on, and all of that and, besides, the puppets freak out in the darkness so one of them made a statement of apology and switched off the lights for five seconds, which as it turns out was as much as the puppet could take before they ended up in hysterics.
When you combine puppets with adult themes, you're pretty much set up for laughs. And I barely stopped laughing for the entire show. After a snappy lead-in song with the puppets and a quick introduction by host Patrick explaining what would happen (think theatre sports but with puppets), the scenes came through thick and fast. Uncovered, the puppeteers performed in front of a camera with the footage projected onto screens on both sides of the stage and to see them create the scene is an experience in itself. You just have to be impressed by their ability to take just about any suggestion from the audience and make up something funny on the spot, over and over again, night after night, I'd rather have it choreographed thank you very much.
Too many highlights to mention all of them and, besides, they probably won't ever happen again, such is the joy of improvisational theatre. The puppet singing an apology for saying another puppuet's face looked like a vagina, the Zimbabwean yodellers and knife-throwers, the milking of the cow, Tom Cruise snogging L Ron Hubbard... we could have had the Opera about Tourette's Syndrome but they had that one the night before and the cast don't do repeats...
Umm... actually, they do:
