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I’ve been following the master puppeteers of Wakka Wakka since at least 2008, and they’re back in New York City with what may be their grandest show yet. Critics throw the words “astonishing” around a lot; I think it’s important to reserve it for what truly astonishes, and the compendium of puppetry and stagecraft that is Dead as a Dodo surely qualifies.
The Baruch Performing Arts Center theater is an ideal location for this dark, depthless piece of mystery art. Opening with a loudly amplified musical number, it withdraws into an eerie realm of darkness and threats. These contrasts persist throughout this profound excursion into the fantastic and macabre. The show’s part-musical nature actually deepens the phantasmagorical atmosphere of this tale of death and rebirth.
Bird of a Feather
A woefully incomplete boy skeleton and a wordless but colorfully expressive dodo skeleton are fast friends in a gloomy world inhabited only by the ossified relics of living beings, and ruled by a tyrannical King of the Bones. When hope intrudes on the erstwhile human’s seemingly futile quest for skeletal completion, the adventures begin.
What for the characters is a classic quest tale is for the audience a bath of illusion and wonder. What’s solid and what’s projection? What’s lighting and what’s props? How are the mostly invisible bodies of the human performers creating not only the visible characters but parts of the ever-changing world they move through?
Puppeteers in stage shows like this typically wear all black so as to remain inconspicuous (even when fully visible, as they are decidedly not here), keeping our attention on the puppet figures they’re manipulating. (Think Avenue Q.) This daring production puts starlike sparkles on their black body suits. In the dim lighting this somehow only deepens the illusion that the puppets are not only alive but living in a deep three-dimensional space of indeterminate size. The bodies of the human performers seem – but again, there’s so much illusion here it’s hard to be sure – to merge with, or actually become, environment as much as they are deus ex machina.
The total effect suggests the wonders of animation, an art unencumbered by reality and physics.
R-O-C-K in the Underworld
The bluesy pop-rock score yields some irresistibly catchy numbers. The appealing voice work and the fantastical story evoke the wide-eyed awe that often powers children’s theater. An underwater sequence is a marvel, packing the full measure of that deadly word, “astonishing.”
At the same time, the thematic material is ageless: life and death; environmental destruction and species extinction; innocence, evil, chaos; Greek myth and underworld epic. The vivid characters are also delightful, most of them funny too. Even the primary villain gets an over-the-top hard-rock music moment.
Dead as a Dodo runs through Feb. 9 at Baruch PAC in NYC. Tickets and schedule are available online.
