Last night Kerry and I went to see Jim Henson’s Puppet Improv at the Fringe. It was great! Now, this wasn’t the muppets, as that is a specific off-shoot of the Jim Henson company, this was just a bunch of the Jim Henson trained performers with more of the ‘generic’ puppets. Animals, aliens, cartoony humans and such. The stage was set up in such a way that the performers just did their stuff out in the middle of the stage with the puppets above them. There were various large screens in the auditorium which showed the feed from a fixed camera set looking at the stage, but at the level of the puppets. So you could watch the screens and see the kind of view you get on Sesame Street or watch the stage and see how the performers make the puppets do what they do.
With it being an improv show there was a lot of audience partipiation which centered around filthy suggestions and topic which usually got a response of “did that yesterday” and “had that already” from the compére. My favourite sketch was when the audience had to suggest four letter words. Then the assembled puppets had to get from word A to word B by just changing one later at a time in a normal conversation. Needless to say, they got stuck pretty quickly as we chose ridiculously hard words, but that just added to the comedy as the pupppets started sniping at each other. In the end they did manage it but had to resort to a few spanish words and comedy words like “mooo” and “owww”. An excellent show, worth the money, definitely recommended.
