There are some shows with a premise so simple that it is just pure genius. This is Jim Henson’s muppets, on stage. You wonder why they never thought of bringing that to the Fringe before. The show is, without any question, a complete sell-out!
The stage, bare apart from a painted background, some chairs for the performers and an extra long table covered by a black cloak, has two big screens at each side, and some smaller televisions around it. The show is so inventive that, not only you get what’s happening on stage (where you get to see the puppeteers’ point of view when they do a show), but you also get to see how it would look on your TV set as if you where watching it from home.
Even more, the show is completely improvised, taking suggestions from the audience, which makes this interactive act incredibly appealing, as not every night you get to see sausages being Ricky Martin’s backup singers, a Scottish brothel where they only have Highland cows as their prostitutes or a rat and a crab in their first date.
Although the show, obviously, is all about the puppets, and your heart cannot but skip a beat when they uncover what’s under the black cloak, i.e. dozens of muppet-puppets waiting to be played with; it is the actual puppeteers that deserve forever praise, for it is them who are so quick and inventive that make this show work so well. Even when they are lost in an sketch, without knowing how to resolve it, they still manage to get laughs out of the audience, and even themselves, not being able to keep a straight face half of the time. Their passion for what they do is contagious.
Jim Henson’s Puppet Improv is a work of art, a piece of love towards an art that is definitely dying as adults and children loose interest in the world of puppetry. Let’s give them one last time, for them, for us: Puppet Up!
5/5
Adrian G. Velazquez
