From: Stephen Kaplin <skactw-AT-tiac.net>
Subject: RE: PUPT: Re: Thoughts on Avenue Q
Date: Sun, 01 Feb 2004 22:05:08 -0500



>But let me ask you this.  If the character had been an opera singer, in a
>musical theater production, do you honestly think they would have hired
>someone who had never sung but showed promise?  Especially knowing that
>they had two weeks to train him before the lead went on vacation?  I do
>know some of the male puppet actors that auditioned and they are shit-hot.
>The other male understudy on Avenue Q knew the part already, but they
>didn't have him do the role.  Why?  Acting?  I've seen him.  He's good.
>Singing?  He's been singing since he was five.  How about his look?  Maybe
>some other factor, but what all of this means, to me, is that the directors
>took the puppetry less seriously.  I've talked with someone who saw the new
>understudy and he said that the manipulation troubles were very disturbing.
>
>
>My distress isn't about elitism.  It's not about taking puppetry away from
>the masses.  It's not about saying that puppetry isn't acting.  It's a
>desperate wish that the skill in manipulation was as important as the other
>skills required for stage.  It was also about my realization that if I want
>to actually get the job at the next round of auditions I need to be a
>singer AND a puppeteer.  Not just a puppeteer who can sing.
>
>Mary


Bravo Mary,
 	I'm in full agreement with your analysis of the situation.
	From my own experience in Broadway scale productions, it seems that
no matter  how finely honed your puppetry skills are, they don't count for
beans if you don't have all the other requisite performance skills
(singing, dancing, shmoozing with casting directors, etc.) Well that's the
way the game is played, in this country at least. Perhaps if there were a
Tony or Oscar Award for "Best Puppet Performance" things would be
different. But there aint, so it's not.
	 Professional theater directors always seem to underestimate the
amount of time it takes to train some one to operate a puppet. And how
could they know any differently if, in all their years of training, they
haven't once had to hold and work a puppet? The fact that puppetry is not
part of the core training of any actor or theater person makes it easy for
professional theater folks to dismiss it-- as though holding a puppet were
the same as holding any other prop. In fact, in the eyes of the stage
unions, the puppet is a prop (unless the performer is strapped inside it,
then it's technically a costume.) This may sound silly, but if you are
puppet master for a Broadway show, you'd damm well better know the
difference!
	 So while I can understand fully when Julie Taymor (or any theater
director for that matter) says that she'd rather train actors to use the
puppets than train  puppeteers to act, it still hurts to know that you're
beloved artform has, once more, come out on the short end of the value
judgement.
	Puppetry performance and acting are not the same craft. Related on
the mother's side perhaps, but no more alike than the set of skills needed
by a trombonist versus those cultivated by a mezzo-soprano. Aside from the
fact that they both read music, does one set of skills readily compliment
the others? (Has anyone heard Beverly Sills claim that her years of playing
trombome in her highschool marching band helped increase her breath
control?)  I've always felt that dancers and other movement-trained
performers are much better at picking up a puppet in a pinch than the
average Joe or Jane Actor. The repertoire of skills that actors learn for
portraying strong, psychologically compelling characters on stage don't
necessarily translate into making strongly compelling puppet performances.
Why is that? I dunno, Perhaps I'm just mouthing off.  Still, has anyone
seen a really compelling  example of "method puppetry?"
	This dances around the sad fact that the producers of "Avenue Q"
couldn't trust the puppeteer understudy to pull off the performance. Like
Mary sez, puppetry skills are simply undervalued in the commercial theater
world in this country. So what do we do with that?  Still I think its
shooting yourself in the foot to have a show that is so dependent on the
quality of it's puppetry suffer because the director couldn't trust a
puppeteer to sing up to standard. Isn't that why God invented lip-synching?
Hell, even Britney Spears is allowed to LS her own songs...in the
SuperBowl, no less!!!

	Okay, enough blather for one night.

Stephen





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