Reviews 2017
Reviews 2017
✭✭✭✩✩
written and directed by Frank Meschkuleit
Invisible Inc., Next Stage Theatre Festival, Factory Studio Theatre, Toronto
January 4-15, 2017
“Fat But Not Filling”
The adults-only My Big Fat German Puppet Show (2013) returns after a stint at the Toronto Fringe Festival in 2015 for a run during this year’s Next Stage Theatre Festival. The look of the show is great but it does not deliver as much as it promises. The evening is essentially a one-person variety show where most of the acts are performed by puppets. But it’s a variety show where lack of variety is the problem. Without a storyline or even thematic links, there is a certain sameness about the acts that cause the show never quite to lift off the ground.
Frank Meschkuleit, who spent seven years as a puppeteer with the Jim Henson’s Muppets on shows like Fraggle Rock, enters as the German-accented Herr Puppenspiel, an obscenely obese, top-hatted entertainer with a twirling moustache. We expect he will be the kind of aggressive cabaret performer who dares us to laugh at his jokes and then chastises us if we don’t. In fact, Meschkuleit’s personality is far more apologetic and convivial that his appearance would suggest.
The fantastic costume he designed makes him look like a sphere with a head and legs. He also looks very much like Mr. Microcosmos, the human bathysphere in Cirque du Soleil’s Kurios (2014) and, like that character, hides a secret in his rotund chest. That secret is a portable stage for his puppets and his opening and closing suit coat acts as the curtain.
After an opening bit not involving puppets, i.e. playing a musical saw, the remainder of the show takes place mostly on his portable stage. The first number is a lederhosen-clad puppet manipulated with the fingers of both of Meschkuleit’s hands that sings “I’m German”, a clever riff on Bob Marley’s “Jammin’” where the incongruence of a reggae rhythm and Teutonic references is the main source of humour. The puppet is so detailed that its cheeks puff out when it is playing the tuba.
Meschkuleit follows this with a puppet of American singer Tom Waits growling out a typically depressing song. The main interest here is that the puppet is constructed of kitchen utensils like a strainer and flour sifter. What the relation is between Waits and such utensils remains unclear.
The next act shows the pathetic attempts of a zombie trying to be an entertainer. He can pull a rabbit out of a hat, but ... poor rabbit. He also in a gross but funny bit can seemingly pull his insides out of his mouth. Then he has this sad member of the living dead howl out a song, the words incomprehensible, that goes on long after it has made its point.
Meschkuleit continues the bad taste theme by switching from a puppet to a marionette that performs on the same stage Meschkuleit is standing on. This is a marionette of theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking relegated by ALS to a wheelchair and speaking via an electronic speech-generating device. First Hawking sings a song heavily reliant on a vocoder, thus satirizing the device’s use by pop singers and, unfortunately, Hawking’s own electronic voice. Then he has Hawking tells a series of quite clever, appropriately nerdy jokes all based on atomic or cosmological physics.
Meschkuleit then satirizes his own past with the Muppets by building a Muppet who then sings a song with Meschkuleit paradoxically about why the puppeteer won’t allow a Muppet in his show.
After all these acts whose success has been strictly hit-and-miss, Meschkuleit concludes with a surprisingly moving vignette with a puppet who looks much like Meschkuleit himself in ordinary clothing singing Tom Waits’s 1999 song “Picture in a Frame”.
The problem with this variety show is that, except for the musical saw, all the acts involve a single puppet or marionette moving and lip-synching to music. Sometimes the song is pre-recorded; sometimes Meschkuleit sings it live. There no question that the latter is much more effective as in the zombie’s pathetic howling or in the final Tom Waits number. If only Meschkuleit could vary his formula more and at least include two puppets interacting, the show would be far more interesting. I must note that much of the audience was convulsed with laughter. Yet, I who had seen Puppetmongers’ Tea at the Palace just two weeks prior, a puppet show that packed more invention into every one of its 60 minutes than Meschkuleit does in his, found it difficult to be more than mildly amused.
©Christopher Hoile
Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.
Photo: Frank Meschkuleit in My Big Fat German Puppet Show.
For tickets, visit http://fringetoronto.com/next-stage-festival.
2017-01-07
My Big Fat German Puppet Show