Sticks, Stones, Broken Bones [FringeTIX]
Bunk Productions @ Puppet Palace
8:00pm, Tue 24 Feb 2009
So – Tuesday night, The Garden, puppet show. Empty, right?
Wrong.
A surprisingly large crowd gathered for this performance and, once seated, Jeff the puppeteer appears – a scruffy fella, purring and squeaking noises instead of speech, he soon takes up position on the floor beneath a projector and, using nondescript chunks of felt and foam, makes shadow stories come to life onscreen. And his stories verge on the surreal; UFO abductions, a ninja attack on an audience volunteer, and a wonderful end title sequence created by a puppet hacking through a forrest of straws. Some clever tricks – a rotating landscape that acted as a road for a doof-doof-mobile, and a glorious horse-racing segment – rounded out an entertaining bit of shadow puppetry.
If my jumble of words hasn’t convinced you one way or the other whether or not Sticks, Stones, Broken Bones is for you, check out the video on the Bunk Productions site. That gives you a pretty good idea what to expect; in fact, rather than bash these words out, I should’ve just linked to that video and appended the words “casually charming.” That would’ve been a lot quicker and certainly more descriptive.
Oh well. Live and learn, I guess.