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Also this issue: Curtain Call Poetry Commotion Visitors from Other Worlds Going, Going ! Media Frenzy Novel Concept Trouble in Camelot |
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April 17-23, 2003
theater
The best thing about this show is that it’s short, although sitting through it certainly feels long. Robert Smythe is an accomplished puppeteer, but this show elbows the puppets off to the sidelines and puts the puppeteer front and center. He reminisces, he narrates, he sings (whoever told Smythe that he is an Irish tenor?) and assumes that we really want to sit in hushed silence for five minutes while we watch him put on a shirt and tie. What kind of ego believes that this amateurish, undisciplined stuff is stageworthy?
The show itself (subtitled A Vaudeville Tribute to Family Secrets, though there are no secrets and no vaudeville) purports to tell the story of Smythe's grandfather, William Smythe, supposedly a star of the vaudeville stage. We are told over and over that nobody in the family spoke of the man, although much information is forthcoming.
The meandering, maudlin story of a man who has so many children he doesn't know what to do is barely followable (I'm talking basic chronology here, never mind character development) and the language of the narration is a dreary combo of flat chat (the kind of story somebody traps you into listening to on a long bus ride) and arch, eyebrow-wiggling flirtation with the audience. It's all in the first person, since Smythe operates on the premise that we are all either his blood relations or adoring fans and thus he does not need to earn our attention.
The little puppets in the scene of the courtship between the grandfather and grandmother have some charm; the tiny hands move expressively. But all the other puppets are large (including a fairly grotesque life-size pregnant puppet representing his grandmother, who weeps) and a shamelessly sentimental white-winged angel of his grandfather who flies, presumably into heaven, after much distasteful discussion of all his hospital ailments.
The final grotesque aspect of this show is the glamorizing of war at this particular moment in time. His grandfather, it seems, was also (or is this a different grandfather?) a mailman and was much humiliated to be delivering letters from soldiers at the front, longing to be one of the real men. All this and Smythe singing "It's a Sin to Tell a Lie," too.
WHEN THE WAR IS OVER Through April 26, Mum Puppettheatre, 115 Arch St., 215-925-7686.
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