Daisy delivers raucous night out
Ronnie Burkett’s latest inspired by subversive Czech puppet shows
The Daisy Theatre Theatre: Ronnie Burkett Theatre of Marionettes Starring: Ronnie Burkett Where: Citadel Club Running: through Nov. 17 Tickets: all $25, 780-4251820, citadeltheatre.com
In one of the more histrionic entrances of the season, the aged “superstar diva” literally drags herself onto the stage, and directs a bilious glare our way. “I don’t blame you; I pity you!”
Yes, we have failed Esmé Massengill, (very) late of Hollywood, by the sheer inadequacy of our adulation. In the showbiz spirit of “generosity and false authenticity,” she will teach us the proper ovation style. “Nothing would please me more than seven weeks in Edmonton at the onset of winter. Oh, pulleeze ...”
Ronnie Burkett, Canada’s remarkable star marionettiste, is an original who has re-strung every expectation about the place of puppets as actors in the legitimate adult theatre. He returns to these parts, not with a play but a semi-improvised puppet cabaret. The Daisy Theatre is Burkett’s homage to the subversive puppet shows that grew up underground in Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia.
And since the performers are tiny, the audience is close at hand — and Burkett gets a kick out of biting that hand. And here, the hand can have a glass of wine in it — The Daisy Theatre is perfectly suited to the Citadel’s charming new downstairs cabaret space. Every night is bound to be a bit different. But, as I can reveal from Thursday’s opening, Daisy is a raucous good time, a night out in the company of a puckish agent provocateur whose wits are as quick as his virtuosity is dazzling.
A cast of two dozen stands (er, hangs) by, and includes some of Burkett’s star characters, on sabbatical from the plays where they made their mark. Esmé, for example, a bone rack draped in her “summer Whore of Babylon costume,” played a vampire in Street of Blood, and she’s just as snarly and withering as ever. And, from that same dark play, Mrs. Edna Rural, the adorably plump, self-styled “silly old biddy in a Sears house dress,” drops by to explain to us why she’s gone urban and moved away from Turnip Corners, Alta. She sits in her familiar armchair, swollen ankles planted into her Naturalizers, remembering her Stanley and tapping her hand to a lovely rendition of My Romance. All the music (and sound), including the clever, double entendre opening stripper number, are the work of the jazz pianist/composer John Alcorn.
And there’s Schnitzel, the innocent little fairy boy from the improvised Daisy shows of Tinka’s New Dress, Burkett’s first big international hit. He has pondered the big ‘why?’ questions of our existence before, of course: who is pulling our strings, in the end?
But since the easy chemistry between audience and stage is the crux of cabaret, the new show has him reaching out to us, across the great theatrical divide. He is the presiding muse of the evening, and gives it its heart.
As an artist/playwright, Burkett has always had huge affection for the faded glamour and razzmatazz of the old showbiz. And as a craftsman/ sculptor, he seems to be fascinated by aging, the choreography of it, the sags and eyebags wrought by time. Thursday we met Jolie Jolie, an ancient French chanteuse (with her own band), invaded by regret, who conjures her younger self. Retired Major General Leslie Fukwah favours us with a song too, a plummy-voiced rendition of There Are Fairies At The Bottom Of My Garden. And, for the first time in a career spanning four decades, there’s audience participation in a Burkett show. Derek found himself up on the bridge, a puppeteer alongside the master, pulling the strings of the military man’s late mama, at the keyboard of a tiny grand piano.
There’s music, talking animals, set-piece skits, jokes. Alberta’s right-skewed politics takes some shivs, and will undoubtedly take more. Burkett’s characters light into Edmonton’s blasted downtown; on other nights, the civic election will no doubt prove meat and drink to them. Canadian theatre takes its shots; so does the Citadel and its audiences. You feel he’s just warming up.
“This,” says the puppeteer lugging the diminutive grand piano onto the marionette stage, “is meta-theatricality, ladies and gentlemen ... Someone at the U of A will write a master’s thesis on this.”