Cannibal! The Musical boasts more than 40 handmade puppets. (Photo courtesy of HalfMad Theatre)
An old, run-down building next to an AMC theater in the Wheaton Mall complex used to house a beauty school. Along the row of mirrors that once hosted heads of imitation hair, different kinds of models can now be found. Some are bloody. Some are missing limbs. Some have knives sticking out of their foreheads.
All of them are puppets, works in progress for a rehearsal of HalfMad Theatre Company’s Capital Fringe Festival production of Cannibal! The Musical, a certified cult classic from South Park and The Book of Mormon creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone.
Written a few years before South Park premiered, Cannibal! brings to life the early 19th-century Colorado legend of Alfred Packer and his band of prospectors, who resorted to cannibalism after stranding themselves in the winter mountains. It bears all the hallmarks of the irreverent style that would bring the duo such later success: vulgarity, over-the-top violence and frequent insults directed at Mormonism. The first of six Capital Fringe Festival performances will take place on Saturday.
Staging this version of this show has been a unique challenge: It’s not originally or usually a show done with puppets.
“With puppets you can do so much more gore,” director Elizabeth Dapo tells DCist. “Our opening sequence is just puppets being torn apart, and it’s funny!”
HalfMad has some experience with the medium. Its first show was a Fringe production of Twelfth Night that mixed live puppets and actors, a 50-50 split. Cannibal! represents the group’s first attempt at puppets in a non-Shakespeare context, but the approach makes a certain kind of sense for a show like this. After all, early episodes of South Park were not too far removed from puppet theatre themselves — much of the humor came from juxtaposing silly-looking characters and extremely adult dialogue and situations. Not to mention the Broadway smash Avenue Q has already paved the way for puppet vulgarity on stage.
Dapo has crafted each of the show’s roughly 40 total puppets herself. They’re composed mostly of felt and cloth, and they range in complexity from butterflies on sticks to a giant cyclops monster. Each one takes about 15 to 20 hours of work from fabric to finished product. In addition to the puppets and puppets parts strewn across the Wheaton rehearsal space, detailed diagrams of the puppets line the walls, listing all of their features, accessories and removable pieces. Each one is accompanied by a name and character traits, making them fully realized characters.
“When an actor walks onstage, they have to say something to make a statement,” said Eric Brooks, a cast member with a master’s degree in puppetry from the University of Connecticut and five years of experience as a full-time professional puppeteer. “When a puppet walks onstage, they don’t have to say anything at all because they are the statement.”
The team has made more than 40 puppets for the production. (Photo by Seth Rose)
Not everyone in the cast shares Brooks’ puppet expertise, however. Some have only a handful of puppet shows under their belts, and others have none at all. Everyone in the cast plays multiple parts, sometimes simultaneously. During a rehearsal on July 9, they still hadn’t quite figured out how to avoid running into each other in the cramped space behind the puppet scrim.
They’ve also been keeping a running tally of all the times anyone has fallen off the wheeled stools they use to maneuver. As of Sunday’s rehearsal it was around 20 or so, with some cast members spilling more frequently than others.
Despite this, even in this embryonic stage where the puppets aren’t finished and nobody has their lines fully memorized, it can’t help but work. Seeing puppets that look like they belong in a children’s show punch, slap, and curse at each other is inherently amusing, and Parker and Stone’s eccentric wordplay helps produce something uniquely raucous. Even when they have to ape their puppets’ movements with their naked hands, the veterans and greenhorns alike have done an impressive job imbuing their avatars with personality traits they’d give to any flesh-and-blood character.
“We weren’t sure how this show was going to go, but it ended up being kind of like Muppets telling a horror story,” Dapo said.
It seems like Parker and Stone would approve.
Cannibal! The Musical will be showing at Atlas Performing Arts Center, Sprenger Theater on July 15 at 5:30 p.m., July 16 at 10:30 p.m., July 18 at 9:15 p.m., July 20 at 7:30 p.m., July 21 at 5:15 p.m., and July 22 at 11:15 a.m. Buy tickets here.
See here for all of DCist’s 2017 Capital Fringe coverage. All shows are $17, with a button ($7) required for entry.
