“The show is a love letter to theater and show biz,” Ronnie Burkett says during a question-and-answer session after performing his “The Daisy Theatre” at Montreal’s Centaur Theatre last Thursday night. It’s a semi-improvised, cabaret-style marionette comedy show that he’s been performing since 2013. The show was the opening performance of Montreal’s 13th annual Festival de Casteliers, a showcase of international puppetry (which sponsored my visit).
Burkett, a legend in puppetry and Canadian theater, has been performing puppets since at least the 1970s and formed his Ronnie Burkett Theatre of Marionettes in 1986.
The Toronto-based performer is known for scripted shows that address weighty themes. His breakout hit was 1994’s “Tinka’s New Dress,” a show about the Holocaust that was inspired by underground cabarets that sprang up in Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia and were nicknamed “daisies” because of lore that the flowers could sprout in the dark. (It’s these daisies that give the current “Daisy Theatre” its name.) In the show “Street of Blood,” he spoke about AIDS. In “10 Days on Earth,” he addressed mental illness.
Burkett says, “’The Daisy’ is the only time I’ve been able to make anything I’ve wanted to make and throw it on stage.”
Help Wonderland keep producing our great coverage of local arts, cultures and activism by contributing to Wonderland on Patreon. And sign up for our free, weekly newsletter so that you don’t miss any of our reporting.
The comedy show is bawdy, rude, purposely outrageous, before striking tender notes. It’s full of double entendres and saucy puns. “We always open with a burlesque number,” Burkett says. In this case Dolly Wiggler stripping (quite a feat for a marionette) and singing, “We’re going to dance till dawn, a lot of cock-a-doodle-doo.”
It’s a series of monologues and singing, of mostly unrelated acts riffing on theater, vaudeville, Vegas. It’s filled with burlesque dancers, lounge singers, washed-up divas, pathetic clowns, a doddering ventriloquist, a lonely old housewife (“There’s a lot of old in this show,” Burkett notes), a foul-mouthed Jesus.
“I’ll take Christmas any day over Easter. I hate Easter with a passion,” Burkett’s puppet Jesus riffs. “Easter morning I get a text from my dad: ‘Hey, you want to hang?’”
After the show, Burkett tells the audience, “I’m insane for having a puppet of Jesus. I really am. But at the end of the day fuck ‘em if they can’t take a joke.”
Burkett performs standing on an elevated bridge behind a curtain that hides his legs, but all through the show you can see the rest of him singing and acting and carefully manipulating the marionettes’ controllers.
Arrayed around the sides and back of the stage, for easy access, are some 43 marionettes, with the cast changing somewhat from night to night. “It depends what the audience can take. Sometimes they goad me and they want more, more, more,” Burkett says. “You kind of smell the audience.”
“I have lots of puppets that I thought were going to be stars, but they don’t work, they sit on the back row,” Burkett says. The ones that do work, “They kind of emerge. … I never know which ones the audiences are going to relate to as much as I do.”
Burkett’s roster of faded divas includes “Canada’s oldest and worst actress” Miss Lillian Lunkhead. He has her invite a member of the audience on stage to help her perform Shakespeare and gets the fellow to take off his shirt so the puppet can—for laughs—rub the man’s chest and pat his crotch.
One act is just an old woman with a walker crossing the stage, pausing only to give the audience a skeptical look. In a ventriloquist act (performed by a pair of marionettes), old puppeteer Meyer Lemon passes out nearly as soon as they arrive on stage and the dummy falls into an existential panic.
Burkett has his marionette Mrs. Edna Rural from Alberta describe herself as a “silly biddy.” She offers an extended monologue in which the punch line is that she makes a pot pie with dill flavored dough—dill dough, get it. Then it pivots to Burkett having her recount sharing fortune cookies with her late husband, a tale that brings many in the audience near to tears.
“What if there’s someone up there manipulating everything we do,” wonders the pixie clown Little Schnitzel before scaling the curtain to question Burkett himself. The marionette reappears in the finale to become a tender role model for bravely confronting one’s fears.
Some of the jokes dabble in politics, like a bit about liberalism and conservatism. A mean clown lectures Schnitzel: “No one thinks before they go to the right. They just read the Bible and jump in.”
“I’m an old white guy. I’m so aware that the job of every old white guy is to shut up and listen,” Burkett says in answer to a question about the lines he toes (or doesn’t toe) when addressing politics today. “I’m waiting for someone to say why is he doing a female character.” Puppets, he says, have allowed him to take on numerous roles. “I’ve been playing with gender all my life and I don’t have to put on false eyelashes, take hormones. … I’ve had the freedom of being young, old, male, female, animal, human.”
Help Wonderland keep producing our great coverage of local arts, cultures and activism by contributing to Wonderland on Patreon. And sign up for our free, weekly newsletter so that you don’t miss any of our reporting.
