BEHIND THE CURTAIN
with the Mesner Puppets’ Wizard of Oz!
by Jane Albright
Originally published in The Baum Bugle, vol. 62, no. 1 (Spring 2018), pgs. 6–9
Citations
Chicago 17th ed.:
Albright, Jane. “Behind the Curtain with the Mesner Puppets’ Wizard of Oz!” Baum Bugle 62, no. 1 (2018): 6–9.
MLA 9th ed.:
Albright, Jane. “Behind the Curtain with the Mesner Puppets’ Wizard of Oz!” Baum Bugle, vol. 62, no. 1, 2018, pp. 6–9.
(Note: In print, this article was supplemented with photographs that have not been reproduced here.)
On June 20, 2017, as part of their 30th season, Mesner Puppet Theater of Kansas City premiered their hand and rod puppet show of—what else?—The Wizard of Oz.
Mesner Puppet Theater’s founder, Paul Mesner, is my neighbor and personal friend. At his suggestion, Artistic Director Mike Horner and Education Director Alex Esp came to see my Oz collection early in the show’s development. They talked Oz, thumbed through books and handled toys as I anticipated the forthcoming puppet designs. I’d seen their towering rod puppet angels float through sanctuaries at Christmas. Mesner’s Punch-and-Judy-style hand puppets were a fixture at local festivals, and marionettes
from past shows were displayed throughout their headquarters; my daughter even returned from childhood birthday parties at their studio with her own sock puppet creations. What might they do with Oz? It was truly an open book.
Early decisions to use public domain material and to limit the show to three puppeteers were driven by practical considerations. Horner began to develop a script while puppet design was turned over to Matt Hawkins of Custom Paper Toys. Although he had never designed theatrical puppets, Hawkins is an established paper sculptor whose whimsical, colorful paper creations combine sculpture with engineering and art. “I really fell in love with the original illustrations in the original book,” he said. “There’s a lot of humor . . . Lion sits like a dog. I just love that. Here’s this giant lion next to a little girl and he’s sitting there like this funny little puppy dog.”
I felt confident the puppet designs were in good hands.
On April 9, Hawkins and Horner presented a preview of the show at the National Museum of Toys and Miniatures. Prototypes for the Scarecrow, the Tin Woodman, the Cowardly Lion, and Toto were on hand for demonstrations, with designs for the rest of the cast projected on a screen. The script itself still had far to go.
As the pair showed off whimsical designs for a humorous Wicked Witch of the West (complete with eye patch), Munchkins, winged monkeys, and the wonderful Wizard himself, my anticipation grew. Horner pointed out how the geometric designs would make it possible to use found objects in their fabrication: the Winged Monkey’s mouth called for a foam football, while his body began with a bowling pin—and look! The Wizard’s head, in the shape of a lightbulb, was perfect for a hot air balloon.
On May 26, I was invited to hear the cast read through the script for the first time. Local talent Damian Blake, Bob Linebarger, and Nicole Marie Green had been chosen as puppeteers.
Each puppeteer would perform multiple characters, which the readthrough would help to clarify. Final decisions would fall to Mike Horner. As writer and director, he brought a lifetime of experience to the table, having first seen Paul Mesner perform for his second-grade class. Few people stick with the profession they choose at age seven; Horner is one of those few.
Some ideas had to change. Three new characters were added to the story, but with a script that could only be performed by six human hands, Toto was cut from the cast. An early idea to use a real balloon that would, when punctured, fly whizzing across the stage to reveal the Wizard was deemed too uncontrollable.
Ultimately, this was the premise of the script: story time at a library is interrupted by a tornado warning. The librarian, storyteller, and a janitor move a visiting class (the audience) to safety in the library basement. There, the three performers step out of their
human roles and into that of puppeteers telling the story of The Wizard of Oz. The adaptation follows the Mesner tradition of presenting classic stories in a contemporary context while keeping the heart of the original, which Horner says is that “everyone
Dorothy meets thinks they’re lacking something, but all throughout their journey together they’re displaying [that quality]: Scarecrow’s coming up with ideas, Tin Man’s showing compassion, Lion is brave, and Dorothy
[has] the power to go home all along.”
During the readthrough, the team worked to minimize the times a single puppeteer needed to manage multiple characters in a conversation. When it was unavoidable—Green took most of the female voices, and Dorothy does need to talk to the Witches—they created different voices to distinguish each character. Listening, I felt like I was on the exhilarating ride of a Robin Williams comedy routine: a handful of people simultaneously created an entire cast, switching rapid-fire from character to character as they read through the script.
As the pages of script slid past, Horner hummed the musical bridges and riffs he created for characters and actions. He called attention to specific effects and explained how Munchkins and monkeys would repeat character lines in a humorous way that children would remember. (Instead of a kiss on the forehead, for instance, the Good Witch uses her wand to give Dorothy a magic “bop on the nose.”)
After the reading, Blake, Linebarger, and Green picked up their puppets for the first time. All four principal characters would nearly always be on stage, and a single puppet would need two hands to move and talk. To bring other characters into the story, the three puppeteers would need help, so Horner constructed the Tin Woodman to be able to stand alone and the Lion to sit on his hind legs, freeing up a puppeteer’s hand to work elsewhere. The three Munchkins, on the other hand, were designed to move on a shared device.
The intricacy and planning that each puppet required was clearer when we climbed upstairs to the puppet fabrication studio, where the rest of the cast was making progress. Patterns and parts were everywhere in the jumble of colorful fabric and foam—with less than a month until show time.
When the curtain rose on June 20, my high expectations were met. There were Easter eggs for fans like me (the janitor is “Mr. Denslow”). The young audience members laughed, cheered, and chanted, “Bop her on the nose!” Even the grown-ups gasped when the theater filled with moving green lights as the doors to the Emerald City swung open. Local response was positive and plans are already shaping up for the show to encore this August at the “Oz Comes to Kansas” weekend event.
Kids at the Mesner performance could take home a kit to make a paper lion hand puppet of their own, and I noticed a pair of 7-year-old boys seemed awfully eager to get started. My hope, then and now, is that among those kit-takers are the puppeteers and puppet makers of a new generation.
(The remount of this production at “Oz Comes to Kansas” was reviewed in a later issue.)
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