How Underground Are You?

So take one blog, plus one person bored at work, shake well, and what do you get? Stumbling upon a blurb about The Undergroundzero Festival. Which took place 7/30/07 at the Collective Unconscious theater at 279 Church Street. The "festival" consisted of three puppet scenes. One scene was actually scenes from the upcoming New York Musical Theater Festival production of Die Hard: The Puppet Musical. While the other two were scenes in and of themselves, "Words, Words, Words" and "Puppet Kafka."

Let's start with "Words, Words, Words" a scene by David Ives, about three chimps that are placed into a room to write Hamlet. The scene was very clever, but the one drawback was that you couldn't see the puppets because they were so small, and the stage was no conducive to having small objects placed upon it. I was straining to see above the people in the theater, and I am tall. It was really not a pleasant viewing experience. But overall it was the best scene of the night. The puppeteers were a bit distracting though because of the fact that they were using minuscule puppets and they dwarfed them. An ineffective tool, considering the aspects of the theater. The director/performer of this scene stated that it was a scene in a book of collected works by Mister Ives. But I was too distracted rubbing my sore neck that I didn't catch what the title of the book was.

Next up, "Puppet Kafka," this vignette, was too esoteric for the general viewing audience. Unless they have a knowledge of Kafka and his works, they were left perplexed and confused. "Puppet Kafka" intertwined his work "The Metamorphosis" and the story of the author's life. Again it was difficult to see because of the angle of the stage. I think that if they found their audience with this piece it would have been more effective. Plus they need to perform it on a different stage, the space itself was nice, but they need to rework the way the seats were placed.

The next offering was scenes from Die Hard: The Puppet Musical. It has potential, but they need to rework the songs, and perhaps cast people who could sing and those who could work puppets. There was one song that was sung by one of the terrorists, that needs to be cut. It didn't make sense, and ruined the pacing of the show. I think I may go see the full production, but we'll see. Because I think as a whole it has a lot of positive things going for it. There is a resurgence of movies from the 80's being taken and made into musicals with camp value, and I think this could be one. We'll see what the future holds for this little musical.

Some negative aspects of this show, it seemed all very thrown together very fast. Very odd. I wonder if this was thrown together in a week. It ran very much like a middle school scene night for drama class. But then again it was at an experimental theater in TriBeca.