“Ruby & Charlie,” one of the three works of puppetry at the fifth annual Puppetopia festival presented at HERE, uses the music of Ray Charles, played by a live band, to chronicle the 1950s courtship and coupling of two lovers of swing dancing. These are cool cats; even the puppeteers wear black fedoras.
The ups and downs of Ruby and Charlie’s life together over the years (actually, over 45 minutes) is dramatized without dialogue, but with plenty of props and accessories that alternate between miniaturized and oversized.
Miniature: A bed that doubles as a radio that Charlie rises from in the morning, and a tiny basketball that Charlie plays with
Oversized: Playing cards that conceal and then reveal Ruby
Miniature, A telephone that Charlie uses to call Ruby
Oversized: An umbrella that Charlie uses to protect the two of them.
As their relationship deepens, the miniatures take over: The 1957 Ray Charles album, Hallelujah I Love Her So, both tiny vinyl record and tiny sleeve; a wedding bouquet, a tiny cooking pan on a tiny stove; a newspaper that Charlie reads too much, the tiny teddy bear that a nurse gives to their newborn son.
The tiny world of tabletop puppetry segues back to life size, when the puppeteers lead the audience onto the stage for our own swing dance.
A production of Jessica Simon and Co, “Ruby & Charlie” features six puppeteers — Victor Ayala, Tau Bennett, Maria Camia, Monica Lerch, Kayta Thomas, and Ashley Winkfield – two each always assigned to Ruby and Charlie, the remaining two to their many accessories. Musicians Jordyn Davis, Jeremiah Flack, and Milton Suggs give the show its swing with the following songlist..
Ruby
You Be My Baby
Ain’t That Love
Alexander’s Ragtime Band
Am I Blue
Georgia On My Mind
Come Rain or Come Shine
Hallelujah I Love Her So
…but only through February 21 (tomorrow), and the run is sold out. (Maybe they’ll extend?)
“Parched,” which runs through March 1, is twice as long at 90 minutes and from another world – or, more precisely, also from Earth but in the future when human beings have become extinct because of a scarcity of water (as the title implies.) A kind of ecological dystopian quasi-Western, the play begins with what is apparently a flashback, when we see a man killed, presumably in a battle over water, and his father in a cowboy hat disappearing into the desert. (I say apparently and presumably, because not everything that happens in this wordless play was completely clear to me.)
Taking the place of humans are mushrooms, who live among the garbage that people left behind, especially plastic bottles. The central character, our unnamed fungal hero, wears one like a helmet in an astronaut’s spacesuit, as he searches for, and battles over, the remaining supply of water – which mushrooms, of course, also need. Many adventures ensue, including battles with sandstorms and humanoids, and encounters with loud, heavy machinery, such as an industrial deep well that humans left behind, and which Mr. Mushroom gets operational, more or less.
The mushroom also meets up with the cowboy, who still wears his cowboy hat, although he is now a skeleton without a head. (My favorite scene is when the skeleton cowboy mounts a haystack of a steed (with great effort) and gallops past a tumbleweed.
Together the space-age mushroom and the headless cowboy battle humanoids who were apparently resurrected because of the now-functioning industrial well and took control of the water supply.
“Parched” is a production of a company called Official Puppet Business, performed by five puppeteers — Andy Manjuck
Dorothy James, Jon Riddleberger, Joseph Lymous and Madeleine Dauer — wearing the kind of eye masks that we associate with gunmen in the Wild West. backed by a three-piece band, Hilary Hawke, Brett Parnell, Jess Tsang performing more than a dozen original, countrified instrumental songs.
Last up in the festival: The Magnificent Ms. Pham, Feb 25-28.
