Pied Piper
Pied Piper is one of the designs I’m most proud of. The set is a touring show, it takes twenty minutes to put it up and it all fits into a van. When you add the puppets and the lights, it winds up being an hour load-in. That’s it. And this is not a small show. It spans a twenty by twenty foot stage and is ten feet tall at its highest point. Once again, Lance Woolen made my drawings a reality. Although I did paint everything.
This show is also one of the most challenging to perform. Jodi Eichelberger (the writer) and I knew that we would be performing it so we wrote it to challenge ourselves. Sometimes I wonder what we were thinking. It’s an operetta that’s 45 minutes long with 35 minutes of music. So we sing a lot, in addition to working very large rod puppets. At one point we have five active puppets on stage with two puppeteers.
In this shot I’m voicing both the Mayor and Agnes, while Jodi manipulates the Mayor.
The piper himself is played by a masked actor (Jodi) who is the other puppeteer. This gave me the challenge of creating a space where he could play. In front of the set is obviously a safe place to put and actor, but behind the green slope are a series of ramps for the actor to walk on. The puppetry is done in the trench next to the ramp. Then at the end of the day, the ramps become packing boxes and we load up to go to the next site. This show is retired now. We did it over 700 times.