At The Cultch until December 22, 2018
Tickets from $24 at 604-251-1363 or tickets.thecultch.com
Posted December 5, 2018
Oh, Ronnie Burkett, Vancouver loves you. You’re naughty but nice. You’re a grownup who plays with dolls – well, marionettes, actually – and we hope you always will. And I bet those dozens and dozens of exquisitely hand-crafted puppets quietly hanging in the wings of your little theatre-within-a-theatre hope you keep pulling their strings forever because what will become of them if you don’t? Where would they be without you?
A vaudeville puppet show with various acts – different every night, The Daisy Theatre has been around for a while. But at the request of The Cultch, Burkett introduced his pint-sized vaudevillians to Charles Dickens and created Little Dickens, premiering at The Cultch back in 2017.
You will not be saying “Bah, humbug” any time during this show. You will be singing “Deck the Halls” along with tiny Edna Rural, the Prairie widow who, for the occasion, has made a special Christmas tree dress complete with garlands, balls and lights. The dress requires plugging in and unplugging, giving Burkett the opportunity to tell the ‘volunteer’ from the audience something Burkett says he imagines the volunteer guy has never heard from a woman before: “Would you please turn me off?” And up her skirt he goes, to pull the extension cord that lights Edna up.
There’s a load of bawdy humour – never coarse, always funny – as Esmé Massengill, a scrawny, fading diva, is visited (like Scrooge) by the ghosts of Christmas Past, Present and Future. And, oh, was Esmé bad as she clawed her way up the career ladder.
On opening night, Burkett, suffering from a cold, confessed “anything could happen tonight” but invited us to “be acoustic with each other” this evening. His cold, no doubt, led him to reference what he called the Shoppers Drug Mart “Holy Trinity”: NeoCitran, Benylin and Vicks VapoRub. There were times when he had to call on Crystal up in the booth for her assistance which endeared him even more to the welcoming audience. And there also were times when an adlib cracked him – as well as us – up. Cold or no cold, Burkett is quick and razor sharp with the quip.
Always au courant , Burkett has Esmé rebuff two unemployed actor-puppets looking for a handout with, “Is there no dinner theatre? Is there no children’s theatre? Surely there’s something in Richmond” – which, indeed, there is.
Opening the show and getting us in the Christmas spirit before Dickens’ tale takes over is Miss Dolly Wiggler singing the innuendo-rich, “There’s a Claus Stuck in My Chimney” while doing a strip tease and shaking her bare, tight little papier-mâché buns at us.
Esmé, in her peignoir, settles down for the night – as did Scrooge – after lengthily and hilariously adjusting herself on her chaise longue. And then the ghostly spirits arrive (not Vodka, Gin and Vermouth, as she hoped) and the tale unfolds with a few additions not imagined by Dickens. Jesus, for example, arrives singing, “Happy Birthday, to me” and talking about getting together with his family – but that’s “only at Easter”. And there’s a Sinatra-style crooner who sings, “What Are You Doing New Year’s Eve?” and Dinah Dooyah with her ample, shaking hips, her Hawaiian-style muumuu and her ‘volunteer’ pool boy.
But there’s also the Dickens’ regulars: Bob Cratchit asking for Christmas day off and nephew Fred with his offer of Christmas dinner with him and his family, including Tiny Tim. Esmé scoffs at the offer of what she believes will be “tofurkey and boxed wine” but is happy, in the end, to have it.
If you’ve never seen Burkett perform before, this is how he works: he is visible the whole time. Elevated above a little stage with curtains, he manipulates the strings, sings and voices the marionettes. He moves some set pieces, like the wonderful band of puppet musicians that he keeps in a trunk and that are animated by an audience member turning a crank. We see Burkett in the shadowy backstage-within-a-stage choosing his puppets and bringing them forward. And so we experience the story through two lenses: the marionettes and Ronnie Burkett himself. There are times when you simply don’t know where to look because the puppeteer and the puppets are equally enchanting.
Apart from Burkett himself, always the star of Burkett’s theatre is Schnitzel, a tiny androgynous fairy creature waiting to get wings. As sad as any Tiny Tim in any Christmas Carol you’ve ever seen, is Schnitzel lurching onstage with the aid of a tiny wooden crutch, falling and struggling to get up.
Little Dickens is not for children but it’s really, really terrific entertainment for open-minded, open-hearted adults. Dickens might be rolling in his grave or, like Scrooge with his eye on the cash register, he might be applauding Burkett and The Cultch’s sure hit at the box office.