At The Cultch until January 29, 2023
Tickets from $35 at thecultch.com or 604-251-1363
Posted January 13, 2023
“Where would you find two shirtless guys and four dancing pricks except at The Cultch?”, quips puppeteer extraordinaire Ronnie Burkett. Where, indeed.
Little Willy is Burkett’s nod – with a lot of nudge, nudge, wink, wink – to the Bard’s Romeo and Juliet and Little Willy is, of course, wooden marionette William Shakespeare.
As Burkett explained on opening night (packed with fans and they are legion), he had tossed the idea out to Cultch artistic director Heather Redfern and the next thing he knew, he was doing the show. “I’m just gonna make a lotta shit up”, he warned us. But when Burkett makes stuff up, it’s always funny, risky, raunchy, sweet and endearing. In Little Willy, the songs – and there are a few of them – are not improvised nor is the arc of the tale of the star-crossed lovers Romeo and Juliet: boy meets girl, they fall in love, they die. But the rest of the show feels like a free-for-all with Burkett responding to the audience in the moment.
Little Willy is a play-within-a-play with some of the old Daisy Theatre favourites – including scrawny, aging diva Esmé Massengill – and old crone Lillian Lunkhead vying for the role of Juliet.
Cast as the Nurse is Mrs. Edna Rural and, “Lord love a duck”, she’s charged with giving 14-year-old Juliet advice on her wedding night. Edna is an old favourite: a widowed prairie wife – the kind of farmer’s wife whom you imagine has made thousands of hearty loaves of bread in the woodstove and prepared lunch for hundreds of hungry farm hands. But Burkett gives her some more backstory this time around as she relates Stanley Rural’s wooing of her following a dance in Turnip Corners. Basically, after no courtship at all, he asks, “If you’re interested [in marrying him], let me know by Sunday.” But it turns out to be a long and good marriage and her advice to Juliet is, “Don’t be afraid.”
Back for another turn is Jesus Christ: a long-haired, pale, totally irreverent marionette whose parting shot is, “I’ll see you at Easter but I hate Easter with a passion.”
For the Ronnie Burkett first-timers a little explanation: there’s a small ‘theatre’ and when the red velvet curtains are pulled back, a stage is revealed above which Burkett is stationed. His handcrafted wooden puppets – perhaps 20 inches tall – hanging quietly in the shadows down both sides of the stage where they patiently await their turn. Burkett is visible the whole time and he appears like a giant amidst his tiny characters. His puppets talk and sing and dance – Dolly Wiggler even does a hilarious striptease right down to her pasties; another sweeps the floor with both hands on a tiny, tiny broom. Yet another plays a guitar or maybe it’s a lute. The audience is caught between watching Burkett as well as his little creations; all are completely rivetting.
Credit: Alejandro Santiago
It’s a physical, vocal, theatrical workout and, yes, Burkett breaks a sweat. And so do his ‘volunteers’ who find themselves doing hilarious things like taking their shirts off in front of a roomful of strangers. But bawdy as he is, Burkett is a gentleman and an expert at reading how far he can push those he’s plucked from the audience. Sometimes, however, it’s touch and go, so to speak, as in the Romeo and Juliet crypt scene.
But the real magic of Burkett for me is how he can make me laugh and bring me close to tears. Many of us have had to memorize Juliet’s balcony scene: “But, soft! what light through yonder window breaks . . . “ and have heard those classic lines from Bard on the Beach and Stratford to Studio 58 and beyond. But give the lines to tiny, adorable, gender non-specific Schnitzel who wants, naturally, to play both Romeo and Juliet and the words ring as sweet and true as any I have ever heard. Schnitzel is surely the true heart and soul of Ronnie Burkett.
It’s no wonder Burkett was awarded the Order of Canada in 2019; he’s a national treasure who traces his art back to the Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia’s subversive, underground, so-called ‘daisy’ puppet shows of Josef Skupa. Ronnie Burkett’s Theatre of Marionettes is also subversive, irreverent, small ‘p’ political and uproariously entertaining. Some tickets are still available but not for long. Don’t miss out.