Wonderful Joe by Ronnie Burkett Theatre of Marionettes. Photo suppied

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

The old man we meet in Wonderful Joe, the new Ronnie Burnett Theatre of Marionettes play getting its much anticipated world premiere Thursday at Theatre Network, has a magical gift (and a dog).

Call it vision. Joe can see life that no one else sees: people who are invisible, or maybe aren’t real — until Joe sees them. When he gets evicted, he and his dog Mister set forth on a grand adventure in the world, which is to say his urban neighbourhood. Which might explain why the Tooth Fairy, Santa Claus, and Jesus, in their respective off-seasons, are hanging out in a gay bar. And why a troupe of homeless actors are performing a morality play in Joe’s  back alley.

Last week, Burkett, the tallest member of the Ronnie Burkett Theatre of Marionettes, was back in Alberta, and back at the Roxy, a home away from home for his productions since 1990. And the Toronto-based playwright/ actor/ director/ designer/ marionettiste, who grew up in Medicine Hat (and started touring puppet shows at age 14), was awaiting the arrival of his Wonderful Joe cast-mates. They were in transit, somewhere in the hinterland, reposing silently (possibly fretfully, since they’re highly strung) in their special crates, at the mercy of Canadian shipping.

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Their impressively large bi-level theatre, with painted graffiti panels, was already up on the Roxy mainstage. “It’s based on my mentor’s stage from the ‘40s,” says Burkett of the American puppeteer Martin Stevens. “Only we made it bigger. And the coolest part, that no one in the audience will ever see, is the bridge (where Burkett stands) and stage floor and ladders and supports all fold up into their own box.”

The competing divas of Little Willy, chanteuse Jolie Jolie and aging diva Esmé Massengill. The Ronnie Burkett Theatre of Marionettes. Photo supplied.

“That was our challenge, to make a set that would fit into a van,” says Burkett. Which, incidentally, was the lesson of Little Willy — in which the diminutive actors of the Daisy Cabaret “do” Shakespeare — the semi-improvised show Burkett brought to Theatre Network for a short run in February 2023. As he explains, the cargo costs to ship Little Willy back to Canada from its California dates, “just one way, on just one leg of a seven-city tour!,” were an unsustainably hefty $24,000.

Wonderful Joe, says Burkett, “has been in my mind for a long time. It’s taken forever to write, and I don’t know why that is. Maybe because I got used to creating stuff by improvising?” That’s how The Daisy Cabaret, the holiday spectacular Little Dickens, and Little Willy, all three of which Burkett continues to tour to sold-out houses (and could do forever since they’re updated nightly), came to be.

This new piece, which will play Stanford University and the Nimoy Theatre at UCLA after the Edmonton premiere run, was originally going to be Burkett’s emerge-from-the-pandemic moment. In those uncertain, isolating times, “when I didn’t know when theatre was going to open and how big it would be,” as he puts it, “I’d built a little hand puppet show, The Loony Bin, that’s really sweet and funny, and fits in a car so I could drive it, set it up, do the lights myself….. Like when I started in Alberta,” long before he would receive the 2023 Governor General’s Performing Arts Award for lifetime achievement.

A play that would be an heir to Burkett’s ground-breaking signatures, Tinka’s New Dress, Penny Plain, Happy among them: that was the plan. “But coming out of the pandemic presenters requested that instead of a sad show about an old man and his dog, could they have The Daisy Cabaret? And reluctantly I said yes, and did Little Willy. And they were right!” Burkett laughs his distinctively rumbling smoky laugh. “To get people back into the theatre it had to be silly and fun and fun, a room full of laughter. And it turned out to be this huge hit! Stupidly popular!”

But Joe and Mister stayed put in the Burkett mind. He calls Wonderful Joe “a small show,” with “only” 17 marionettes and six hand puppets. It isn’t as dense as Tinka or Penny Plain, says its creator. “It’s a simple, gentle story about Joe, and who he encounters.”

Face sculpting for Wonderful Joe, in Ronnie Burkett’s studio. Photo supplied.

So, back at the gay bar, Joe runs into the Tooth Fairy, “a little body-builder who’s built like a moose. In a tutu,” as Burkett describes. The off-season Santa “is in a too-short Hawaiian shirt and cut-off jeans.” And Jesus “isn’t the Sunday School Jesus”; for one thing he’s brown. And as for the troupe of homeless players in Joe’s back alley, they’re led by Minnie, “the directrice, who’s very old and louder than everyone, and swears, and is funny,” says Burkett.

The people who are real because Joe sees them are a multi-cultural  assortment of urban characters in a multi-colour multi-ethnic city like Toronto or Edmonton — “that’s the city now; you can’t do all-white and be of the city” — the disenfranchised, the lost, the outliers struggling to survive.

“We have an Indigenous character named Baby, a mixed-race trans sex worker, a South Asian guy named Sunny who’s funny, and delivers the news that Joe’s building is being torn down … a moody teenage girl named Getty (Serengeti Levin-Woo)…. They’re all there.”   

“The people Joe meets are invisible to society…. They’re all Joe’s neighbours.” And “we have flashbacks, because I always do, where we learn what happened to child Joe and teenage Joe.”

Mother Nature is in the show too, old and worse for wear, times being what they are. She’s naked (save for a feather boa made of garbage bags). And she’s “the only one in the show who has a song.” Look at Me Now, is a Weimar-flavoured number (“Piaf could have sung it.” says Burkett) by the jazz musician/composer/lyricist John Alcorn, Burkett’s real-life partner, whose original music underscores the show, with additional vocals by Coco Love Alcorn.   

“The band is back together!” says Burkett happily of the creative team, his obsessive perfectionist collaborators, many of whom have worked with him since Penny Plain and before. Lighting designer Kevin Humphrey, for example, and stage manager Crystal Salverda are back; so is Marcus Jamin, a high-precision stringing virtuoso.

shoe moulds for Wonderful Joe, Ronnie Burkett Theatre of Marionettes. Photo supplied

“I made a character named Terri who looks like Terri,” (Terry Gillis, Burkett’s long-time production manager, says Burkett. Kim Crossley, who works at the Stratford Festival, is back to execute the exquisitely detailed costumes Burkett designs. And the shoes are by designer Camellia Koo, who’s actually made tiny jelly sandals for Minnie, perfect Blundstones, penny loafers with, wait for it, to-scale pennies. At a bar near the Burkett puppet studio, they found a kind of beer in a can with copper in the label. “Not a beer I’d care to drink. And we punched out a penny…. Now that’s commitment!” declares Burkett in delight.

Mister, Wonderful Joe, Ronnie Burkett Theatre o Marionettes. Photo supplied.

And back in his supervisory role as the company’s studio “Majordomo” (as credited in the program) is Robbie, the elderly canine member of the Burkett/Alcorn household. Mister, says Burkett, “isn’t physically based on Robbie, but absolutely on my relationship with him.”

“The tone is a sense of home, of loss, and the longing for home,” says Burkett of his newest play. And the through-line, he says, borrows its prevailing metaphor from kintsugi, the Japanese art of repairing broken pottery by filling the cracks with gold. “When people are broken you don’t have to dispose of them, you can mend them with gold — be they old, be they street people, or outcasts. And that’s Joe’s magical ability…. He sees what he believes.”

PREVIEW

Wonderful Joe

Ronnie Burkett Theatre of Marionettes at Theatre Network

Created and performed by: Ronnie Burkett

Music composition and lyrics: John Alcorn

Where: Roxy Theatre, 10708 124 St.

Running: Thursday through April 21

Tickets: theatrenetwork.com

Warning: children under the age of 16 will not be admitted.