Shakespeare in the City, Macbeth with Puppets

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Photo via Optimist Theatre

The Pocket Park Puppet Players

The Pocket Park Puppet Players

The Pocket Park Puppet Players provides one of the most oddly satisfying offerings on this year’s outdoor Shakespeare in the City program presented by Optimist Theatre. It’s a 45-minute Macbeth with puppets. The entire cast of Shakespeare’s classic takes the form of slightly unsettling, somewhat adorable, fuzzy Muppet-like head-and-torso puppets in an impressively concise rendering of the classic tragedy. A tiny cast fits the entirety of the drama around a few puppets and a few props. The story makes its way across an intimate outdoor space with an oddly inexplicable grace. Fabian Guerrero plays a haunted, little Macbeth along with roughly half of the cast of puppets. Kas Hesek wields considerable gravitas as Lady Macbeth and the other half of the cast.

The ever-charming Chris Flieller provides wry and witty narration throughout the show that serves as the only straight-ahead scripted comedy in the entire show. The company manages a very tight balance between traditional drama and comedy. For the puppets, the tragic drama is all very real. They’re puppets, though...so they can’t help but make even a towering tragedy seem kinda cute, cuddly and funny. There ARE a few overly comic gags worked into the production. Macbeth’s hallucinatory dagger of the mind takes the form of a metallic, little prop that’s dangled in front of the puppet with a clearly visible classic fishing rod and reel. Banquo takes the form of an adorable, little gnome-like puppet that actually appears small enough to be held as a puppet by Macbeth. Banquo is Macbeth’s puppet literally AND figuratively ... until he shows-up as a ghost later-on. There’s a bit of rather clever puppetry that goes into the ghost of Banquo that adds some adorable creepiness to a deliciously strange production of a classic tragedy.

Pocket Park Puppet Players’ production of Macbeth runs through July 21 at various parks across Milwaukee. Admission is free. For a full list of sites, dates, time and information about other shows being presented on the program, visit optimisttheatre.org.