By Joe Anuta
Kids often pretend their toys are alive, but the hand-carved marionettes that will arrive in Forest Hills Monday will make that fantasy a reality.
The Katzman Playground in Yellowstone Park will host a city Parks Foundation’s puppet show called “Bessie’s Big Shot,” a modern fairy tale about a cow that finds her niche in life.
“Kids are really into it. For them it is something new,” said Freedome Bradley, director of theater for the foundation. “Hundreds of years ago this is how people told stories. Now people get their entertainment from other sources, like TV or the computer.”
But the old-school show will involve a group of puppeteers who will set up a temporary stage in the park. Four of them will have to juggle all the characters in the show, and the Bessie marionette requires two people to operate it.
The story centers around a circus, and is an original creation written by the foundation. It is designed to be a modern-day fable — for example, Bessie surfs the Internet at one point — but not without delivering a moral message.
“It’s a new type of fairy tale that we’re telling,” Bradley said. “It teaches kids no matter what you want to do, no matter how absurd it is, to stick to it,” he said.
Uplifting messages and tales of adventures are common in many mediums, but if past performances are any gauge, watching a puppet show is especially intriguing for the kids.
“They are looking at it like a toy, and to see it move around by itself and speak — it’s almost like the toys coming to life and telling a story,” Bradley said.
And that is the reason that Barbara Stuchinski, the Community Board 6 member who requested the show, wanted the Puppet Mobile to return for the second year in a row.
“It’s not a television set. It’s a live performance,” Stuchinski said. “As far as the kids are concerned, these little things that are dancing around are dolls.”
Last year, nearly 100 kids sat through an entire performance of “Beauty and the Beat” in the blistering July heat.
“We had 100 kids, easy. And maybe five or six would get up and wander off and say, ‘I want to go home,’” she said. “It’s something they have never seen. It’s a whole new learning experience for them.”
And this performance will literally be nothing the kids have seen before.
The idea for the show came from “Jack and Beanstalk.” When the crew was preparing for the show, they could not finish the puppet of Jack’s cow, according to Bradley.
It sat on the wall for two years before they decided to finish it and make it the star of a new show.
The performance is free and will take place on Yellowstone Boulevard between 68th Avenue and 68th Road at 11 a.m.
Reach reporter Joe Anuta by e-mail at januta@cnglocal.com or by phone at 718-260-4566.
