A Frog, A Monster, and a Dream

I attribute a large portion of my bad eyesight as an adult to sitting too close to the TV during the Muppet Show as a kid. I watched it constantly, soaking in every joke, every song, every "hidey-ho there," until a very clear goal emerged in my mind: someday, I would be on the Muppet Show. No matter what it took, somehow I was going get that dressing room with the star on it, get the "Fifteen seconds to curtain, Mr. Test!" warning from Scooter, and then wait in the wings for the moment that would mean I had finally arrived at the pinnacle of achievement and show business stardom - the moment when Kermit the Frog, waving his arms above his head as only Kermit can, announced to his audience and the world, "It's the Muppet Show, with tonight's special guest, Scott Test! YYAAAAAAAAAYYYYYYYYYYYY!!!!!" (An aside to my reader: take a moment, wherever you are, and say that sentence with your name in it. Bonus points if you do an impression of Kermit when you do. If you don't get chills, you're not a human being.)

Sadly, this heart-warming tale of childish ambition takes place in the early 90s, long after the Muppet Show went off the air, so I never got my shot. But this past year, I got a chance to do something that was just as good, or maybe just a little bit better - I got to help create the music for a brand-new puppet show, and I got to voice the main character in a story that's going to make lots of little kids very happy very, very soon. The show is called Monster Intelligence, and it premiered at the Theater at West Shore Station May 10th at 2 PM.

Before I got the call from David Manley, the brains and puppeteering brawn behind the Up In Arms Puppet Company, I had never really given much thought to what goes into creating a puppet show from scratch. The way David does it, the process goes as follows:

1. Research and Planning. What's the show going to be about? What concepts are we gonna teach the kids? This is a non-trivial part of it, because as students of Jim Henson already know, the show has to work on two levels - bright colors and easy jokes for the kids, subtle word play and clever hidden references for the adults.
2. Script writing. In this show, the writing was handled by a fellow named Alex Ishkanian, who wrote the script, all the lyrics, and the melodies for the songs. Alex provided a fantastic canvas for musical and theatrical creativity in this script - the characters were believable, the lyrics were clever, and the world these monsters inhabit felt very, very real. (If Sesame Street did one of those city mouse/country mouse spinoffs, these woods would be a believable setting.) Several drafts later, we get to...
3. Music and Orchestration. Which is where I came in. I was presented with the current draft of the script and a folder full of melody-only recordings of songs; my job was to flesh the songs out into performance-ready recordings with full orchestration. The writing process was intense, and possibly the most interesting collaboration I have been involved in to date. I would record a rough sketch of what I had in mind, send Alex and David a scratchy MP3, and wait for feedback. The styles were shockingly varied - one piece harkened back to Madonna's "Vogue," while another asked to be Elton John's "Crocodile Rock;" others were more traditional broadway pieces reminiscent of what you'd find in "Hello, Dolly." Once we were finished, there ended up being country, heavy metal, Broadway pop, and what feels like a dozen other styles, all tied together in one massive tour of the monster personalities inhabiting the script. I was thrilled with the way it all turned out, and I had a blast making the demo recordings and doing all the voices for the characters.
4. Rehearsal. Of course you have to rehearse - and it's a very different process than rehearsing a play. I was incredibly fortunate that David asked me to do the voice for Melvin Monster, the main charater of the show; otherwise, my involvement would have ended at step 3. The basics of the rehearsal are the same for doing a regular play - finding the beats of the scene, tweaking line delivery, etc - but with the added component of voice manipulation. What register should your character speak in? Should the voice be gruff or smooth? Many of the characters went through two or three completely different voices before rehearsal ended, and some of them didn't really settle in until recording day. While all of this is going on, David is designing and building puppets, which gives us more inspiration for the voice work.
5. Recording. The most fun, and the most challenging. For the actual show that the public sees, there is no live voice work; the entire show is recorded like a radio play, and the puppets lip-synch with the recording. So the next step is to go into the studio and record the dialogue and the songs. The challenge is to convince the listener that you are not, in fact, a slightly pudgy fellow in his late 20s sitting in a windowless room with a microphone up his nose, but rather a 10-year-old furry purple monster wandering the woods where he lives. Think of it as a session of that "Let's Pretend" game you used to play with Mr. Rogers, except it lasts for about eight hours and is being recorded in high definition by somebody who stops you every few minutes and goes, "That was good - let's get another take. Do it again."
6. Editing, Mixing, and Mastering. A lot of behind-the-scenes stuff involving highly technical audio jargon that makes the average Joe go cross-eyed (myself included, most of the time). This is where you cut out the takes that didn't work, paste in the alternate takes that were better, and twiddle a bunch of dials to make stuff sound spiffy on the recording. By the end of this step, you have the whole show on your iPod, radio-show style, to start the next step.
7. Puppet Rehearsal. Now that the show is done, the puppeteers begin the unenviable task of learning every single line of dialogue, and the cadence of those lines, so as to mimic them perfectly with the puppets. This is incredibly difficult, and it's the primary reason that people were willing to pay Jim Henson so much money to do stuff for their movies. Brian Henson (Jim's son) did an interview with the Nerdist Podcast the other week (which you should really go listen to), where he made the point perfectly - a puppet, by itself, doesn't look alive. The work of a good puppeteer makes it seem alive, which is why people identify with the Muppets; but bad puppeteering breaks the spell, and reminds you that you're looking at some guy with a fistful of felt, rather than a living thing, which is weird and not at all charming.
8. Performance. Get a room full of kids, lower the lights, and jump in. The premier was a fantastic event, and I was really proud to be a part of it, and glad that my mother and brother got a chance to be there. It was also nice to justify to my fiancee why I had been doing funny voices around the apartment for the last six months to practice for this.

I would do another one of these in a heartbeat. It was a great chance to write fun songs with a bunch of really cool guys, and I think the kids at the premier had a really good time. Also, there were cookies at the reception, and I think we can all agree that anything that brings more cookies into the world is a thing worth repeating.

The best part? We're not done yet! The show has two more public performances in the area that you can go see before it goes on tour to schools and community centers around the Hudson Valley - and beyond! For more information, check out the Up In Arms website. And check out this cool gallery of photos from the premiere!

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