Tokyo puppeteer Yanomi Shoshinz is a charmingly openhearted performer, but I was only engaged by about half of her material. Happy Go Lucky consists of four puppet routines and Shoshinz starts with the weakest. In it, a Janus-faced female puppet engages in a series of conversations. She shows us the face on one side of her head as she tries to be polite about gifts of sweets, a friend’s new haircut, and so on, then the face on the other side as she expresses her harsher, more honest feelings. A frank haircut response: “What are you supposed to be, a monster?” A polite response: “Wow, that haircut’s … unique.” This isn’t high wit, the format is repeated through several iterations, and it’s capped with an obvious moral: we should strive to find a middle ground, to be honest without being unkind. That’s followed by a piece in which a little puppet made of white mesh fabric dances on a xylophone. It plays “Chopsticks”. Many will enjoy the intended whimsy. My response was more like “So what? I’ve seen this before” — including when Tom Hanks danced on the giant piano in Big. But then Shoshinz bumps things up several notches with her take on “Little Red Riding Hood”, in which her gifts of irreverence and skilled audience interaction come to the fore. Shoshinz gives viewers a choice of three different versions of the character — my bunch chose “realistic modern girl” — then she moves through the audience, getting us to play trees, redistributing possessions, and engaging in cheeky conversations: “How old are you? Wow, that’s impressive. But I’m, like, a thousand years old, so …” The final offering is a meditation on old age and loneliness. It’s sentimental but evocative: the focused stillness of the presentation held my attention.
At the Vancouver Fringe Festival. Remaining performances at Ballet BC: September 9, 5:15 pm; September 10, 8:45 pm; September 11, 7:00 pm; September 12, 10:30 pm; September 13, 5:15 pm; September 14, 3:30 pm; September 15, 8:45 pm. Tickets
(Photo by Takahiro Okubo)
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