A Show of Hands for the Muppets on Broadway

More than four decades after they took Manhattan cinematically, The Muppets finally made it to Broadway. Unfortunately, their sojourn was short-lived: appearing as special guests alongside magician Rob Lake, they lasted only three weeks before the music stopped playing and the lights went unlit, reaching an audience of just over 20,000 in total.

It was an ignominious fate for the beloved puppet troupe, which has starred in a series of TV and film projects dating back to the 1970s, most notably in the backstage-set The Muppet Show and their film debut The Muppet Movie, which even yielded a classic tune, “The Rainbow Connection.” The Muppets have had their ups and down over the years – standard-setting films like The Muppet Christmas Carol being a high and the 2015 TV series The Muppets a low, but the affection that surrounds them seems undimmed, as the cheers that met them as they were revealed in Rob Lake Magic attested.

The Muppets’ first Broadway appearance was topsy-turvy from the start, since they were billed below Lake when surely their decades at the top of the bill everywhere else should have yielded headliner status on the Great White Way as well. Though, to be fair, they were used only as sidekicks in the magic act, and if their stage time reached even 15 minutes of the 80-minute show I’d be very surprised. Even in such a disappointingly small portion, though, it’s interesting that they apparently didn’t produce the marketing bump that surely the folks behind the show had hoped for.

That doesn’t mean that Muppet diehards won’t continue to try to manifest a true Muppet-centric Broadway show, as we – yes, I am among the faithful – have fantasized about for years. But the Rob Lake blip serves to point out the challenge of Muppet Broadway, namely how do they get free of the platforms and masking that shield their human operators from sight to allow for range and variety in the staging.

Unlike some puppeteers – at my age I think of Shari Lewis and Lamb Chop, or ventriloquist Paul Winchell and Jerry Mahoney – we’re not used to seeing people operating The Muppets. They’ve always stood alone, on their own hooves or flippers as the case may be, but mostly in closeup. Unlike cartoons adapted to the stage (such as London’s My Neighbor Totoro), The Muppets are already three-dimensional, so they have more of a purchase on reality. Yet to fully realize them on stage, for them to be moved about with reasonably complex blocking, will take some ingenuity because some of the obvious solutions are unlikely to convey the essence we seek.

Options include:

• The You’re A Good Man, Charlie Brown option: you could simply tell people that undisguised humans are the beloved characters and make no attempt to represent the physical creations we know and love.
• The Lion King option: actors wearing The Muppets, but with their own features revealed as well (as opposed to full body costumes, such as in Muppets on Ice or the ratty off-brand mascot versions in Times Square).
• The Avenue Q option: make the puppeteers fully visible alongside the puppets, freeing the characters to move about the stage at will. But part of the Muppet magic has always been that they exist alongside humans as equals, without being visibly operated by them. See also The War Horse/Life of Pi option.

To be fair, if the material written for them is strong enough, any one of these might fly, because The Muppets don’t wow us simply by their felt-covered presence, but through their distinctive, fully fleshed out characters and the situations in which they are found. Exhibit A: The Muppet Christmas Carol, every bit as good as you may have heard. It works because we see The Muppets as favorite actors taking on roles in the Dickens story, so that it’s not simply Bob Cratchit, but Kermit AS Bob Cratchit that we’re enjoying.

Whatever the creative solution might be, and puppeteers are nothing if not endlessly resourceful in their imaginations and executions, a new one has arisen in the West End this month, with the advent of Paddington the Musical. Early reports are extremely laudatory about the realization of the title bear, achieved in a human-puppet hybrid that sees motion handled by the human actor inside while expressions and voice come from an offstage remote puppeteer. The effect is reportedly highly effective.

Whatever the technology, we deserve to have The Muppets on Broadway, and some of us (ahem) have been waiting almost 50 years for the opportunity, appetite whetted but far from sated by their recent foray, though as proof of concept, we now know that despite their small size, they can play the big houses. Whatever the vehicle – The Muppets in an existing play or musical retrofitted for their charms, or perhaps a Muppet Show vaudeville of the characters alongside human guest stars for a series of sketches and acts – The Muppets have long dreamed of the stage and many of us have dreamed of them there, so it’s about time they get there in a vehicle suited to and deserving of their talents. They can still be sensational, inspirational, celebrational and yes, Muppetational.