Review: LEONARDO! A WONDERFUL SHOW ABOUT A TERRIBLE MONSTER at Children's Theatre Company

Have you ever wondered what it would be like to see behind the curtain of your favorite kid’s tv show? A world filled with puppets, monsters, and zany sound effects. If so, the Children’s Theatre Company has the perfect show for you. Leonardo! A Wonderful Show about a Terrible Monster is a fantastically fun retelling of the two books that inspired it.

Utilizing hundreds of puppets, creative camera angles, and live actors, the audience is given a rare look at how movies and television shows are made. The actors and puppeteers use a variety of mediums to bring the story to life, such as 3 ring binders full of different pages that provide the backgrounds for the paper puppets to be used upon, the pages are flipped and new and exciting puppets are seemingly brought to life before our very eyes. Not to mention the live puppets that are used to interact with human actors throughout the piece.

The true magic comes in the form of a screen that hangs above the performances space where the cameras that are aimed at the action on stage are shown, providing the audience the ability to see a movie that is being made in real time.

It is a benefit to the audience that the show is performed in such an intimate space because everyone within the theater has the ability to feel as though they are a part of the story telling. As the actors break the fourth wall at times, we never feel disengaged from the action being performed in from of us.

A highlight of the show is that it becomes a choose your own experience kind of performance. The audience is allowed to choose where to view the show at any given moment. Whether focusing on the actors and the ways that they are bringing the story to life, or choosing to watch the show as a movie on the screen, or a mix of the two (which is definitely recommended).

While there are four actors in the company, only two of them provide the voices for the characters, Lily Emerson who takes on the bulk of the voices (to tremendous affect) and the sole musician on stage, alongside, Leonard’s puppeteer Kevin Michael Wesson who is beyond talented as a puppeteer and voice actor.

It is a marathon for the four actors as they don’t just have to act but also provide all of the technical elements for the production. It just goes to show how much work is put into every television show, film, and even homemade video that we see and consume each day.  Leonardo! A Wonderful Show about a Terrible Monster doesn’t just deliver a great message to the audience but it also provides an education of how teamwork and collaboration can come together to create something so special.

Whether it is the young ones who are current viewers of shows such as Sesame Street, the middle school aged kids who are curious how these shows are made, all the way up to the adults who feel a sense of nostalgia of days gone by watching shows themselves or with their own children. It is one of the most joyful experiences that all ages will enjoy.

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