ON STAGE
What: Thank You For Being a Friend: The Ultimate Golden Girls Experience
Where: Friday Feb. 15, 8 p.m.
When: McPherson Playhouse
Tickets: $36.50-$41.50 from rmts.bc.ca, by phone at 250-386-6121, or in person at the Royal McPherson box office
Cast members tasked with playing in puppet form characters made famous by the TV series Golden Girls had little to draw on — other than Avenue Q, which pioneered the exposed-puppeteer style.
But that’s a large part of the appeal of Thank You For Being a Friend: The Ultimate Golden Girls Experience, a live touring production that uses puppets in place of Bea Arthur, Betty White, Rue McClanahan and Estelle Getty, the four actors who starred in the show, which ran from 1985 to 1992.
“It’s a difficult thing to get your mind around as a performer,” said Seanna Kennedy, who plays McClanahan’s character, Blanche Devereaux. “Picking up a book or picking up a spoon or trying to eat some cheesecake turns into a very technical moment that requires precision. But you can get away with saying things as a puppet that you can’t really say as a human.”
Kennedy has been with the Canadian touring production for three years, following a stint with a Toronto-based production of Avenue Q, the Tony Award-winning musical comedy featuring profanity-spewing puppets in various stages of undress.
Avenue Q was famous for introducing the art of unconcealed puppeteers. The Muppet Show it wasn’t, but audiences soon grew fond of the radical approach, opening the door for productions such as Thank You For Being a Friend, whose name is based on the show’s theme song.
Adding credibility to this particular version, the puppeteers received training from Mike Peterson, an original puppeteer on Fraggle Rock, a Muppet Show spinoff from 1985.
“It’s a completely different way of expressing yourself on stage,” Kennedy said of the puppeteers in the production, who have become characters unto themselves.
“The human actor and the puppet morph into a single character. The audience gets their information visually from both. They mostly watch the puppet, but they get the facial expressions from the human. They are put together as one thing.”
With its Emmy-winning cast, Golden Girls became one of the most critically acclaimed TV shows during its run. The sitcom about four older women (three widows and one divorcée) living together in a house in Miami, Florida, still resonates, Kennedy said.
“There are diehard Golden Girls fans, which I think makes up the bulk of our audiences, and they are willing to accept it in whatever form is out there. But there are people who like puppets, and people who come because it looks like a fun night. Some have never seen an episode of Golden Girls, and have no idea what they are coming into. They don’t know why it works, but they love it.”
With a set modelled after the one made famous on the TV show, Thank You For Being a Friend has plenty on which to riff, beyond the show’s gaudy 1980s wardrobe. Producers of the touring production recreated the TV show’s living room and kitchen, where most of the show is set, fashioning it with the swinging door used to great comedic effect in the broadcast version.
“It’s such an esthetic — the big palm leaves and rattan furniture,” Kennedy said. “It feels exactly like being in an episode. Real fans really appreciate that.”
It wasn’t a given that Thank You For Being a Friend would succeed when it launched. The Happytime Murders, a critically reviled film by the production studio of Muppets creator Jim Henson, was a box-office bomb after audiences decided Muppets acting vulgar and smoking cigarettes was too much of a stretch.
But producers did their due diligence where the original series was concerned, Kennedy said. That has resonated with newcomers and super-fans alike.
“It feels like an extended episode of the series. But the thing about Golden Girls is that you could watch it as stand-alone episodes. Our shows work as that, too. If you don’t know Golden Girls, you will still enjoy the show. The archetypes are in there — you understand who everybody is very quickly.”
Diehard fans are often on the lookout for inside references in the touring production, Kennedy said. “If you are a fan of the show, you are going to find a thousand things that are pulled out of the show. If you know the show really, really well, you’re going to recognize some of the quips and jokes and scenarios.”
