Theater

Ugly Duckling story is told with paper puppets, music

Actor/puppeteers Rivka Kuperman and Paige Carpenter prepare projections — upside down and in reverse — for The Ugly Duckling at the Arkansas Arts Center Children’s Theatre.
Actor/puppeteers Rivka Kuperman and Paige Carpenter prepare projections — upside down and in reverse — for The Ugly Duckling at the Arkansas Arts Center Children’s Theatre.

The Arkansas Arts Center Children's Theatre season opener breaks new ground at least five ways.

• It's a new adaptation, "devised and directed" by Children's Theatre company member Katie Campbell, of The Ugly Duckling, the Hans Christian Andersen tale about a youngster distinctly out of step in her current environment who eventually discovers the proper way to spread her wings.

The Ugly Duckling

7 p.m. Friday, 2 and 7 p.m. Saturday, 2 p.m. Sunday through Sept. 6, Arkansas Arts Center Children’s Theatre, MacArthur Park, East Ninth and Commerce streets, Little Rock.

Production sponsors: Philip R. Jonsson Foundation, Jim Henson Foundation. Season sponsor: Arkansas Blue Cross Blue Shield. Fall season sponsor: Centennial Bank

Tickets: $10, $8 for Arts Center members

(501) 372-4000

ArkansasArtsCenter.…

• It's a puppet-shadow play, involving three actor-puppeteers, nearly 100 paper puppets and a pair of overhead projectors.

• It involves a new, original music score by Jessica Drake Mosher, played not by the Arts Center's usual "house" ensemble (piano, bass and sometimes percussion) but by a 15-piece "pit band" from the Arkansas Symphony Youth Orchestra, with Geoffrey Robson on the podium.

• Campbell is producing the show with a Jim Henson Foundation Family Grant, which celebrates innovation and excellence in puppetry, and which made it possible for Campbell to commission Mosher's music.

• It's the first of three Studio Shows, a new Children's Theatre series designed to "provide space to explore new ideas and themes, appeal to a different audience than Main Stage shows and intended to showcase actors and ideas over scenery and properties," according to a news release. (The other two: Apollo: To the Moon, Oct. 9-11, and The Odyssey, Feb. 19-28.)

The Ugly Duckling, opening Friday and running through Sept. 6, follows a young girl (Aleigha Morton) on a journey of self-discovery and personal transformation. Actor/puppeteers Paige Carpenter and Rivka Kuperman, doubling with her usual role as production stage manager, are mostly behind the scenes operating the projectors.

"It's been a labor of love for about two years," says Campbell, a North Carolina native who has been a Children's Theatre company member, off and on, for eight years. (Later this season, Campbell will be directing Schoolhouse Rock, Live! at the Arts Center and James and the Giant Peach at Wayne State University in Detroit.)

She took two years off to pursue a Master of Fine Arts degree in directing theater for young audiences at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. That's where she first came up with this idea.

"It happened out of necessity," she says. "I needed a story that could be told with very few actors and a minimalist set in order to share a tour van with another student.

"I knew that I was going to be adapting The Ugly Duckling, and was trying to figure out what was the avenue I would take to do that. And I came across a book titled The Amazing Paper Cuttings of Hans Christian Andersen [by Beth Wagner Brust]. I used that as inspiration for the piece.

"It was fashionable in that day to do paper cuttings -- silhouettes. Sometimes he'd be sitting down telling a story and paper-cutting at the same time. I thought shadow puppetry would be a really great way to use that element of paper."

When she came across Manual Cinema (manualcinema.com), a Chicago company that uses overhead projectors to create shadow puppet shows that sometimes imitate animation, that gave her the technique she needed.

"There are two overhead projectors and a screen, and everything's from rear projection," she says. "So the puppeteers are working upside down and in reverse. Which is really hard.

"The third actor/puppeteer is interacting with the shadow world behind the screen as well. She's like a human puppet. She's interacting with this puppet world. Sometimes we see her in her puppet form; sometimes we see her in her human form."

Weekend on 08/27/2015

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