FIVE GOOD REASONS TO SEE…THE JUNIOR MIGHTY LITTLE PUPPET SHOW!

1. It has puppets!

Like the title suggests The Junior Mighty Little Puppet Show has puppets in it
but these puppets are like nothing you’ve seen before.  This brand-new show is specifically designed for kids, but parents will be sure to have a brilliant time as well!

What’s unique about our puppets? They have been custom-built by the extremely talented people at The Puppet Workshop specifically for improvised puppetry.

After making their debut at last years’ Melbourne International Comedy Festival with a more adult orientated format, our puppets (called The Ritas) are thrilled to be back for MICF 2017.  The Ritas are brightly coloured and blank-faced, and we have large selection of eyes & noses that can be attached and removed to The Ritas whenever – and however – we want!

This means we can create new and exciting puppet characters for every performance.

2. Kids can create the characters!

That’s right, the Ritas were specifically created so new puppet characters could be created before each scene. In The Junior Mighty Little Puppet Show the audience will be able to see the characters built before their very eyes, and have the opportunity to vote on their favourite eyes and noses to create characters from!

Some lucky kids will even be able to put the eyes and noses right on to invent the new puppet faces. We wanted our puppets have the potential to be just as spontaneous as the scenes they will be in.

3. It’s a choose your own adventure style show

Not only does the audience play a role in creating the characters, you also get to choose which story you want to see through to the end! Audience members get to vote on which character’s story you want to see continue at each stage, and watch our improvisers build a narrative around that choice!

4. We have an amazing troupe of improvising puppeteers!

For this show we handpicked performers from the Melbourne Comedy and Improvisation community who have experience with puppetry.

It takes an intensely focused performer to improvise while operating a puppet and it takes a very humble, generous performer to improvise in a scene with one.

We’ve really lucked out.

For MICF 2017 we have: Amanda Knights, Caitlin Yolland, Corey Glamuzina, David Innes, Hallie Goodman, Jaime G. Cerda, Jaklene Vukasinovic, Petra Elliott and Scott McAteer

 

5. We have a sensational host!

Our amazing host Rob Lloyd has been working professionally as an actor, comedian & improviser for over 15 years.   Rob is also the star of the ABC Me educational adventure series Bertram Poppingstock: Problem Solver.  Rob is the Artistic Director of The Mighty Littles and is excited to host The Junior Mighty Little Puppet Show.

The Junior Mighty Little Puppet Show is on at The Melbourne Town Hall from April 1 at 2.15

https://www.comedyfestival.com.au/2017/shows/the-junior-mighty-little-puppet-show

 

 

5 Good Reasons to See The Mighty Little Puppet Show

1. We’re back!

We were actually quiet surprised when our little show had quiet a successful world premiere at this year’s Melbourne International Comedy Festival. We had wonderful reviews, great feedback and really supportive audiences. So it seemed only natural to bring the show back for Melbourne Fringe
and at The Butterfly Club, one of Melbourne’s best fringe theatre and cabaret venues.

2. It has puppets!

If you missed us at MICF The Mighty Little Puppet Show has puppets in it
but these puppets are like nothing you’ve seen before.

What’s unique about our puppets is that they are custom-built, by the extremely talented people at The Puppet Workshop.

Our puppets (called The Ritas) are brightly coloured and blank-faced, we’ve also had large selection of eyes & noses build that can be attached and removed to The Ritas whenever we want.

Meaning we can create new and interesting puppet characters for every performance.

3. It is an improvised show!

Yup
every show will be improvised so no two shows will be the same. The Ritas were specifically created because The Mighty Little Puppet Show is completely improvised.

We wanted our puppets have the potential to be just as spontaneous as the scenes they will be in.

4. We have a NEW stellar line-up of Special Guest Stars!

We were fortunate to have some of Melbourne’s most respected, popular & experienced performers guest star with the Ritas for our Comedy Festival season.
This Fringe is no different, we have assembled a stellar line-up of stars from the Melbourne Comedy scene, who are ready to raise hell with our puppet crew.

Our guests include:

-Lliam Amor, Elly Squire, Ross Daniels, Damian Callinan, Dilruk Jayasinha and Lauren Bok.

5. We have NEW members to our amazing troupe of impro-puppeteers!

We are very excited to welcome three new cast members to this Fringe season.
We have:
-Hallie Goodman (an puppeteer & improviser from New York how has worked with The Improv Conspiracy).
-Amanda Knights (A regular performer with Impro Melbourne & First Draft Theatre).
-Danny Alder (An actor/improviser who was seen in Eastenders & was a regular performer with impro/comedy troupe The Crew).
They will be joining our senior Mighty Little troupe members who will be returning for Fringe duties: Scott McAteer, Caitlin Yolland, Petra Elliott & Rob Lloyd.

The Mighty Little Puppet Show is at The Butterfly Club from Monday Sept 19 to 25 – 10pm. No show Friday.

Tickets can be purchased at: https://thebutterflyclub.com/show/the-mighty-littles

For more info: https://melbournefringe.com.au/program?event/the-mighty-little-puppet-show/9f769e57-2b1a-4c3c-963a-f039b1dfeba8

The Big HOO-HAA! – 24 Hour HOO-HAA!

By Elyce Phillips 

It’s 6am at Czech House.  Six bleary-eyed improvisers are up on stage, looking for suggestions from an equally bleary-eyed audience. Many have fallen, some have only just begun and there are still 14 hours to go.

For this year’s Fringe, The Big HOO-HAA! threw all their comedic eggs into one proverbial basket and put on a 24 hour show. It’s something we’ve seen at festivals in the past. The 24 hour show has become something like an extreme sport in the comedy world – and the HOO-HAA team’s performance was up there with the greatest of endurance athletes.

Team members of the Hearts and the Bones rotated through the night in hourly blocks, with ten minute breaks in between. For every hour you stayed, you got a dollar back from the $24 ticket price – a moment heralded on the hour with the jingling of a bowl of gold coins and a burst of an on-theme tune like ‘Gold Digger’.

The event began with HOO-HAA’s usual two hour program, with Liam Ryan on hosting duties. Ryan was an absolute stand-out through the 24 hours, somehow remaining incredibly witty right to the end. The man is an absolute natural as a host.

From there, the show took a step into different territory, changing up the theme with each hour-long block. At 10pm, there were games based on stories told by Nova’s Deano. At 12pm, an improvised musical.

At 3am, we hit Danger Hour and things started to get a bit weird. HOO-HAA’s usual games were beefed up with a series of increasingly painful punishments. We saw a strip edition of Doo Doo Ron Ron. The poor players who found themselves Desperate and Dateless (Ryan and Michelle Nussey) had pegs clipped to their bodies every time they made an incorrect guess. There was even a moment of genuine danger as Scott McAteer slightly choked on an unreasonable amount of bread in a game called Carbo Loading.

In the next couple of hours, the weirdness continued. We had Free Love at 4pm, in which team members paired up and did whatever they wanted for 15 minutes, resulting in an extremely complicated piece by Matt Saraceni and Wyatt Nixon-Lloyd about the invention of closed captioning. Then it was a mega round of My Game, My Game, where we saw such gems as ‘Multi-Cluedo’, ‘DolphinHospital’ and ‘It’s Banjo Patterson’s Birthday!’.

By 6pm, brains were beginning to break. I think everyone’s mindset was best summed up by Saraceni during a game of 181, in which the players had to come up with one-liner beginning “181 somethings walk into a bar.” On the theme of spiders, Saraceni stepped forward and said, “Let me give you a little insight into how things are inside my head. 181 spiders walk into a bar. Something about a web?” With many in the audience just as sleep-deprived as the players, that simple statement was perhaps the funniest moment of the hour. We were all suffering together.

How they managed to get through the whole 24 hours, I have no idea. The sleep deprivation was enough of a challenge for those of us in the audience. In the end, only four audience members stuck it out for the full 24 hours, but many more popped in and out over the duration.

It’s an absolute testament to the skills of the HOO-HAA! team that they created an experience that was genuinely hilarious for the full 24 hours. There’s no sense in pointing out the stars in the group – they were all fabulous. Go and see them in action for yourself, perhaps at their saner two-hour show.

The Big HOO-HAA! Perform every Thursday at 8pm at The Portland Hotel.

http://www.hoohaamelbourne.com.au/