Imaginary Worlds - Behind The Felt

Episode Date: August 24, 2016

In the continuation of my behind-the-scenes mini-series, I revisit the first interview I ever recorded for Imaginary Worlds -- the puppeteer Stephanie D'Abruzzo, who is best known for performing as Kate Monster in the Broadway musical Avenue Q. I interviewed Stephanie for an episode that compared puppets to computer generated characters, but she had so many interesting things to say about the craft of puppeteering which didn't fit into that early episode. In other words, she can tell you how to get to Sesame Street. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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You're listening to Imaginary Worlds. I'm Eric Belinsky. This is the second half of my late summer mini-series where I pull the curtain back on this podcast and talk a little bit about my process. Every so often people ask me why my episodes aren't longer because, you know, a lot of other podcasts, an episode can run an hour or an hour and a half. But as you heard in the last episode, I used to do public radio stories that were five or six minutes long. And if I got to do a longer piece that was maybe eight or nine minutes, I sometimes got a call the night before the show aired saying they're running long, they have trimmed every other segment of the show. Now I've got to lose 90 seconds out of my story,

which would be painful because that 90 seconds would be chock full of ideas and clips and tape that I really liked. And yes, we still use the word tape, even though these are digital audio files. So now to have a podcast where I can say, yeah, I think this episode should be 18 minutes or 25 minutes feels luxurious to me. But I'm still a public radio guy, and my instinct is always to trim and trim anything that feels extraneous to the overall flow of the narrative. So even for this podcast, sometimes stuff ends up on the proverbial cutting room floor that I really liked. Prime example, Stephanie DiBrusso. I interviewed her for my second episode, which was called When Human Met Creature. I looked at whether a puppet or a CG character, a computer-generated character, was more believable. And besides Stephanie, I interviewed my friend Charles, who was a digital animator.

But Stephanie had so much more to say about her career as a puppeteer and what it was like to work on Sesame Street, which I loved, but the tape just felt like it belonged in a different episode. So I'm very happy to have the opportunity to play it for you now. Now, if her name, Stephanie DiBruzzo, sounds familiar to you, you might be a fan of Avenue Q, the Broadway musical about puppets who had very adult problems. She developed and performed the character Kate Monster. So why don't I have a boyfriend? It sucks to be me. Me too.

It sucks to be me. It sucks to be me. It sucks to be Brian. At first, Avenue Q was initially conceived as a television show. Oh, was it? Yeah, it was. The first title was Avenue Q Children's Television for 20-somethings. And then it became very obvious early on that it was best done as a stage show.

And I was one of the first believers in that and when we did the first readings of it we didn't try to hide the puppeteers we were at music stands we just held the puppets and everybody said what a bold creative choice that was to show the puppeteers and we all went thank you because there had been no intention to show the puppeteers until we realized, oh my gosh, our faces are going to be the subtitles for the characters' emotions. character's journey is we had to make you believe right off the bat that even though you could see the puppeteer that that puppet was 100 real that we were committed to it that it was a real character because otherwise you're not going to feel for those characters when their hearts get broken you're not going to follow you're not going to care about princeton's journey you're not going to care about kate monster i asked stephanie when did she know she wanted to be a puppeteer

for her profession? I was at Northwestern University. I was a radio, TV, film major after sort of trying to run away from acting a little bit because I had done a great theater program in high school

that was very method heavy. I went to the Pennsylvania Governor's School for the Arts. And when I was in college, several things happened. I enjoyed working in production but I still enjoyed performing and I was always doing character voices and I was always writing but I didn't want to be a writer and singing but I wasn't sure if I wanted to pursue being a vocalist and I wanted to find a way for all these things to come together and then at the the same time, when you're in college,

you revert back to your childhood and you start rewatching the Warner Brothers cartoons and Schoolhouse Rock and Sesame Street and the Muppets. And I began looking at the Muppets with new eyes as from a place of performance. And I began realizing these guys are doing amazing things. Nobody thinks about that. You don't really know the names of the people behind, you know, underneath the characters unless you read credits. Or when I was a kid, I used to have Sesame Street records and I would read the backs of them and see names. But all that started coming back to me and I thought, wow, what a great way to play anything I wanted to play without it mattering what I looked like. So I built the crappiest looking puppets you ever saw in your life.

I had no idea what I was doing and my friends helped me produce a project and that's how I sort of learned. And I specifically learned the technique by watching Sesame Street, Muppets, whatever I could get my hands on. Looking back now, if you were to sort of look back and cringe,

you go, oh my God, why did I do that? Why did I think that that was right? Or would you think, huh, I really kind of got that pretty early on? What would you think now if you could look back on that? There are a lot of rookie mistakes that I made. You know, when I'm walking, I'm taking too many steps. I was flapping my mouth too wide all the time. I wasn't varying the mouth opening when I'm talking. But a lot of it was really fine-tuning stuff. And I learned from the best. I mean, once I started working with the Muppet performers at Sesame Street and doing other Muppet projects and non-Muppet puppetry projects

back when there were other puppet shows on TV. So what is that? Is the training like they just kind of throw you in there? Or do they have to give you some kind of Muppet boot camp before letting you go on? There was a time when there was a lot going on, when all of the Muppet characters were under the control of the Jim Henson Company, where there would be auditions. And then there would be these things called workshops where you would kind of work on things, but it was more of, they were kind of also auditions. You kind of tweak things and learn things, but it wasn't really a boot camp.

And sometimes you'd get thrown into something. I mean, mostly Sesame Street has become a major training ground for new Muppet performers because it had the most consistent schedule. And back when I started, they were taping six or seven months out of the year. That production schedule's decreased quite a bit. But there was always going to be a day where there was a group scene.

So newbies could be thrown in the back or into a right hand or doing a butterfly in the background so that you're on the floor in a professional setting, but you're not doing heavy lifting yet. And you sort of move up from there. Mr. Count, does that mean counting school is over? No, no, no, no. It is not over till the bell rings. One, one rings.

And rings, two rings. And rings, three rings. So when you were seeing somebody, somebody that, you know, was incredibly experienced, and you thought, oh my God, this person's incredible. I'm learning so much by watching them. What are some of the things that just seem magical that they were doing? Well, it's the effortless quality that appeals to me the most. And that's what I love the most about doing it is you really let yourself go. You really immerse yourself in it. You can't think about being self-conscious at all. And a lot of times, even though it might not make it to tape, in between takes, there's a lot of play back and forth. Really?

So you're improvising in character, and sometimes it's appropriate, and sometimes it's very inappropriate. But that's how you learn to create new characters, or that's how existing characters develop new relationships. Really? That writers might not have thought of before. Yeah, yeah.

Play is a really big part of the Muppet world. But it's funny, the thing that always amazes me, like, when a puppet's on a talk show, that to me is one of the most mind-blowing things. Like, I saw Kermit was on Jimmy Fallon the other day. Yeah. And the naturalness of that interaction is kind of mind-blowing to me. And, you know, Steve's been doing Kermit for, gosh, almost 24 years, 23 years now. And he knows how Kermit would respond to most instances. Now, yes, a lot of times there are pre-interview questions and sometimes there will be gags written for characters. of what Muppet performers do is off the cuff and they're so in tune with their characters because it's just one person playing that character so they know if he's been on Fallon before he can make a reference to to the past and it's not just about a joke it's about the character comedy you're on back in 19 is

it 1956 it was way back there. Yeah. You know? And I like to come back every 70, or maybe every 58 years. Yeah. They're very, very cool. You were on the original. You were on with Jack Parr. I was.

I've been on with all the J names. Jack, Johnny, Jay, and Jimmy. Yeah. Sounds like an Irish rap group. That's very strange. Yeah. Sounds like an Irish rap group. That's very strange. Yeah. Sounds like an Irish rap group. Yeah, it is a good one. You know, in animation, we always talked about thinking poses.

Poses where it looked like the characters were thinking. But I'm always fascinated when an actor is talking and the Muppet's supposed to be listening. Yes. That's what's so interesting to me is how actively the Muppet listens. Yeah, because the worst thing you can do is have a puppet go dead, which is to be stock still. Now, being stock still can actually be used comedically, but that has to be an active choice. One of the one rookie mistake is for when a puppet's not talking to go dead. So it's being engaged. It's tilting the head. It's because we have to we have to cheat. The eyes relationship to a camera lens tells you everything.

If a puppet's eyes are just above a lens, it can give a thoughtful look. If it is right in the camera lens, it can be deadpan or, you know, direct address. If it's just below the camera lens, it can be deadpan or you know direct address if it's just below the camera lens it can be sad or pensive these are things that you wouldn't think about unless you really watched it and if you watch it you'll see it hmm you'll see it constantly so we use those angles to do things with puppet eyes that human actors don't even think twice about what they're doing with their eyes. That's wild. Yeah. Huh.

Yeah, the eyes and the mouth and the head in general are the most important things to a Muppet-type puppet. There are people who for years insisted that Miss Piggy would bat her eyelashes at Kermit. Now, Miss Piggy never had an eye mechanism that would make her eyelids open and close, but it was all in the way Frank Oz would lean the pig and tilt the head and make it seem as though the audience would fill in those blanks, the way they fill in the blanks with animation.

And also, too, in terms of the mouth, I'm sure probably one of the rookie mistakes must be to open and close the mouth too much. Oh, yeah, that, and also, we'll do it on the wrong, close the mouth too much. Oh, yeah, that and also we'll do it on the wrong. Close the mouth on the word. That's a lot of people's instinct is to close their hand on the word. A, B, C, D. I see a lot of kids start to learn to puppeteer, even adults.

If they're imitating, you know, how on sitcoms people will make a joke like, meow, meow, meow, meow, meow, and they'll have a little puppet hand up. If you look a lot of the time, they're going, meow,'re closing on the word. Well, if you're speaking as an adult, if you're speaking, I mean, if you're speaking as a person, words are coming out when your mouth is open. So that's the first thing you learn with lip sync is the puppet's mouth, aka your hand, has to be open on the syllables. And sometimes you don't hit, you don't flap your mouth on every single syllable, especially if you're speaking fast. But that said, different puppeteers have different styles.

And some puppeteers are very, very precise. And some are very, very loose. And some are every spectrum in between. And if you look at Jim Henson's early puppetry, it was really loosey goosey and great. And you just weren't thinking about it. And Frank Oz came in, he was a little more precise. And Jerry Nelson came in, he was a little somewhere in between. And Kevin Clash came in and he was ultra, ultra, ultra precise. He would do a thing where he'd end a word and have the mouth open, just like hang open right after the word was over. Dorothy wants to know, how do you hop on one foot?

Oh, good question, Dorothy. Let's ask Mr. Noodle. Mr. Noodle! It's anything we can do to fool the audience into believing that this thing that we all know is not alive is actually alive. After the break, we'll talk about why a simple puppet made out of felt and fur and plastic can feel more believable than a very elaborate computer-generated character. character. Now, as far as animation goes, I think there are some things that, I think gravity is a big part of it. Like, just getting that weight of a human as a CG character is walking to get that feeling of gravity.

Whereas we don't have to worry about that. Gravity helps us. All the technology in the world can't really portray. You can put up all the green blocks with dots on them. But if you're patting Grover on the head, there's just no way to replicate that in a really, truly believable way with CG. It's getting there. Believe me, I know that. But there's also a look on the human's face who's doing that rubbing on the head.

They know. They're right there with Grover. Here it is, Sarah Jessica. I have brought you big. Um, super... Oh, thank you. I hate to tell you this, but this is not big.

But of course it is. It is a big pumpkin. No, no, no. That's right. It is. Well, it's kind of big. Well, it was short notice. You're right. You can't fake it. When you're there, if an actor is interacting with Grover, and they're looking, even though Grover has plastic eyes, they're looking at those eyes and they're reacting to that thing. And I'll tell you the other thing that's harder for an animated character to do with a human being is ad lib. Right. You'd have to have the voice performer there on set, but they can only ad lib lines.

They can't ad lib a reaction. You know, Grover can give a hubba wah. Yeah. Or they can duck down or they can, you know, tickle their, you know, tickle them or kiss them or give them a hug out of the blue. Something that's unscripted. And those are the best moments that come from Muppets in Sesame Street. All of those things. Or make a face.

from Muppets and Sesame Street, all of those things, or make a face, you know, Kermit reacting to something that Fallon says and making it that, you know, that crunched up face that only Kermit can. Oh, you know, this is so interesting to me, too, is that when you book, well, from the media side, when you book a Muppet, you actually have to book the Muppet and you actually have to talk to the people behind the scenes as if the Muppet is real and you're booking the character, not the puppeteer. Absolutely. Why do they make that kind of commitment for like the people who work on the staff of the media shows? Not even, I mean, all that kind of commitment doesn't even end up on the air. Because it's all in service to the character. If you wanted to talk to Steve Whitmire as a performer, you wouldn't book Kermit. You would book Steve to talk about his life as a performer. If you're booking Kermit, why would you talk about anyone but Kermit? I mean, it doesn't do anybody any good.

Steve's monitor going to go and how's Kermit going to sit on the chair and do you need to cut a hole in something or how are you going to mask the puppeteer? Those are obviously logistics. But as far as pre-interview questions, anything else would be a waste of time. You're not going to ask Kermit about the guy underneath him. You know, it's like there's no there's no point in that. Yeah. People think that puppeteers are very odd ducks and we are odd ducks, but not in the way people think. People have asked me, do I ever forget that the puppet isn't real? And to that I say, I'm working too damn hard to forget that the puppet isn't real.

Yeah. I mean, I even find it mind blowing that you are underneath. What you're working with is up above. Yes. You're looking at a TV screen. Yes. And trying to keep our head out of the shot too. Keep your head out of the shot. And do is up above. Yes. You're looking at a TV screen. Yes, and trying to keep our head out of the shot, too. Keep your head out of the shot.

And do a vocal performance. Yes, while you're also interacting. Yes. The thing above that you're interacting with, I mean, that is like... And we have lines taped to the monitors, too. We try, we can't, there's too much going on in our heads

to memorize these days. Right. Yeah. I mean, that is like beyond walking and chewing gum at the same time. Yeah. I mean, it's like Anne riding a unicycle and... Yeah, and the monitor is showing a backwards image. It's not a mirror image.

So when we move to our right, it's camera left. Really? Why? Well, Jim Henson decided early on. And I think the technology for being able to flip a monitor existed, but not everywhere when he started in the 50s and 60s. but not everywhere when he started in the 50s and 60s. And I think he wanted to be 100% sure that he could pull in a good performance no matter where he was, even if they couldn't flip the monitor. So we all learn in the unflipped way.

And this way, when there's text on screen, you can follow it the right way with your eye. You're seeing exactly. I think it's really important to see exactly what the audience sees. But it takes time to learn. Yeah, I was going to say, how long does it take before that second nature? Oh, boy. Probably a couple of years before it's truly second nature. So tell me, I also want to find out other misconceptions about what you do.

People think that just because it's aimed at children, it must be easy. at children, it must be easy. If anything, it can be very difficult because you have a lot of, certainly if it's educational in any way, it's hard enough to be funny, but to be funny and hit curriculum beats and to do something correctly and teach something in a way that's efficient and true and that a kid will understand and keep eyes on there you're really juggling but people just think oh it's it's a kid show i would get more respect if i made a living as an extra not with a puppet on my hand because so i mean i think that's real yeah i could do the exact same thing with or without the puppet on my hand. The only difference is it's a lot more believable with the puppet on my hand because, you know, you need a lot of say I were to play a little boy. my hair, I would need to maybe try to look smaller than other people if I were to play a kid on stage. Whereas you throw on a well-built puppet that is constructed to look like a little kid,

and you hide me and you take my face out of the picture, it's a lot more believable. By the way, Stephanie has done some pretty great work without puppets. She starred in the musical episode of Scrubs, the sitcom set in a hospital. She played a woman with a brain aneurysm, which made her think that everybody was singing when they were supposedly just talking. What's going to happen?

When will I be alive tomorrow? What's going to happen to me? When will I be alive tomorrow? What's going to happen to me? You're going to be okay. That's what's going to happen. Everything's okay. We're right here beside you. We won't let you slip away.

Plan for tomorrow. Cause we swear to you, you're going to be okay. Imaginary Worlds is part of the Panoply Network. You can like the show on Facebook, I tweet at emalinski. You can also support the show on the crowdfunding website Patreon, where you can sign up to have access to a Dropbox folder where I put longer versions of each interview,

including this one. Just click the donate button on my site, imaginaryworldspodcast.org. You're going to be okay. TheWorldsPodcast.org Season 3 begins in two weeks with a five-part series on a genre that I haven't dealt with that much so far in this podcast. Magic and fantasy.

So get ready to apparate.