Monday Night in Harlem: SummerStage presents "Tunde's Trumpet" at the Richard Rodgers Amphitheater in Marcus Garvey Park

It was a great night in Harlem as we got to attend a marvelously innovative and dynamic musical production, Tunde's Trumpet, by the brilliant playwright Chisa Hutchinson, at the renovated Richard Rodgers Amphitheater in Marcus Garvey Park. This was her second commission from SummerStage and her first musical and her first play with puppets. It was astoundingly entertaining for both adults and kids and needs to move elsewhere now that this last of the four SummerStage performances is over.

Directed by the award-winning Kristin Horton, with a sprightly book by Chisa Hutchinson and tuneful and versatile music by Elliot Goldman and lyrics by Sarah Gancher, Tunde's Trumpet featured an energetic cast of five talented humans and a group of expressive, sophisticated, and funny puppets telling a great story that's essentially a sly parable of the process of becoming a performing artist (or, indeed, any kind of artist).

We wish we knew more about puppetry, but we think this was close to the Japanese form called bunraku, and the large puppets seemed capable, in the hands of their puppeteers, of rather sophisticated body movements, which obviously made the musical numbers livelier than you might get with more static puppets.

It's a little hard to tell from the program, but the five performers, all of whom had excellent voices, were truly outstanding, as actors and puppeteers as well as singers. We think they are Tanisha Christie, Rory Lipede, Ayesha Ngaujah, Darnell Wickhham, and Chris Myers.

Tunde is a bright, mischievous African-American kid with energy to spare, and on his tenth birthday his jazz trumpeter father gives him the trumpet he used to practice on when he was a boy. Both his exasperated mom and dad hope that Tunde will focus some of his energy more constructively, focusing on the musical instrument.

Tunde is excited but needs to work through and get past several obstacles to become an accomplished trumpeter who makes his parents proud. These obstacles, demons that plague all aspiring creative and performing artists (and probably a lot of others) -- Frustration, Distractions, Laziness, Doubt and Jealousy -- here are actual characters, physical manifestations of Tunde's active mind, "personified" by amazingly imaginative puppets manipulated with grace and precision. As the Parks Department website says, "these puppets come together in a music packed, high-energy show with a funkified soundtrack that celebrates the determination inherent in all of us." Director Kristin Horton seamlessly pulled it all together.

Chisa Hutchinson’s plays have been presented by such companies as the Lark Play Development Center, The Atlantic Theater Company, and Victory Gardens Theater in Chicago. Her works include The Subject, She Like Girls, The Schematic, Sex on Sunday and #9.

She was in the audience tonight and along with the cast, the fine musicians, the director, librettist and composer and the others involved with show (James Hunting for set design, Luqman Brown for music direction, Raphael Mishler as puppeteer and more, Christian DeAngelis for lighting direction, Chris Rinaldi as stage manager), received a lot of applause and an ovation at the conclusion of this wonderful show for kids and adults alike.

(Video courtesy of Community MAP)

We're grateful we got to see Tunde's Trumpet and hope more people will have the same opportunity someday. We're also grateful for the quiet time to explore the byways of Marcus Garvey Park we didn't get to see on our last visit in June.



It was a clear, beautiful night as we walked along Mount Morris Park West, but contrary to the title of Henry Roth's 1994 novel, the first in the tetralogy Mercy of a Rude Stream, we did not see a star shine over Marcus Garvey Park, or back in his day, Mt. Morris Park.

Tuesday Morning in Williamsburg: CityParks Foundation Puppet Mobile presents "Bessie's Big Shot" at McCarren Park

Cowabunga! This morning lots of little kids enjoyed a terrific performance of "Bessie's Big Shot" put on by the CityParks Foundation Puppet Mobile in McCarren Park.

Unlike the previous great puppet shows put on by the group (like "Sleeping Beauty" last summer), "Bessie's Big Shot"

is an original story and production rather than one taken from Central Park's Swedish Cottage Marionette Theatre.
And it's a great story of Bessie, a New York City cow who, though working a series of unsatisfying jobs (like serving lattes), has always had the dream of being a part of the circus.

With the circus coming to Brooklyn, Bessie the cow tries out for a role in the greatest show on earth.

Can Bessie lift tremendous weights like Ziegfried the strongest man on earth? Work with a monkey? Gracefully glide on the trapeze? Balance herself on a high wire?

Through funny trials and tribulations, she finally achieves her dream.

At McCarren Park, it drew a big crowd, some very young,

who seemed delighted by the skillful and entertaining show done by the expert puppet masters.

"Bessie's Big Shot" will stay in the neighborhood for another two days: tomorrow morning it will be in Cooper Park, the next day in McGolrick Park, and it will playing in parks and playgrounds throughout the five boroughs all summer.

We know some little people who would be grateful if you took them.

Thursday Morning in Clinton Hill: Swedish Cottage Marionette Theatre's "Sleeping Beauty" at Underwood Park

An overflow crowd of little kids was entranced this morning in Clinton Hill by a performance of sublime puppetry by the Swedish Cottage Marionette Theatre in "Sleeping Beauty."

It was an updated musical version set in Belvedere Castle, by the Swedish Cottage's home in Central Park.

The wonderful City Parks Foundation's PuppetMobile brings these shows out to neighborhood parks in the five boroughs over the summer.

Underwood Park was formerly the site of the elegant mansion of the typewriter mogul - our dad's pants company's showroom/warehouse at 87 Fifth Avenue had a 1940s Underwood we used to do office work on forty years ago - and the land was donated by his widow. You can't miss it if you get off the G train at the Washington Avenue side of Lafayette Avenue at the Clinton/Washington stop.

The kids in the audience, were mostly from First Choice Academy preschool from around the corner where we lived when we were their age, I.S. 218 Beacon on Fountain Avenue, the Beach 41st Street Houses (near where we spent our summers in Rockaway as a kid), and other day camps, day care centers and summer programs. But lots of kids were there with family members or nannies.

The show was very sweet but easily understandable. Princess Aurora is the victim of a spell by the evil witch Marisol when she turns 18, but helped by her royal parents' loyal servant Nicadou, the funky spirit Jack, and most of all by her constant companion, the unicorn Orion, of course a handsome prince comes to the rescue and wakens her from a long slumber with a kiss.

The puppeteers were skillful, the sets pretty (in the end so much time has elapsed, that the backdrop to Belvedere Castle includes skyscrapers), the marionettes with clear individual characters, and the songs whimsical and pleasant. It's ideal for young kids, with a little audience participation at the end, and not at all scary. The audience loved "Sleeping Beauty" and gave the cast a big hand at its satisfying conclusion.

As the kids exited, most to buses with their camp counselors and staff, some with their parents or nannies, the PuppetMobile got ready to head to the Bronx for tomorrow morning's performance of "Sleeping Beauty" at Crotona Park.

Friday Morning in Brooklyn Bridge Park: White Bird Puppetry presents "It Wasn't Always This Way" by & for kids

Late this morning we were in Brooklyn Bridge Park with a bunch of kids watching other kids perform "It Wasn't Always This Way," a charming thirty-minute puppet show, produced by White Bird Productions, about the natural and man-made environment of New York City.

Large puppets marked the history and geography of our urban environment: the island of Manhattan forming, birds flying, buildings being built, subways moving and much more. It was a delightful half-hour, with terrific music supplied by adults, from tom-toms to "The Sidewalks of New York," and you could tell it grabbed the attention of the very young audience by the lack of a single crying child during the entire performance.

According to its website,

For over 18 years, White Bird Productions has been producing plays, commissioning new work, collaborating with musicians and choreographers and, through Creative Theatrics, offering children’s theater classes in Brooklyn. Based in the Alliance of Resident Theatres/New York’s South Oxford Space in Fort Greene, Brooklyn, White Bird Productions has a particular interest in the urban landscape, and how the residents and the natural environment of New York complement and collide with one another.

Earlier work exploring these issues includes Villagers (John Istel) at St. Mark’s Church in the Bouwerie, COMBUSTION: The Politics of Trash at BAM (Kathryn Dickinson), and Islands: An Urban Archipelago (David Pleasant and Dickinson) at Blue Heron Arts Centre. White Bird has also developed and produced Boro Tales: Brooklyn at the Blue Heron Arts Centre and BRIC Studio in downtown Brooklyn and Boro Tales: Manhattan at HERE Arts Centre, with three boroughs to come in this five-borough project that seeks to celebrate our urban environment through the lens of well-known NYC playwrights.

This show began with a look, not 400 years ago, in 1609, when Hudson first sailed here, but 400 years in the future:




This wasn't history by Mike Wallace or Russell Shorto, but it was visual, musical and understandable, aimed at little kids. The new book Mannahatta, from the Wildlife Conservation Society, after all, details the streams that once ran through Manhattan.

A turtle, or perhaps a tortoise, roams.

A forest on a hill.

A beaver blissfully frolics in the water before the Astor family turns it into someone's chapeau.

The native people have their canoes.


What is this big ship? Rather than a Cunard liner, it looks like the Half Moon to us.

The Dutch build their houses, like the one in the neighborhood where we grew up.

The pigs are coming, or maybe they're real estate developers.

The houses seem a little skittish at the arrival of the pigs. But then the houses throw out scraps. . .

. . . and the pigs gobble them up. They're the sanitation department, only with shorter work breaks.

New multistory houses push aside the farmhouses and trees.

The Statue of Liberty brings new New Yorkers to their homes.

The first street musicians.

The first highrises.

Eventually skyscrapers, subways and high-flying planes become part of NYC's daily environment.



And the show ends in 2009, with a parade of all the actors in the natural history of New York, reminding us that it wasn't always this way. . .

. . . and getting applause and love from the audience. The kids, and the adults behind the show, did a magnificent job. It was a beautiful morning - now time to walk down Main Street for iced tea at Starbucks. Yeah, chain stores are part of NYC's environment, too.