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A merry band of marionettes By Victor Wishna Tue, Jan 31, 2012 KCMetropolis.org
Paul Mesner Puppets "Go, Dog, Go" review by tnice KC STAGE BLOG Dec. 2, 2011
Office Space: Spencer Lott, puppet master by Brianne Pfannenstiel Kansas City.com June 28, 2011
Lighton program makes ambassadors of artists By ALICE THORSON
Community Curator Program at the Kansas City Museum, Musings on a Marionette by Paul Mesner
Stinky Cheese Man' teaches preschoolers post-modernism Creative Loafing Atlanta by Curt Holman on Mon, Mar 28, 2011
A Parent’s Review: Anansi the Spider at Northwest Puppet Center by Ruth Schubert Published January 12, 2011 Seattle's Child
Paul Mesner Puppets Appeals to Children and Adults KCUR 89.3 FM
Paul Mesner Puppets Will Put A Smile On You And Your Child’s Face In Kansas City, MO Posted by Keri W. on November 06, 2009 GlobalYP.net Blog
An archangel, the Virgin Mary, and a few dozen giant puppets
Paul Mesner's puppet Nativity drama is a visual holiday feast for all ages
By Jeff Henry KCFREEPRESS.COM
The Puppets Are Coming! The Puppets Are Coming!
By Megan Browne Helm Present Magazine.com
Paul
Mesner Puppets present The Nativity
KCUR
Public Arts
Puppeteer
awakens quirky 'Sleeping Beauty'
By
JONATHAN WILLIAMS For accessAtlanta Published on: 07/31/2008
Posted
on January 10, 2008
Seattle Post-Intelligencer
Wolf's version of the 'Three Little Pigs' is a howl
By DOREE ARMSTRONG SPECIAL TO THE P-I
Silly me, I always thought I knew the story
of the "Three Little Pigs" when Big Bad Wolf huffs
and puffs on their houses because he's a bad guy; gets his
comeuppance at the end.
Apparently the wolf's version is different. So if you want
to know the real story of what happened, check out the Paul
Mesner Puppets production of "The True Story of the 3
Little Pigs by A. Wolf" at the Northwest Puppet Center.
Based on Jon Scieszka's popular children's
book, Mesner's adaptation tells the story from the wolf's
point of view, as he's sitting in jail -- unjustly, in his
mind.
According to Alexander T. Wolf, he simply
wanted to borrow a cup of sugar from the neighbors because
he was baking a cake for his granny's birthday. But he had
a terrible cold, and just as he knocked on the first door,
he sneezed so hard he blew the straw house down, accidentally
turning the first Little Pig into dinner.
"Why waste a good ham dinner?" Mr.
Wolf says of the unfortunate turn of events.
"It's a very subversive version,"
puppeteer Paul Mesner said. "It's a really fun character
to play because he's so subversive and naughty."
Mesner says teachers love Scieszka's book,
which was published in the 1980s, because it teaches students
about perspective. If you hear only one side of any story,
are you really getting the whole truth?
Mesner has been performing the show for about
seven years. He's tried to stay faithful to most aspects of
the book.
"I had read the book and I have a couple
of friends who advise me on children's books, so I'm always
looking for what's funny and new and edgy and what's interesting
and what's popular," he says. "It's a very popular
show, especially with school groups because they've read it."
This is Mesner's eighth or ninth time performing
for his friends at the Northwest Puppet Center. Based in Kansas
City, Mo., he performs locally and takes his show on the road.
Mesner's favorite part of the show was just
a minor part of the book, so he has expanded it. The book
has a picture of a sandwich on one page, so Mesner has constructed
the sandwich fixings out of cloth and builds the sandwich
in front of the audience.
"It has a mole in it and frog legs and
a little dead gray animal on it," Mesner said. "
'Mole tastes better if you put dill on it!' Mr. Wolf likes
to say. So it was a fun way to use something exactly from
the book but it lets you in on Mr. Wolf's character and his
way of thinking."
Mesner dresses himself as the wolf for part
of the show, wearing a mask and furry gloves and feet, even
striped purple pants, like Mr. Wolf in the book.
There's even some music, as Mr. Wolf sings,
"When you're sneezing, it's displeasing" to the
tune of "When You're Smiling."
It's a one-man, 50-minute show with rod puppets
and one shadow puppet. It's up to parents to decide if their
little ones are old enough to sit through the show. (Lots
of kids squirm through puppet shows and it's perfectly acceptable).
"I've had 14-month-old kids who sat all
through my shows and 5-year-olds who couldn't sit still,"
Mesner said.
Doree Armstrong is a Seattle-based freelance
writer. She can be reached at doreearmstrong@yahoo.com.
Review
of The Mikado: OperaOnline.us
Posted
on Sat, Jan. 05, 2008 The Kansas City Star
For
20 years, Paul Mesner has ruled KC audiences by
ROBERT TRUSSELL
He was young. He was a gypsy. He was fearless.
He was
one man in a Datsun pickup with a box of puppets and a portable
stage, driving icy Minnesota highways. His name was Paul Mesner,
and he prided himself on never missing a performance.
“My
winter driving skills got really good,” Kansas City’s
best-known puppeteer said recently.
Mesner did the Minnesota tour every year in
the late 1970s. Now the man who never went to college considers
it his education.
“This fellow saw me perform at a regional
puppet festival, and he had done this school assembly circuit
tour for many years,” Mesner said. “And he offered
me this 14-week job of doing 12 to 14 shows a week in 10 to
12 different schools a week from January through May in Minnesota.
So I did that for four years, and I think of that as my school-of-hard-knocks
college.”
It was just Mesner and the puppets as he made
his way from town to town, school to school. Often he would
meet school custodians at 7 a.m. to unlock the building so
he could set up his stage.
One year the thermometer was stuck at 22 below
for three weeks. But Mesner, who had been doing puppet theater
in Omaha, was living an adventure.
“This was $350 a week, and I had to
pay for all my meals and lodging and gas, but I thought it
was great money.”
He found hotels for $6 or $8 a night. They
were “like out of some movie — flower-print wallpaper
they put up in the ’40s, creaky bed, bath down the hall.
… I scrimped and saved and I came away from there saving
money.”
Each year the pay went up by $100. The first
three years, he performed “Tom Sawyer” and other
shows written by his employer using marionettes. By the fourth
year he persuaded his boss to let him do his own material,
and he headed out with the hand-and-rod puppets he prefers
to this day.
“I never missed a date. I was there
for every single date and every single show.”
That changed in the spring of 1980, midway
through the tour in his fourth year. He was called home to
Lincoln, Neb., because one of his cousins, believed to be
drunk and high on peyote, murdered another of his cousins,
a caretaker at a Quaker meeting house. Mesner had been close
to the victim, Janet Mesner. The killer, Randoph Reeves, was
sentenced to death, but the family rallied to have the sentence
commuted, in part to honor the memory of Janet, who vehemently
opposed the death penalty.
“That was before grief counselors,”
Mesner said. “I went back on the road and was just miserable.
I was having nightmares every night. At 3 o’clock I’d
think I heard someone outside the hotel door. I was a mess.
So I just canceled the tour.
“I really came out of that with a sense
that life is so fragile and that you’ve got to work
your hardest and do your very best,” he said. “It
sounds corny, but you’ve got to follow your dream. I
worked very hard from that moment on, and I just kept thinking
of Janet and what would she think.”
Higher profile
Things have changed a lot since then. Mesner
turned 50 last year, and December marked his 20th anniversary
as a puppeteer in Kansas City. His first show was “The
Twelve Days of Christmas” at Quality Hill Playhouse.
In an
era when we’ve seen puppetry mainstreamed in two Broadway
shows, “The Lion King” and “Avenue Q,”
Mesner keeps his performances relatively simple. He has built
Paul Mesner Puppets into a nonprofit arts organization with
a budget of $416,000 and four full-time staffers, including
Mesner and his executive director, Diane Barker. This season
includes four shows at Unity Temple on the Plaza, “Hansel
and Gretel” at the Folly and the annual “Page
to Stage” production at his studio based on writings
by students.
Paul Mesner Puppets received an $18,000 grant
from the National Endowment for the Arts to cover part of
the $100,000 budget for Engelbert Humperdinck’s “Hansel
and Gretel,” which his company will perform with the
Kansas City Chamber Orchestra in April. In recent years he
has also collaborated with the Civic Opera on “The Mikado”
and the Kansas City Chorale on “Amahl and the Night
Visitors.”
“Most people think puppets are dumbing
things down,” Mesner said. “It’s an unfortunate
prejudice. It’s been a struggle to educate people on
how sophisticated it can be.”
Mesner operates out of a studio at Linwood
and Harrison, which houses, among other things, about 1,200
puppets of all shapes and sizes. He recently walked a visitor
through the labyrinth, which once was an auto-supply store
and later a business that sold artificial limbs.
The main studio was set up to shoot a DVD
of one of his shows. Puppets were mounted on the walls. Vast
storage areas held scenery, puppets and equipment. In a small
backyard Mesner had planted a garden thick with vegetables.
A fulltime resident of the building is Doris,
a happy-go-lucky dog who showed up at the door one day looking
battered. According to Mesner, neighborhood drug dealers had
been using her as a tackling dummy to train pit bulls.
Mesner was born in Indiana, moved with his
family to Washington, D.C., then back to Indiana and finally
to Lincoln, where his father is a professor emeritus of mathematics
at the University of Nebraska. It was in Lincoln that Mesner
discovered puppetry.
“When I was 11 or 12 I was driving my
parents nuts,” he said. “And there was, at the
local community playhouse, a woman who taught puppets. …
She was a bit of a tyrant and enjoyed being a tyrant. She
was an incredibly talented fabric artist. And she had a flair
for dramatics.”
Mesner took classes for a year and then auditioned
to become an apprentice. He learned different kinds of puppetry,
including life-sized body puppets.
“I loved it because I could finally
get outside of myself,” he said. “I didn’t
have to be the nerd. I think for a lot of kids who find a
creative outlet, you can get out of yourself or explore some
other part of yourself. Puppetry lets you do the same thing.
You can shed who you are and become the other characters.”
Mesner intended to go to college. It just
never happened.
“First I was going to work one year
and then go to college,” he said. “So I went out
to Denver and got a job in a ski-jacket factory because I
could sew. I learned how to sew when I was in that very first
puppet class. I was only there for nine months, but I got
a couple of raises because I could lift heavy things, but
I could sew, too.”
Mesner was “a hippie” in those
days. He’d go hiking on the weekends and sometimes he’d
stay at a cabin his friends owned in the woods. But he also
took modern dance lessons from a French woman who taught in
her basement.
Back in Omaha, Mesner banded together with
three friends and started a puppet theater. Success was elusive.
“We incorporated as a not-for-profit,
but we didn’t know how to ask for grants,” he
said. “It was a very Mickey Rooney-Judy Garland approach,
and we promptly started starving to death. I perfected the
art of cooking refried beans.”
French connections
In 1982
Mesner took the advice of arts career counselors and applied
to the L’Institut International de la Marionnette (International
Institute of Puppetry) in Charleville-Mézières,
France. He was accepted into a program to study shadow puppetry
and considered himself lucky.“I was with 15 other students
from around the world, and all the classes were taught in
French. I’d been taking (French) classes at the community
college … so it was like total immersion.”
Charleville-Mezieres is a place Mesner sometimes
describes as “Sioux City, France.”
“Charleville-Mezieres is in the Ardennes,
where the Battle of the Bulge was fought. It sounds very bucolic,
but it was a working-class town. Rimbaud was from there.”
For the first month Mesner and his fellow
students lived in a workers’ dormitory.
“It was miserable,” he said. “A
stinky, smelly dormitory. And the food was just factory-gray.”
After a month they were able to move to a
Catholic workers’ social house around the corner.
“We had a common kitchen we could share,
and we all had our own bedrooms. … It led to a lot more
socializing at night. And there were at least two or three
picnics a week.”
The faculty, like the students, came from
across the globe.
“We had a teacher from India, and she
taught in English,” he said. “So everybody who
was speaking French complained because this was, after all,
in France. And then she’d switch back to French, but
her French was broken and my comprehension was no great shakes.”
Mesner stayed in France a few weeks after
he finished the course. He even performed in French at a Paris
nightclub. He was told he could find regular work if he decided
to stay in France. But it was time to go home.
“I came back all charged up,”
he said. “And it’s been a steady progression since
then.”
Despite his success, Mesner remains unsatisfied
in some ways. If he could wave a magic wand, he would give
his company a permanent theater or at least a residency in
an existing theater. Then he could have better sets, more
elaborate puppets, sophisticated productions that are beyond
his reach.
As it is, he has to do things pretty much
like he did them on the road in Minnesota 30 years ago. The
sites are temporary. Equipment is hauled in, set up, dismantled.
“We’re still a gypsy company,
basically.”
"So
funny it would melt the Ice Age... Mesner is truly hilarious...
a complete entertainer." -Paul De Barros,
Seattle Time
"I
may never want to go back to a traditional production of Gilbert
and Sullivan's classic operetta. If you have any interest
in theater of any form [the Paul Mesner Puppets' Mikado] is
a must-see." -Paul Horsley, The Kansas
City Star
"Quality,
educational value and entertainment for the whole family make
the Paul Mesner Puppets a 'most-requested' show. Everything
the company produces is a hit with our patrons." -Kathleen
Cuny Miller, Children's Fine Arts Series, San Antonio, Texas
"As a professional educator, I have always been impressed
by Paul's knowledge of developmental levels and is ability
to reach children of many different ages." -Ann
Brubaker, The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art
"The
Paul Mesner Puppets productions are always unique fun for
families and have been a great fit with our outdoor festival
and summer student work. Paul's work is always creative, in
tune especially with younger audiences, and cost efficient."
-Gary
Gaydos, Manager Florissant (Missouri) Civic Center Theatre
"The Paul Mesner Puppets incorporate educational values
into every show and do an outstanding job of promoting the
value of reading. The shows are silly enough to elicit much
laughter from younger children and subtle enough to have adults
in the audience chuckling as well." -Helma
Hawkins, Director of Youth Services and Collection Development,Kansas
City Public Library
"When scheduling performing arts programs each year,
the Paul Mesner Puppets are always considered a 'must.' Paul
has a unique ability to make the characters come to life,
offering humor and entertainment for both students and adults."
-Doug
Harris, Leawood Elementary, Leawood, Kansas
"The
students were engaged and attentive throughout the show. They
responded with genuine enthusiasm. ...I would highly recommend
the Paul Mesner Puppets as an exciting adventure in the art
of puppetry." -Jennifer Reph, Tremont
Elementary, Medford, New York
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