Puppet designer Michael Curry got his Awakening call early, back when Wynn’s spectacular, effects-and-acrobatics-laden production show was still only a wild dream.
“I’m known in the industry as a bit of a rainmaker,” he says, calling from his studio in Scappoose, Oregon. “I have a reputation of being attached to successes, and so I’m brought in very early. Many times, it’s not with an idea that there’s even characters or puppets in the show. It’s for me to work as a conceptual designer and consultant with the director.”
Awakening bears out that reputation. Curry—whose creations have appeared in the Broadway adaptation of Disney’s The Lion King, Universal’s new Epic Universe theme park, multiple Cirque du Soleil productions including KÀ, and even Taylor Swift’s Eras tour—filled Awakening nearly to overflowing with puppets, many of which don’t resemble puppets so much as living scenery. There are lumbering, elephant-like beasts. A benevolent guide for the heroine that assembles itself from stones lying about on the stage. A floating, life-sized whale, controlled by a single puppeteer who flies it as you would a kite.
Today, however—in anticipation of World Puppetry Day on March 21, a meaningful day for Awakening’s crew—Curry is talking about the “Dark Lieutenants”—mysterious, towering entities whose artfulness, grace and sheer invention bridge the gaps between puppetry, costume and scenery. Curry needed literal storytelling devices, so he built them.
“They’re the acolytes of Darkness, our femme fatale, and I wanted them to be at a scale that they created a portal, a gateway for her,” Curry says. “I couldn’t put her on a throne; furniture doesn’t work in our show. But I wanted her to have a sense of place and station and wanted her not to be lost.We have a bunch of five to six-foot-tall characters in costumes, and our show is complicated, always moving around. I wanted a wayfinder, so I always know where she’s at. And I wanted them to have a menacing quality, but also a weird juxtaposition of beauty…
“They have almost a childlike, mask face. It almost looks like a Noh mask from Japanese theater, without expression, and it’s illuminated,” he continues. “I wanted a fluid motion, but I wanted it to look robotic. It looks like it’s machine-made, but it moves like a ballet dancer. Also, I wanted to hide the human that’s in it, but I don’t really care that you [see the operator]. I love the second read that you get with my puppetry. The next time you see the whale, you’re going to enjoy watching that single puppeteer below him. We did a lot to disguise the Dark Lieutenants.”
Awakening performer Kyle Tanguay, a former Philadelphia Eagles cheerleader who worked alongside Curry while the Dark Lieutenant was created, talks me through the mechanics of getting inside the puppet, a process that involves a special ladder, stilts with articulated toe joints, and a harness lowered from the ceiling. The puppet feels so intuitive to Tanguay that he can focus on his performance, not the mechanics.
“That’s what I want as a performer. I like when I’m not stuck inside of some system,” he says. “It makes the story feel real, and it makes it fun to adapt when things [on stage] go a little different. … Working with [Curry] has changed the way I approach everything. I love his thought process. He’s so collaborative. And I love watching him work with his team. When his team was out here, you could tell that it’s like it’s not a paycheck or just a business to him. It’s a passion project.”
And in a time when the artless are proudly bragging that they can generate a blockbuster film using only AI, Curry’s passion for hand-built art feels almost revolutionary in tone.
“My worry is not that AI will be used or not be used [in art], but if the audience loses their ability of aesthetic judgment, about quality, if AI [causes] audiences to be dumber. …That’s my worry. People will start settling for it, and it’ll make art even more rarefied, which isn’t a good thing.
“Since [computer graphics] started being so heavily used in film—and especially the genre of family cinema that we find today, from Harry Potter to Game of Thrones—puppetry is almost your only chance at presenting those elements live, those fantastic creatures. Actors can’t do them, and it’s what the audience expects them to look like,” Curry says. “Puppetry is one of the only choices you could turn to if you want to do that in a live entertainment presentation. There’s a heyday of puppetry going on because we need these characters on stage.”
AWAKENING Friday-Tuesday, 6:30 & 9 p.m.; Sunday, 4 & 7 p.m., $88+. Awakening Theater, wynnlasvegas.com.
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