Theater review by Stuart Miller…

When I reviewed Wakka Wakka’s puppet show “The Immortal Jellyfish Girl” two years ago, I wrote about the “dizzying visual feast” but spent even more time on the show’s complex story, the humor, the emotional investment we felt in the oddly engaging characters and the “dark but vital environmental message” that lingered after the show ended.

The acclaimed theater troupe’s newest show “Dead as a Dodo” is even more dazzling to watch, with their imaginative and inventive puppeteering complemented by compelling light projections. But while co-writers and co-directors Gwendolyn Warnock and Kirjan Waage have concocted a show with visuals and some memorably quirky characters that keep the show entertaining on a moment-to-moment basis, it is not a flat-out success. 

The creators write that “the birth and growth of AI, gene editing, and biotechnology have all thrust us into new realities and ideas of what is possible. Science is now looking at resurrecting the extinct.” But those ideas are only touched on glancingly and the story of friendship and the fight to survive and to be remembered is painted in broad strokes–“Dodo” is more kid-friendly and less subtle than its predecessor and ultimately isn’t as coherent or fully explicated a story, lacking the themes that gave “Jellyfish Girl” its gravitas.

“Dead as a Dodo” opens with an unnamed skeleton boy and his best friend, a skeletal dodo bird, hunting for more bones. Things are getting desperate because the boy’s bones keep disappearing—he’s shy an arm and a leg and parts of his head– and the Bone King, who rules this realm and his princess daughter snatch up the potential replacements.  

Early on the boy and dodo have some moments—comedic but with death looming—that feel like they’ve descended from Vladimir and Estragon in “Waiting for Godot” but that isn’t maintained. 

Instead, when the dodo suddenly begins spouting feathers, raising the possibility of returning to the realm of the living, it creates chaos in the underworld and sends the duo on a road trip of sorts.  

There’s a showstopper: the Bone King and his daughter perform a catchy musical number that sounds like something out of “The Nightmare Before Christmas” and features the puppets playing a xylophone and a guitar made of bones and using other bones as drumsticks.

When the Bone King lays chase to the rebellious boy and dodo, the duo ends up in the River Styx, where they are rescued by a fish that swallows them and then delivers them to a goofy gondelieri, who explains their predicament, boasting of knowledge he completely lacks. The visuals of the river scene, as the characters dive beneath the surface and then return a moment later, are stunning and the gondelieri is good comic relief. 

But, as with the subsequent scenes in the Monster Realm and later with a Monty Python-esque scientist who yanks the boy and the dodo out of a large, “Mound Shimmer” creature that swallowed them (and that seems to be his wife), or with the later appearance of a mammoth that carries the boy to his destiny, these scenes only work as self-contained set pieces. After the opening scenes, the show doesn’t really ever create an emotional attachment to the characters and so there’s never a sense of the stakes or of urgency, especially given the lack of a strong theme.  

Ultimately, the play, like the boy and the dodo, make a strong first impression but are unable to overcome the characters’ concern about disappearing—a play that connected to our hearts or provoked our minds would have been more indelible.

“Dead as a Dodo” runs through February 9th as part of the Under The Radar Festival at Baruch PAC,55 Lexington Ave, Manhattan. The run time is 80 minutes with no intermission.

Photo credits: Richard Termine (1,3,4) and David Zadig (2,5)