Theaterwork’s Production of Lewis Carroll’s Puppet Ballad Opera La Guida di Bragia

On May 6, 7, & 8, 2009 at 7 P.M., at the Scottish Rite Center Theater (463 Paseo de Peralta, Santa Fe), Theaterwork will mount a full production of Lewis Carroll’s La Guida di Bragia: A Ballad Opera for Puppets (LGDB) for the first time in over 150 years.

First performed in the home of nineteen year-old Charles Dodgson (Lewis Carroll) with the aid of some of his ten siblings, LGDB is divided into three acts with musical interludes and elements of the English pantomime and Carroll’s own characteristic nonsensical language.  Fascinated by the miniature and the absurd from an early age, Carroll created his original production for characters played by dolls with special costumes and wigs on a Victorian puppet stage, all of which Theaterwork has recreated for the current production.

LGDB also underscores Carroll’s obsession with the Victorian popular theater of Gilbert & Sullivan, opera bouffe, popularizations of Shakespeare, phantasmagoria (magic lantern ghost shows), and ballad opera (lyrics set to popular tunes and the form the author employs in the play) and his love of railroads.  The title of LGDB, in fact, refers to Bradshaw’s Railway Guide (a monthly railway timetable first published in 1841) and was employed by Carroll in other of his works (Richard Foulkes’s Lewis Carroll and the Victorian Stage).

The Theaterwork production has been designed by permanent members of the company: Jonathon Dixon (a member of the International Lewis Carroll Society who has illustrated two recent Lewis Carroll publications) has scored the music while veterans Richard Gonzales (props), Deborah Kruhm (costumes), Jack Sherman (lighting), and David Olson (set design and direction) contribute their customary expertise.  Actors Angela Janda-Goldstein (Housekeeper) and Larry Lee (Butler) bring the puppet characters to life.

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In a telephone interview on April 27, 2009, jack-of-all-trades and veteran of over twenty Theaterwork productions Jonathan Dixon informed me of his long interest in the work of Lewis Carroll.  In 1990, while at Iowa University, Jonathan wanted to be an illustrator and to find a subject in the public domain.  After some research, he sent a fan letter to Professor Morton Cohen without realizing his preeminence in the world of Lewis Carroll studies.  Cohen wrote back saying that the LCSNA wished to publish Jonathan’s illustrated “The Hunting of the Snark” which it did in 1992.  Jonathan spent six months traveling in England and “lucked into so many things” having to do with Lewis Carroll, including having a private showing of the original Alice in Wonderland manuscript at the British Museum and spending a few hours signing first edition pages of his recently published edition of Lewis Carroll in the author’s old digs at Christ Church College in Oxford.

In 1993, Professor Cohen invited Jonathan to submit illustrations for Carroll’s LGDB which had been published only in Queen Magazine in 1931.  Jonathan did further research at Fales Library at NYU, but the project was put on hold until 2007 when it was again given the green light.  The illustrated LGDB was first published in January of 2008.  Artistic Director David Olson became aware of Jonathan’s LGDB work in 2007 when displaying some of his company member’s art for the Theaterwork production of Belle Moral (2007).  David became intrigued with the work and the history of LGDB and decided to mount a production of the play this year.

Jonathan informed me that the title of the play is a fake Italian pun for “The Guide of Bradshaw,” the most popular publication of its day.  The focus of the play is how the railroad impacted the small English towns of the North of England.  The play’s prologue is written in iambic pentameter and the work consists of two seemingly opposed strains:  rollicking music hall excess and educated parodies of Shakespeare.  The plot itself also centers on seemingly mutually exclusive elements.  First, Mooney and Spooney, prototypes of Tweedledee and Tweedledum, want the job of stationmaster and, as with Alice, meet interesting but annoying and irritating characters that seem to have stepped out of a Monty Python skit, e.g., Mrs. Muddle, an obnoxious old woman who waves an umbrella and utters malapropisms with equal alacrity, and a Zulu warrior  Second, there are the light opera lovers Orlando and Sophonisba, whose humor derives from the travesty of a domestic scene inflated into a tragic leave-taking when Orlando takes the train to Birmingham to buy port wine for dinner that evening.  The plots intertwine, of course, at the rail station.  The resulting tone is “unabashedly strange and bizarre.”

The puppets themselves are dolls on stands with the puppeteers, dressed as Victorian servants, in plain sight.  Both Jonathon and Director David Olson believe that the “magic of good puppeteering is the same as regular acting, only with everything transferred into the little people.”  Jonathan came to understand that being a good puppeteer is “more than wiggling a doll around.  The actor must possess skills that demand a refinement of movement and a facilitation of focus.”

According to Jonathan, LGDB is more than Lewis Carroll juvenilia: it is the only play the author ever wrote and foreshadows the author’s idiosyncratic humor and witty language that come to fruition in his later more famous works.  Equally important, Jonathan feels “a responsibility to Lewis Carroll” to recreate in this production “the feel of Carroll” which he felt was possible after first viewing the set and props for LGDB: “It [the design elements] seem like they should be in a museum.”  Finally, he is excited about being the first person in over 150 years to hear the play as written by Lewis Carroll and is eager to share his vision with Santa Fe audiences.

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TW members Jonathon Dixon and David Olson will also be featured speakers at the Lewis Carroll Society of North America Spring Meeting on May 9, 2009.  Many of the day’s member-only events will be held at the Theaterwork Rehearsal Space (3201 Richards Lane).

Ticket prices are $10 for adults and $5 for children.  Proceeds will benefit the Santa Fe Children’s Museum and the Santa Fe Southside Library.  Reservations for and further information about TW’s LGDB are available at (505) 471-1799 and at thwork@theaterwork.org.