In order to build publicity for his upcoming performances, ID Public Relations, the firm founded by Reubens’ new manager Kelly Bush, created a public Facebook page and Twitter account for Pee-wee’s fans to reconnect with the character. Almost overnight, Pee-wee Herman was an Internet sensation. This gave him the ability to connect with his fans directly for the first time in his 30-year career.
Pee-wee with Kelly Bush and Natalie Lent of ID Public Relations [© Brian Solis]
The original idea for the revival of The Pee-wee Herman Show was to use the script from the show that ran at the Groundling Theatre and The Roxy in 1981 and to make minor edits so the show was more relevant to a contemporary audience. Out of respect for the late Phil Hartman, who had been tragically murdered by his wife in 1998, Kap’n Karl was replaced by Cowboy Curtis, a character created after the stage production had finished. A number of original cast members, like Lynne Stewart, John Paragon, and John Moody, who was Mailman Mike, were also invited to return.
On August 17, 2009, the first staged reading for potential investors took place at Alley Kat Studios in Hollywood. Reubens requested the help of Playhouse alum Ric Heitzman, George McGrath, and Alison Mork. To avoid unwanted attention, the show was listed as Mr. Bungle: The Musical, a reference to the 1959 educational film that had been shown during the original live show.
“At the first table reading the script was almost exactly the same show,” McGrath recalls. “Joan Leizman was going to be reprising her role as the hypnotized audience member and the musical salute to Sly Stone was still there. The biggest difference was that an actor dressed as Susan Boyle [from Britain’s Got Talent] was going to start the show with ‘The Star-Spangled Banner.’”
As Reubens continued to work on the script, he and the show’s producers were caught by surprise when The Music Box reported they had sold nearly 10,000 tickets to the show in 24 hours. People from around the world were buying tickets and planning to fly in to Los Angeles for the 10-day run. In response, the show was extended until the end of December to accommodate the demand. But there were more significant changes on the horizon.
The first major change was that Jared Geller was demoted to associate producer despite the young producer’s persistence in gaining Reubens’ participation over a two-year period, while Reubens’ friend Scott Sanders, who had recently scored a big Broadway hit with The Color Purple, was asked to serve as lead producer. Under Sanders’ advisement, Alex Timbers was brought on to direct. Timbers was a young up-and-coming Broadway director with a recent hit directing Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson. Also on Sanders’ advice, the show was relocated from the 1,300-seat venue to Club Nokia in downtown Los Angeles, with the ability to seat a thousand more, a move that also disrupted the show schedule, with the start date pushed back by two months.
Pee-wee, Alex Timbers, and Scott Sanders at a press conference for The Pee-wee Herman Show in Los Angeles [© Lenora Claire]
Although Reubens and the producers maintained that the move was made in order to enable more fans to see the show, thousands of fans took to Pee-wee Herman’s Facebook and Twitter pages to voice their displeasure about the move. On October 7, 2009, the Los Angeles Times reported that fans who had spent up to $1,500 in travel expenses to see the show now had to spend an additional $300 in cancellation fees after the dates were so drastically changed.
In response to the criticism, producer Scott Sanders says, “Paul called me and said, ‘I think we’re outgrowing the space.’ As a producer, it felt clearer to me that it would be difficult, if not impossible, to make it work [at the Music Box]. It was a creative and artistic decision that evolved organically.”
To apologize for the inconvenience, Sanders granted all original ticket holders a week to exchange their seats or receive a refund before tickets were made available to the general public (Music Box show ticketholders were given the best possible seat available at Club Nokia within the price range paid for the original ticket). Also, Reubens promised to treat all displaced customers to a half-hour question-and-answer session following each show.
Meanwhile, Reubens continued to work on the script with John Paragon and the show’s original director Bill Steinkellner. On November 11, 2009, the actors reconvened for a second staged reading at Hollywood United Methodist Church. Within moments, it became clear that the show’s changes were not limited to the performance venue and dates. There had been significant alterations in the script and cast since the first reading months earlier.
“The role of Sergio became a lot bigger,” McGrath remembers. “There was a fantastic actor who played him [in the table reading]. I thought he was the best Latin actor by far of all who have played that role and its variations. Unfortunately, they replaced that actor, even though he had done all the readings.”
To make the show more kid-friendly, Reubens omitted the more adult material from the original production and made the show similar to the children’s series. As he did with converting the unused draft of Pee-wee’s Big Adventure into Pee-wee’s Playhouse: The Movie, Reubens added a number of Playhouse characters not present in the original live show. Many of the original cast were on standby expecting to reprise their roles, but found their characters’ time on stage rapidly diminishing as the drafts progressed.
“Originally Paul asked Monica to do the musical salute because they weren’t sure if I was available,” says Brian Seff, who played Mr. Jelly Donut in the original production. “I emailed Paul and told him I was available, but once I saw the script, I just said to him I didn’t see how it was going to work. In 1981 everyone still knew who Sly Stone was. I didn’t know if audiences of today would get it.”
In addition to fearing that some jokes would simply die, Seff had questions about the physical changes Reubens had undergone in the last several decades.
“I was surprised that Paul was doing it,” he admits. “I wondered if he could still pull off that voice when he was fifty-seven years old.”
As work on the script continued, the final form of the cast and crew started to take shape. Lynne Stewart and John Paragon were hired to reprise their roles as Miss Yvonne and Jambi the Genie from the original stage production and the television show, along with John Moody, who was a part of the original stage show as Mailman Mike. Groundling Phil LaMarr, from MADtv and Pulp Fiction fame, was tapped to fill in for Laurence Fishburne as Cowboy Curtis.
George McGrath and Alison Mork were hired to voice all of the puppets, but after the final staged reading, Reubens dropped a bomb on the two actors.
McGrath explains, “I was asked to do all of the table readings, and at the last one, I was told that I would be doing all of the male puppet voices offstage and Alison would do all the female ones. And then, right before rehearsals began, Paul said [Actors’] Equity wouldn’t allow it — which meant that he’d tried to cut a deal to pay us less than scale and the union wouldn’t go for it.”
According to McGrath, Reubens claimed that hiring the two vocal actors would have cost him an extra $50,000. Instead, he intended to have the actors who played the human characters double as voices, a measure that would enable him to hire fewer people.
The producers rounded out the rest of the cast by hiring Josh Meyers to play Fireman Phineas, Jesse Garcia as Sergio, Drew Powell as Bear, and Lance Roberts as the King of Cartoons. Gilbert Lewis and William Marshall had played the King of Cartoons for the television show (the latter passed away in 2003 from complications from Alzheimer’s disease and diabetes). Lori Alan and Maceo Oliver were cast as understudies and puppet voices.
Rebuilding the Playhouse
Most of the puppets were designed by Swazzle, a company based in Glendale, California. The group lobbied for the job after hearing word of Pee-wee’s return to the stage.
Patrick Johnson of Swazzle rebuilds Randy [© Swazzle Inc.]
“We were good friends with Alison Mork and she mentioned to us that The Pee-wee Herman Show was starti
ng up as a new live show,” says Sean Johnson, co–creative director at Swazzle. “We figured they weren’t going to dig the old puppets out of storage and thought we should be the ones to build new ones, so Alison passed our name along.”
Despite having an insider-track to Reubens, it still took Swazzle some time to win the project. To help seal the deal, Johnson contacted the Chiodo Brothers, the production studio that had animated the Large Marge sequence in Big Adventure, and joined forces with them.
“It turned out the person in charge of hiring the puppet builders [for the new stage show] had done work with the Chiodos,” Johnson says. “They were already being considered for the project. We just didn’t know it.”
Ultimately, both teams were brought on board to create the puppets. The Chiodo Brothers managed the project and contracted Swazzle to build 19 puppets and provide puppeteers for the show, while Alex in Wonderland, a company that specializes in costume-sized puppets, were brought on board to build Chairry and Conky.
Although Chairry had not been a part of the original stage production, Reubens knew that audiences would want to see their favorite character when the show was revived on stage in 2010. To make Chairry move, puppeteer Artie Esposito sat on a rolling chair with a built-in school desk, two other puppeteers would lower her shell over Esposito, and he would slip his arms into the sleeves of the puppet. Inside each of Chairry’s arms were handles that controlled the mouth and eye movements.
“It was very comfortable,” Esposito explains. “It was pretty much like an oversized costume where I got to sit the whole time.”
Perhaps not that comfortable, since Chairry and Pee-wee shared a song-and-dance number that required Esposito to put his puppeteering skills to the test.
“It was heavy, but it was okay,” Esposito recalls. “It was similar to when you sit in a chair and get stuck. When you stand up the chair is stuck on your butt. That’s pretty much what it was like. When I would stand up to do the dance, the whole thing would come up with me and I would sort of waddle.”
There were also some difficulties in translating the character from screen to stage. Alex Timbers stressed to the puppeteers the importance of the puppets looking alive at all times while on stage, an extra effort not required on the television series.
“That was the biggest challenge with Chairry,” Esposito recalls. “Her part in the TV show was usually limited to one or two minutes of camera time and then Pee-wee would be in another part of the house. You didn’t know what Chairry was doing. So I had to take Alison’s movements and come up with other things for Chairry to do. Alison didn’t do too much clapping, so I added that to the character. I had to add nuances I could keep up for ninety minutes so that when Chairry didn’t have lines she wasn’t dead.”
The puppet builders at Swazzle also needed extra assistance to ensure that Pee-wee’s talking fish remained physically active, even when they were not the center of attention.
[© Swazzle Inc.]
“The fish had a special motor that the Chiodo Brothers made that would keep them in perpetual motion,” Johnson says. “Whenever necessary, a puppeteer would flip the motor off, have the fish say their lines, and then flip the switch back on.”
Ever the problem-solvers, the Chiodos faced some big ones when it came to designing another Playhouse character.
“Magic Screen had to do on stage what she never had to do for the TV show, which is move by her own power,” Sean Johnson explains.
To make her glide seamlessly in front of an audience, the Chiodo Brothers built a remote controlled puppet. The first Magic Screen was powered by a toy car that was weighed down to prevent her from zooming off stage.
“With that system there were also problems with the RC signals,” says Victoria Johnson, who operated the puppet’s body movements. “When Magic Screen would get close to Paul she would go berserk because of his wireless microphone.”
[© Swazzle Inc.]
In the week before its debut, the puppet was refitted with a new mechanism that enabled the Magic Screen to turn on a dime. The results made it easier for the puppeteers to control her and made for smoother, cleaner movements on stage. Unlike most of the puppets, Magic Screen was controlled by two puppeteers. While Victoria Johnson operated her body, Haley Jenkins operated her mouth. The duo had to work in sync with vocal actress Lori Alan to make the illusion work for the audience.
“As a puppeteer, you’re used to doing the voice or using a prerecorded track,” Victoria Johnson explains. “But it worked out. I think we executed it well.”
Testing an early version of Pterri at the Swazzle workshop [© Swazzle Inc.]
While the puppeteers had many sessions of trial and error to get the characters to move fluidly, none posed a larger challenge than Pterri. To assist in his flight, the puppet received a facelift: his carved foam body was covered in neon lime green latex for maximum durability and mobility. Initially, the team had difficulty finding a way to move the puppet vertically through the stage space, but award-winning puppetry consultant Basil Twist suggested the group use a device called a split controller, which allowed the puppeteers to use horizontal space to make Pterri fly up and down.
The finished puppet on stage [© Swazzle Inc.]
Just as on the television show, more than one type of puppet was used to bring Pterri to life. A marionette puppet with a six-foot wingspan was used for when Pterri was in flight, and a hand puppet was used when vertical movement wasn’t required. His size was expanded a few inches for maximum visibility in a large theater, with his height totaling two feet tall.
Joining fan favorites like Clocky, Conky, Globey, and Mr. Window on stage were two new characters. The team from Swazzle built Ginger, Cowboy Curtis’s new anatomically correct mare who was designed by Playhouse puppet designer Wayne White, and Sham Wow, made of the hyper-absorbent hand towels made famous by late-night infomercials.
As one might expect, the marionette Sham Wow puppet, designed by Patrick Johnson, was made of the actual product. There was even a phantasmal incarnation of the character from the Great Beyond — Ghost of Sham Wow.
Patrick Johnson’s Sham Wow design and the finished puppets [© Swazzle Inc.]
Ghost of Sham Wow was born during an improvisational moment in rehearsal. Reubens jokingly threw Sham Wow into the deep-fat fryer during snack time and the cast immediately started rolling with a series of what-ifs: What if Sham Wow was now dead? What if the puppets all had a moment of silence? Reubens loved the suggestions and decided to integrate them into the scene, forgetting that the character had one more appearance later in the play. Several solutions were posed, like Sham Wow appearing burnt or deep-fried. But finally, someone suggested that he appear as a ghost.
“We called Ghost of Sham Wow ‘old reliable,’” explains Carla Rudy, the puppeteer who operated the character. “No matter what else had happened with the marionettes that day, every time Ghost of Sham Wow popped down, he always killed. The audience loved it.”
Despite the conventional wisdom, Ghost of Sham Wow designer Artie Esposito recalls that the character struck a particularly strong chord with children.
“Paul thought that kids were going to be afraid of Ghost Wow,” Esposito says. “But when he would go do the Q&A, kids would always say Ghost of Sham Wow was their favorite part of the show.”
According to Esposito, Reubens was surprised that kids really enjoyed characters from a horror genre, and has an idea for a kids show involving ghosts and monsters, which might leave the door open for Ghost of Sham Wow to rise again from the dead.
As fun as it was to create the new characters, the team at Swazzle was disappointed when the Puppetland Band was removed from the show weeks before opening.
“It’s funny because we had all picked which ones we were going to build,” Esposito recalls. “Then the day we came in to start building, we got the phone call that they were being taken off the
table.”
A number of factors caused the characters to be cut from the show.
“Paul mentioned many times that the budget was about two million dollars, which sounds like a lot, but is still a finite amount of money,” Sean Johnson explains. “The puppets were bid at a price that made them unaffordable, unfortunately.”
In addition to the cost, the physical limitations of Club Nokia might have played a role.
“The puppets were supposed to roll out on a giant platform that was a huge set piece,” Johnson says. “It was also going to require three more puppeteers to get into that area.”
The most significant reason the characters were cut was the mature content of their scenes. While the show definitely employed suggestive humor that would have been over the heads of most children, the sequences involving the Puppetland Band were surprisingly risqué.
In a November 2009 draft of the script, the Puppetland Band appears on stage “laughing hysterically amid a cloud of smoke.” It’s discovered that Chicky Baby had just scored some medical marijuana and the group tries to get Pee-wee to take a hit from an oversized bong because he often seems anxious. Pee-wee is tempted, but ultimately decides to pass.
“I have the type of personality where I’d go right to heroin,” Pee-wee says.
With the new puppets ready for their stage debut and the cast in place, The Pee-wee Herman Show was ready to return. For the team at Swazzle, working on the project that called for them to recreate some of their favorite childhood characters was a once-in-a-lifetime experience.
Inside Pee-wee's Playhouse Page 14