In January 2007 at the inanimate objects festival, I joined a fascinated audience to watch Alberta-born Ronnie Burkett do a reading of his work-in-progress Billy Twinkle, Requiem for a Golden Boy. Proving why he is one of Canada’s greatest artists, Burkett showed he doesn’t even need puppets to put on an incredibly entertaining show, and the audience went home happy and excited to someday see the final product. Burkett, however, felt differently.
“There is a funny story about that reading actually. That night was my father’s 80th birthday and I agreed to come out west so I could go to Medicine Hat,” he recalled. “I walked off the Vertigo stage at that reading and went ‘Huh. That’s not it,’ threw the script in the trash and went to the hotel and sobbed my eyes out because I’d written this turkey. Somewhere on the trans Canada highway around Strathmore it hit me what I needed to do. That public reading was really beneficial and led me on the right road.”
“It has retained the best part of the initial script, but I have a whole new hook on it. I realized that Billy’s mentor Sid Diamond needed to come back from the dead as a hand puppet and make him look at his life. It became very funny, it’s now like It’s a Wonderful Life meets A Christmas Carol where Billy is dragged kicking and screaming through his life as a marionette.”
Billy Twinkle is a middle-aged cruise ship puppeteer who gets fired from his job, so he decides to kill himself by jumping off the boat. His mentor appears as a hand puppet and Billy is forced over the course of that night to relive his life as a marionette show. When we spoke to Burkett in 2006, Burkett described it as “My big gay piece.”
“In terms of it being the big gay piece, he is unabashedly gay. The first time he talks he is doing a roller-skating bear and he looks out at the audience, gritting his teeth, talking about the audience and going ‘that’s right Mister, I am just a big faggot.’ So right at the top we know that he is gay. There is a great funny scene where he goes home to his boyfriend Brian and their dog Mr. Havalind. All the way through the play we see this little boy with his little showgirl marionette and he dreams of a sparkly life, but he is from Moose Jaw. I really believe that ‘gay’ doesn’t come from Hollywood or New York on Broadway, it comes from wherever that person grows up. As much as you aspire to be twinkly and sparkly and Hollywood, this is a kid from Moose Jaw was already a little queen as a kid and just took it to the cruise line.”
People are going to see the show and think it is autobiographical. Initial drafts of the piece may have been, but that is no longer the case.
“Billy has been in my head for a long, long time and I vowed I couldn’t do it until it was not about me. Now it is so not about me that everybody will think it is me telling my life story. I had to get to the place where Billy was a complete invention and I held off until I felt it was more about the audience than me. Everybody is stuck in the middle of something, whether you are 20 and in the middle of university, or elderly and in the middle of dying. I just had to invent him completely. So what I have here is a toothy-grinned showbiz guy. I have known those guys but never performed that way. So now I have to perform that and it kind of goes against my grain but I have to be Billy Twinkle for the next few years.”
“It is different from me because this is a form of showbiz I have never worked in. I have had a lot of people ask if I was going to put together a variety show and do cruise ships as research. I reply that I didn’t actually go to the concentration camps to do Tinka’s New Dress so I don’t need to go on the cruise ships because I know enough guys who have done it, and told me their experiences that I know what the life is like. It was just setting it somewhere - the guy is literally adrift at sea which was interesting to me. I have never been in that American version of showbiz, and we have this battle between his mentor who was a great artist and Billy disappoints him by being this variety act. My path has been one where puppet shows resonate at home, I was able to do a kind of puppetry that not many thought they could do. It is very different from me personally because Billy is middle aged, disappointed and stuck in a rut and I personally don’t feel that. We have seen enough of those ‘this is my midlife’ one person shows in this country. If anything we need something that is a little sparkly.”
Billy Twinkle makes its world premier at Edmonton’s Citadel Theatre October 17th to November 9th. The show will then embark on a world tour taking Burkett to Australia and the UK. Calgary fans will either have to head up to Edmonton, or wait until spring 2010 when it comes to Alberta Theatre Projects.
“Hopefully some people will come from Calgary and see it on this run. It will be with me through the 2010/2011 season. Interestingly it hasn’t gotten a booking in Toronto yet for a number of different reasons. I think it will get a booking there in 2010… If anything this one feels like it may have a little longer shelf life in it, I don’t know why it feels that way but it does. I already have the next one in mind so we will see when the next one takes precedence in my brain - I will just have to stop Billy and move on to the next one.”
The last time Burkett brought his puppets to Alberta was fall 2006, with stops in both Calgary and Edmonton for the incredible 10 Days on Earth. The previous show has now been retired.
“It got published and so it is out there. I was asked whether I wanted to keep doing it, and I just don’t seem to have the focus or energy anymore. It came time to decide whether to keep it alive and keep touring it or move into Billy Twinkle zone. It was really hard for me, during the last run of the show I kept thinking, ‘I hope I am doing the right thing because I think this one is special.’ The minute it retired and I was back in the studio working on Billy I realized it was time to move on to the next conversation. I think Billy is exactly where I should be right now, and I can only be here because I did my past shows.”
After retiring the show Burkett returned to Toronto to begin the lengthy work process of creating a new show: designing puppets, making script rewrites, and creating sets.
“After 10 Days on Earth I hadn’t been on the road for 15 months, which is the longest I have ever been home. I have been in-studio all year and I found myself, last week, feeling like I was done, I couldn’t be in the studio anymore. The whole gang is still working in the studio on the puppets but I just kind of left. It is a massive amount of work to put these things together. But I think it looks good and we have a real luxury of being in the theatre rehearsing for three weeks on set.”
“We have 29 puppets, and I realized that if I was going to be building all this I wanted to build it in a whole new way. There is a lot of facial animation in the puppets, which I have never done. All of the Billy puppets actually blink. Because Billy is a variety cruise ship puppeteer, we see his act four times. I went to Los Angeles last October to learn how to make a marionette stripper, so the first puppet you see takes off four layers of clothing. There is also a roller-skating bear and an opera singing diva who gets drunk on stage, sings this wild number, and her eyes bat and her mouth moves. We really changed our building process, all of the heads and bodies are made out of paper-mâché, which I haven’t done since I was a kid. I wanted to see if we could get a porcelain-like finish out of brown paper and cornstarch glue. We challenged ourselves everywhere along the line just to keep it fresh.”
So why see Billy Twinkle? While I haven’t personally seen it yet, based on the reading, having seen Burkett’s past shows, and with how enjoyable it is speaking to him, I am just telling you that you need to go see this show. If that isn’t enough, I will let Ronnie himself offer his reasons.
“You can’t see this on TV or anywhere else. The point of the live performing arts is that you are in the room and experiencing that music live, whether it is an acoustic voice telling a story or seeing a marionette show that gets you emotionally. It is not like we live in a culture where there are a lot of adult marionette shows that you see and have a really good time, that tweak your heart and brain at the same time. I can’t believe I am going to say this finally but I think it is just special: it is good to be in a room with a bunch of other strangers and hear a nice story.”
With Billy Twinkle being a middle-aged puppeteer much like Ronnie himself, we asked how long Burkett plans to continue to work.
“Till I drop. This is what I do. We were editing the script a little bit this afternoon in rehearsal and there is a line where Billy’s childhood friend Benji, who becomes the great art puppeteer, goes to the gym and gets laser eye surgery and looks fabulous and quits puppetry. Billy’s quite incensed by this and says ‘we don’t quit, we die with a puppet in our hands’ and that is how I feel I guess. I am a bit long in the tooth to be retrained to do anything else so I am cursed with this. Not joking, as long as audiences keep coming out I feel like that is a vote of confidence to keep going. If there were three people a night in the theatre I would have to take the hint but for some reason people keep coming to see these puppet shows, so that’s what propels me to think of the next one.”
Billy Twinkle, Requiem for a Golden Boy
October 18th – November 9th, 2008
Citadel Theatre, Edmonton
www.citadeltheatre.com
