Review: La Muela del Ray Farfan

Performed in the Ferst Centre, this is a show (AKA The Toothache of the King Farfan) by bilingual and Latino company, Society of Educational Arts. The orchestra pit had been opened up, and inside were musicians. We start with a small intro animation/shadow puppetry projected on the black curtain that hides the stage. When it lifts, we see a large castle set behind a scrim, the cyclorama lit in blue behind the castle, and vertical banners hanging from poles (four in total, two on each side of the stage).

The play is about a king - duh - who has a toothache :roll: . Yeah ok, a bit more detail needed: the king is bad-tempered and has a toothache - but the scientists and philosophers can’t treat him. He also is quite mean to his daughters. He locks up one, and stops her from marrying her true love. The princess escapes, and hides with the help of some forest gnomes (elves? They were something like that), but manages to get caught in the end. She is returned to the king, where a strange woman offers a drop of blood (yeah, blood) to cure the king. The king tries it, and feels better. The woman turns out to be … you know, I actually don’t know that and you’ll see why in a second … anyway, she teaches the king that he’ll only feel better if he’s nice to people and isn’t stingy with the royal money. In the end, the daughter is free to marry her love.

This whole performance is an operetta, sung in Spanish and English; although more on the Spanish side. Hence me not knowing some of the finer points - I could follow the play alright, but the details were mostly in Spanish. I’ve probably missed out on a lot of jokes, but then I didn’t hear the audience laugh much. The operetta was more of a drama than most.

What makes this a stunning performance isn’t actually the puppetry; it’s the combination of the puppetry and the live music. Five opera singers take on the voices of the puppets, similar to how bunraku plays are sung/spoken by the narrator. Other than one puppet - the court jester, which was a minor character - all of the puppets were synched perfectly with the vocals. In fact, it took me about ten minutes to figure out that the dialogue wasn’t done by the puppeteers, but by the opera singers on either side of the stage.

By the time we were in the middle of the show, I had gotten into the groove of the style of puppetry (more about that in a second), and had started watching the singers. It wasn’t because the puppetry was bad, or boring, but simply because the musicians were simply fantastic to watch. Their voices were strong, powerful, and the range of characters each played showed off their skills well; more than that, the singers were just as emotive as if they were the performers being watched, not the puppets. So it was also a delight to see them act out the characters too.

The puppets included small rod puppets, shadow, and lifesize pseudo-bunraku (I really have to find a better term for it; puppets that are worn and operated by the back of the head/mouth and hand/rod). The puppeteers wore tight - I mean tight - lycra or something, along with black socks and hoods; although most of the time you couldn’t see their costumes as they were wearing the puppets. (The singers wore something I could only describe as uniforms, leather plated sort of things, almost like a Roman legionairre thing)

The puppets were skillfully operated, with even the singers taking part in the manipulation. There were one or two things that could have done with a polish, but nothing worth mentioning other than the jester’s lip synching.

The lighting design, whilst colourful, was a bit weird to me. They had used a mirror ball, but the lights hitting it were angled incorrectly, and the ball used only during bright scenes, so the dots of light hit the ceiling instead of the walls or stage. I doubt anyone else even realised there was a ball; I only noticed because I saw it on my way to my seat, and realised that I hadn’t seen it in the rig before tonight. They also used lots of red (red wash, red cyclorama, and the spinning mirror ball - even though the light washed out the ball again) during scenes when the king was angry. It was a bit of an overkill.

Despite that, La Muela del Ray Farfán is a joy to watch. I’m not a big fan of musicals, but enjoy opera a little more. This show amazed me at the level of manipulation skills. It’s hard enough to lip synch to your own movements; but to lip synch to someone else’s voice and do it without missing a single word is a feat almost impossible (not impossible, because they pulled it off!).

(This show just opened, and will continue performing in Atlanta at the Centre of Puppetry Arts over the next month… just in case you happen to be in, or will be in, Atlanta)

I give this show: