"Stuffed and Unstrung" started as a workshop, actually, classes within our company. We found that our puppeteers were not ad libbing as well as traditionally, Jim Henson Company puppeteers have. We're sort of famous for going off script a little bit and ad libbing.
The first show that my dad and my mom did together was for, was a comedy series, a short form that went in the middle of late-night news, and then through all of their career, it was always the "Ed Sullivan Show," it was a variety act, my dad was on the "Jimmy Dean Show" for a few years.
This is certainly the raunchiest, if you use that word, raunchy. The roots of Jim Henson, though, was adult comedy.
You get used to it, you look forward to the adrenaline of the stage fright before you go out.
A puppet that starts to improvise badly is almost funnier than the puppet that's improvising well. So the show gets better when the improvising is really good, but also the show can also sometimes get better when the improvising sort of goes a little wrong and that's sort of a blessing to improvising with puppets.
We wanted to premiere it in New York, because New York is sort of the home of the Jim Henson Company and it's sort of the tone and flavor, always, of the puppet work that we've done traditionally. And that's what brought us here and now we're here.
And then after the success at Melbourne Comedy Festival, then we regrouped back in LA and we went back into workshopping and decided to develop a proper show and that's when we started working on "Stuffed and Unstrung," which is a much bigger and sharper version of "Puppet Up."
And with puppets, especially in our company, we sort of demand a very high standard of puppetry, so it's a real technical skill.
So while you're trying to improvise, you're also trying to puppeteer, you're doing everything that you need to do to perform a puppet in our style, for a camera.
So that's the challenge, you have a big technical aspect of what you're doing whilst you're creatively trying to improvise.
It's actually good when the performers are nervous, because it kind of sharpens up your brain and a little bit of adrenaline is good. Initially it's really tough.
I think initially it's terrifying because going into a show where, you know, "Oh, I'm going to be on stage for two hours, I have no lines to memorize, I have nothing really prepared," and actually I say that, the show is not all improvising.
We kind of lost a lot of that and puppeteers were sticking to the script and we thought everything needed to get a lot funnier, so we thought we would go to a good improv comedy instructor.
The show is probably 60 percent improvising and 40 percent not. So there's quite a bit of it that we do have prepared and that part of it, you have memorized and you've rehearsed and you're prepared, just like any show.
I think it's a lot richer than what we call fleshy improv, I think it's very funny, puppet improv and fleshy improv.
And it should be something that only that group of people could've made with everybody invested.
But curriculum-wise, I was drawn to the sciences and specifically to physics, and I really enjoyed it and I think for a little while there, I was really thinking my schooling would be in physics, that that was something I loved.
The first big thing that I did with my dad was the bicycle sequence in "The Great Muppet Caper," where Kermit and Piggy are riding bicycles in Battersea Park in London and that was a complex marionetting and cranes driving through the park, it was a complicated scene, and I did that with my dad.
I was already sort of mixing my science physics enthusiasm with entertainment and directing and puppetry.
And my dad's answer would be usually something to the affect of, A, it came out better than he imagined, but also, he said, "No, it would be impossible for me to imagine the way it will come out." He said, "Yes, I story-boarded it, I had a plan, but then I work with an army of great artists and I want all of them to create inside that creation."
I was 17, certainly by the time I was 19, I knew that show business was where I was going to end up, and I had my sights on being a director.
People would say to him, "When you finish a movie, did it come out as good as you thought it was going to?" Or, "Did it come out the way you intended it to come out?"
I guess I learned a couple of good lessons from my dad. One was when you're creating something, what you want when you're working with a team of other artists, is everybody to work with some creative freedom, so that you really get the best out of everybody.
But initially when I was working with my dad, it was in special effects puppets with radio control and motors and puppet effects.
At that point, I thought probably special effects, something like that, and indeed, the early days when I was working with my dad, after I left school, I only went to less than one year of college, and then I was transferring, and then I delayed my transfer, and I did a movie, and then another movie, and then I never finished college.
