MicheLee Puppets

The honest nature of children is something to be admired, and nothing awakens that spirit of candid excitement like an interactive, colorful, melodic performance. Essentially, the latter is what MicheLee Puppet Shows provide for their young audience, with the addition of one other very important distinction: MicheLee Puppets comes with a message woven neatly into the fiber of each of their plays.

A Good Day for Pancake is a cheerful marionette show with an undercurrent of morality. What initially seems to be your typical go-to source for an hour’s worth of quality entertainment for an age group spanning from two years to seven quickly transforms throughout the presentation. The plot that begins as explicit and playful as any nursery rhyme unexpectedly hits a pivotal checkpoint when a bully character is introduced to the pack of silly puppets and begins to pick on one of them, hurting the little lion’s feelings and ostracizing him from the rest of the group. The story takes an unprecedented 180-degree turn, and begins to accrue gravity as the bully injects an alien spirit of mean-heartedness and violence into the dynamic of our beloved fluffy heroes.

Pancake the piglet, in all of the sincerity of a child in the age bracket of the bright-eyed attendees in the crowd is struck with an inherent sense of responsibility and concern, and we follow along with Pancake’s strides in an attempt to denounce the bully and right the wrongs imposed on our favorite lion cub. With the help of Pancake’s mom, who also serves as the puppeteer, Pancake and the young audience learn how to report bullying to an adult in order to bring it to an end.

With the cheerful swing of things restored and the vitality of every cast member revitalized, especially the happiness of the lion cub, a quick review of the material covered in the play is crisp evidence of the resilience of the message in the young minds of its viewers. It was clear to see that several short lessons condensed into a simple cadence were enough to have an effect on the kids seated on the floor in front of the stage, and there is something reassuring about watching the next generation subsume such an important lesson into their freshly-developing sense of morality, because seeing this is very nearly the equivalent of watching tomorrow’s young thinkers dissolve domestic violence. That, along with the simple enjoyment of seeing a puppet show, is all the reason you need to see a MicheLee Puppets performance!

MicheLee Puppets are a non-profit organization who cultivate their shows from the seeds of social concerns. To learn more about what MicheLee Puppets does, where to find them, and how to support their cause, visit micheleepuppets.org/ - And tune in on Tuesday the 8th for a presentation of Somebunny Special as part of these ten days of ArtsFest 2011!