Les Miz and Friends! A Puppet Parody at Maverick Theater Is Exactly What it Sounds Like

If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, then what do you call a show in which ornery, foul-mouthed puppets invade a well-known play and slice, skewer and cannibalize it? Ask Nathan Makaryk, the co-creator of the R-rated Les Miz and Friends! A Puppet Parody, and you won’t get the stock reply of “Well, we’re just having a lot of fun satirizing a show that we all really love and blah, blah.”

No, ask him about the ridiculously popular musical set among the poor and oppressed in early 19th-century France, and you get the idea he’d just as soon flush the script down the toilet. “I’m not a fan of the musical, which is where all this started,” says Makaryk, a multitalented performer, writer and director who has in the past helped to unleash puppets on such iconic pieces of literature as Hamlet and Frankenstein. “When we were thinking of doing another show that puppets could destroy, this one was at the top of my list. There are certain elements that just drive me crazy about it. It’s overrated for certain reasons, and I really relished the idea of attacking it with puppets.”

While Makaryk—who co-created the show with Genevieve Flati and is working with Danny Mantooth, a puppeteer for Disney—has adapted his share of straight plays over the years, such as The Hobbit and Robin Hood, after working with Sean McNamara’s All Puppet Players at the Maverick several years ago, he realized there is something about the surreal world of puppets that serves as a useful counterpoint to real-life actors.

“Originally, we just liked the novelty of them,” Makaryk says. “Puppets can get away with things [onstage] that humans can’t, especially when it comes to comedy. When a human assaults another human, it’s one thing, but when a puppet does it, it’s funny. . . . And I loved the idea of puppets trying to do good theater, but they’re still puppets, and if something goes wrong, they just rip it apart. That’s a formula we found worked with Hamlet, so now we’re doing it to this.”

The conceit of this show, which is more like Avenue Q, in which 14 live actors interact and control 24 puppets, is that it begins as a faithful and reverent production of the tale, which is based on the French musical (based on Victor Hugo’s novel) that opened in 1980 and spawned Buddha knows how many productions, as well as a 2012 star-studded film that somehow actually topped the stage musical in terms of bombast and dumbness. But because puppets tend to be puppets, they begin questioning the complexity of the plot and the very reason why they’re onstage in the first place; once the second act rolls around, all Hades breaks loose.

“The human actors are the straight men, trying to do a good show,” Makaryk explains. “And the first act is mainly humans and a few puppets. But in the second act, the puppets take over, and we just keep amping up the chaos, and you really have no idea what’s coming next. . . . The good thing about puppets is that when something goes wrong, they can jump on it and improv. . . . So the script is really a skeleton, and everything else that happens depends on the whim of the puppets.”

One of Makaryk’s biggest issues with the classic Les Miz is that it shoves a 655,000-word novel into a three-hour musical (the running time for his show is about 2:25). “It’s far too much story,” he says. “It’s one of the longest novels in history, and to have that much story in three hours is nonsense.” Another flaw, he says, is that the first 45 minutes are “normal story, but it’s all prologue, and then skips 30 years later, and you’re thrown into this new world. You never get to define who is fighting who, what they’re angry about or who the characters are. All the details get condensed, and it makes the plot unbearable.”

That said, Makaryk thinks his puppet massacre works for those who don’t like Les Miz, those who both truly love it and those who like it because they think they’re supposed to like one of the most iconic musical-theater works. “Even though we destroy it, at the same time, we do enough of the show to do it justice,” he says. “We’re not saying the whole show is crap. The parts that work and the songs that make sense are still there, but we get to cut out all the extraneous fat. . . . I will say I like the show much more than when we started the project.”

Les Miz and Friends! A Puppet Parody at the Maverick Theater, 110 E. Walnut Ave., Fullerton, (714) 526-7070; www.mavericktheater.com. Fri.-Sat., 8 p.m.; Sun., 6 p.m. Through April 22. $10-$20.

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