It’s a familiar scene: a forlorn-looking woman with a lacy black shawl covering her head walks on stage, carrying a bottle of champagne. Silently, she pulls out a bottle of pills and gives the champagne to an audience member to pop open and pour her a glass, which she promptly gulps down with the pills.
But then, the twist: The performer, puppeteer Meredith Miller, focuses her viewers’ attention on a small screen, behind which she presents a shadow show representing the deaths of 25 different celebrities. By the second tiny reenactment, the audience at the Chopin Theatre is half-groaning, half-laughing.
In her first long-format show, “Madness in Miniature,” a series of short acts all featuring interactions with some kind of hand-built item, Miller has developed a formula, pairing an old song (such as Bing Crosby’s “The Moon Got in My Eyes”) with an object, and “some sort of trick element,” she said, adding, “I didn’t consciously build a strategy.” But from her experience participating in variety and burlesque shows—she performs as Claire de Lune—she’s found that audiences respond well to a reveal.
There must be something to that theory. For her 10:30 p.m. shows every Thursday, she’s gotten “surprisingly good” turnouts in the Chopin Theatre‘s small downstairs lounge.
“For the last couple weeks,” she said, “there have been people I don’t recognize.”
People are also intrigued by the idea of adult puppetry, Miller said.
“The range of ‘what is a puppet’ is pretty broad,” she said.
For instance, it’s not just your standard Punch and Judy–type marionette. It can also be a prop or a costume item, such as the devilish creature in Miller’s “A Dance with The Devil,” which she’s performed in variety shows and added to “Madness in Miniature.”
She builds all of her objects in her Edgewater studio.
“It’s a lot of papier-mâché,” said Miller, who’s also a freelance props person and puppet designer for local theaters such as the Chicago Shakespeare Theater. “It’s a lot of latex, fabric, foam and a lot of items found at hardware stores.”
She said she’s like an inventor who knows the outcome of what she needs to create, but the hard part is figuring out how to get there. For one puppet, a bouquet, she worked for 40 hours a week for about a month.
“You wouldn’t really be able to tell by looking at it, but the point is it looks kind of effortless,” Miller said.
Miller, 29, has been performing “Madness” at the Chopin Theatre (1543 W. Division St.) for an open run, and she’s been consistently changing up the structure, experimenting with each act’s placement. For the first week, it was just Miller and her piano player, Nick Sula, who performed between Miller’s sketches to give her time to prepare for the next. There’s no curtain on stage to quickly change behind, so she has to go into the black-box theater next door.
“It had the format of more of a concert: song, act, song, act, song, etc.,” Miller said. “It would have worked well if it had all been a long piece of live music, but using the recorded tracks for some and solo piano for some was creating a bit of disconnect for the audience.”
For at least the next few shows, Miller added performers and friends Jason Adams and Emmy Bean to the line-up, although she does expect to change up the bill every four to six weeks. These two do prop-focused vignettes between Miller’s segments, such as Adams’ retelling of the Daedalus and Icarus myth while contemplating reasons for Amelia Earhart’s disappearance.
“I think that including Jason and Emmy makes it much more understandable,” Miller said. “The format is more identitifiable as a puppet ‘cabaret,’ and really helps create the variety of texture and rhythm that makes it work as a show.”
