Center for Puppetry Arts’ ‘Space’ gives astronomy a musical liftoff

When the audience gets schooled about astronomy at the recently expanded Center for Puppetry Arts, don't expect anyone nodding off like students in a droll and dry college classroom.

Rock 'n' roll riffs help fire the engines of "Space," a science-based puppet musical written and directed by Jon Ludwig, the center's artistic director. The cast of puppeteers strikes power chords while delivering planetary facts amid a toe-tapping soundtrack.

In short, Ludwig’s grand plan isn’t rocket science. Instead of having guests simply ingest galactic data, he hopes the catchy lyrical melodies provide some scientific retention.

“You’re learning as you’re enjoying it,” Ludwig said. “There’s a sugar-coated pill of knowledge there.”

Originally launched in 1996, “Space” receives overhauls each time it takes flight. Ludwig and company stay in step with scientific discoveries by enlisting help from Georgia Tech astronomer James Sowell.

“He’s been reading our scripts,” Ludwig explained, “and making sure our science is current.”

That information links together like a constellation thanks to alien puppets Ot and Eema, an otherworldly comedy duo that takes the audience to the stars. Think Abbott and Costello with antennae.

Using hand-and-rod, shadow, black light and body puppets, the cast orbits onstage while belting out new songs penned by John Cerreta. The puppeteers explain the phases of the moon to a hip-hop beat, croon about comets in the style of the B-52s, go rockabilly when singing about Mercury, and serve up a recap of all of the information with a song inspired by Beck’s “Loser.”

Pluto almost scores its own song, a death metal thrash fest, but the anthropomorphic celestial body gets his guitar taken away, because he’s no longer a planet.

Musical additions and technical enhancements harmonize with new characters. Ludwig gave the puppeteers some creative license to soar. For example, performer Dolph Amick introduces his own creation this time around, a character he dubs Guitarth Vader.

This begs a question: Did Ludwig and the center decide to remount “Space” to take advantage of the release of the latest “Star Wars” film?

“I think it was a happy accident,” Ludwig said. “It was time for this show to rotate back in, because it’s been about four years. I don’t think any of us knew it was coming out at the same time as the new ‘Star Wars,’ but we’ll take it.”

In between rehearsals, we recently spoke with Ludwig about what it’s like to have his head in the stars with “Space.”

On how he presents scientific information through “Space”:

“In other versions of the show, there was more information. I think I fell in love with the statistics. And then you realize saying billions and trillions, and listing numbers means absolutely nothing to most people. So we started simplifying it and getting rid of a lot of that technical stuff. That’s where Dr. Sowell helped us. We found the most important things to say about each planet, and the show became more streamlined and more memorable. … This is about the fourth time we’ve done it, and each time it changes a little bit. This time it’s more rock ‘n’ roll. We have more songs, and it’s kind of influenced by They Might Be Giants and their educational songs. You can sing the songs, and hopefully the kids will continue singing them when they get back to school and the information will kind of stick with them. And the teachers will be happy, because the kids have learned something that they’re teaching.”

On how technology has advanced the production:

“Last time, we added in an animator and a projectionist. Our technology has gotten so much better, too. In 1996, we had six slide projectors, six overhead projectors and a million shadow puppets. Now we’ve streamlined that, and it’s really high-tech. … We do a lot of animations and projections. With Dr. Sowell’s help, we picked out (images) from NASA and were able to animate them. So it looks like we’re seeing flybys and landing on the surface of Mercury or Venus. It’s multilayered, because we have a big scrim in front of everything. It’s just like going to the planetarium. It’s huge and looks really enormous. You’re basically flying through the solar system in outer space.”

On keeping things entertaining:

“I think the whole goal was to make it educational, but not feel like a boring lecture at all. We actually kind of start off the show like that and fool people. We have this observatory guy doing a boring lecture. Suddenly this spaceship shows up, and we get into rock ‘n’ roll. … We have a song about day and night, and one about the sun. The song about Jupiter has a nice funky beat. One of the original songs was about an asteroid belt, and we did it in the style of James Brown. We basically take pop songs we really like and make them our own.”