EVENT PREVIEW
“Dr. Seuss’s The Cat in the Hat”
10 a.m. and noon Tuesdays-Fridays; 11 a.m., 1 and 3 p.m. Saturdays; 1 and 3 p.m. Sundays. June 13-July 28. Preview performances 10 a.m. and noon June 11-12. No shows July 4. $16.50; Center for Puppetry Arts members $9.25. Center for Puppetry Arts, 1404 Spring St. N.W., Atlanta. 404-873-3391, www.puppet.org.
Ever since it arrived on bookshelves in 1957, Dr. Seuss’s “The Cat in the Hat” has continued mesmerizing generation after generation of young minds with a “Bump! Thump! Thump! Bump!”
Those and more literary noises and kinetic illustrations are popping from the pages and onto the stage at the Center for Puppetry Arts. It marks the first time puppets have been officially used to tell the beloved story of the famous feline with the candy cane-colored chapeau.
Technically, it’s an adaptation of an adaption.
“[The rights] have been locked up tight,” said the center’s artistic director, Jon Ludwig, who oversees the adaptation and directs the production. “We’ve been wanting to do this since 1978 when the center first opened up.”
Produced as a play by the National Theatre of Great Britain, and originally adapted and directed by Katie Mitchell, it became the definitive stage version of “Dr. Seuss’s The Cat in the Hat.”
When Ludwig heard the play was making its stateside debut at the Children’s Theatre Company in Minneapolis late last year, he jumped with the bounciness of Things One and Two to find out how to snag the rights for the center.
Once the center’s show was greenlighted, even more challenges began stacking up. Although, for the most part, the script sticks strictly to the words found in the book — every “hat,” “cat” and “sat” staying just like that — Ludwig and his team were struck with quite a task. How would they create puppets that could perform all of the over-the-top actions Seuss put on paper?
“We quickly found that actors have opposable thumbs and most puppets don’t,” Ludwig said. “… We had to adapt it for what puppets can do, and there are quite a few things actors can’t do that puppets can.”
According to Ludwig, when the Cat rides his bicycle on the ceiling in the original stage version, the actors simply look up and point at an imaginary occurrence. At the Center for Puppetry Arts, it happens in front of the audience’s eyes.
Without heavy makeup, actors can’t really replicate the look and scale of Seuss’s style, Ludwig said. So, the crew decided to make it look as if the audience was looking at the best possible replica of the world Seuss created.
The center used the National Theatre of Great Britain’s set design of “Cat” as the starting-off point. They then decided to pack in as many more additional visual details from the book as they could. Even a plant that’s only partially seen on Page 2 of the tome makes the cut. Ludwig said since countless readers know these images so well, the pictures are as important as the dialogue.
“There’s no one looking over our shoulder making sure we follow the design exactly,” said the center’s resident puppet designer Jason von Hinezmeyer, “but from my point of view, being a lifelong Dr. Seuss fan, trying to capture the look of the book was the fun part.”
While Seuss’s illustrations capture all of that unbridled energy and whimsy, they aren’t consistent from page to page. The amount of fingers on the Cat’s hand varies throughout the tale. Colors, sizes and shapes often alter as the story moves along.
That fact, and because the characters do so many different dynamic things throughout the show, required von Hinezmeyer and his puppet building force to create multiple versions of each character.
A total of four different Cat puppets were built by Chris Brown. A special one was devised and equipped with magnets to help reproduce the scene when the character stacks and balances a hodgepodge of household items all over his body.
“I sculpted the heads and built most of the Cats from scratch for the show,” Brown said. “It’s like you’re building your childhood in some way.”
Even the set itself is a giant puppet, an animated entity that moves and changes size. Ludwig likens it to a massive Transformer toy.
It’s that kind of imaginative playfulness Ludwig hopes resonates with audiences just like that book has for decades. It’s how the puppet pro first learned to read.
As the center’s production of “Dr. Seuss’s The Cat in the Hat” prepares to bump and jump to life, a question arises. Will it become an annual tradition like the center’s adaptation of the animated TV special “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer”?
“I hope so,” Ludwig said. “… It’s such a popular book. It’s ingrained in our collective unconsciousness.”
