QUILCENE — String & Shadow Puppet Theater will bring three highly imaginative spectacle performances to the Quilcene Lantern this weekend.
Formed in 2020, the theater group has produced an original show from scratch each year, including writing scripts, building elaborate sets, building sometimes more than 12-foot-tall puppets and rehearsing casts of 10 to 15 performers.
Co-founder and Director Emily McHugh said this year’s spectacle includes a 7½-foot cockroach.
The puppets are built using cardboard and paper mache, and this production made heavy use of textiles, McHugh said.
“I think of puppetry as anything inanimate that you can animate through and give life to through your movement,” McHugh said.
“Night at the Grand Opera” takes place in a single night in a European opera house in the 1890s.
The show will take place at the Quilcene Lantern, 7360 Center Road, on Friday and Saturday night with doors opening at 6 p.m. and the show starting at 6:30 p.m. Doors will open for Sunday’s matinee at 1:30 p.m. and the show will start at 2 p.m.
Tickets cost $33.94 for adults, including fees, and $18 for kids 12 and younger. They can be purchased online at quilcenelantern.com/events/night-at-the-grand-opera. A limited number of pay-what-you-can tickets will be available at the door.
Audiences are strongly encouraged to dress up for the opera.
The show is seen from the perspective of a fly on the wall who observes the events of an evening at the opera.
“There’s a revolutionary plot,” McHugh said. “There’s a lot of things converging towards catastrophe or transformation in this one night at the opera house.”
McHugh said she and her creative partner, co-founder and Director Donald Palardy III, work together in plotting the stories out, often starting in the early winter, and then she writes the script. The script changes during the 10 weeks of rehearsal and pre-production leading up to the summer stagings, she added.
A smaller version of this year’s show was created for a festival in New Orleans. The version acted as a rough draft for the current show, McHugh said.
Based in Olympia, the theater has held many performances at the Finnriver Farm and Cidery in the past. Last year, when the weather turned bad before a performance, the Quilcene Lantern invited the group to stage its show in the historic barn.
Following the show, McHugh said she dropped hints that the company would be interested in doing something weird for Halloween.
Several months ago, Lantern owner Laurie de Koch reached out to see if the group would be interested in doing a Halloween show this year, McHugh said.
“This show takes place in an interior, and that barn is just so beautiful,” McHugh said. “It’s a barn, but I feel like it will feel like an opera house with the right lighting and sets and everything. It has wonderful acoustics.”
String & Shadow often travel and perform with live musicians, but for this show, it opted to use old opera recordings instead. McHugh said the pre-1920s recordings are helpful for transporting back to the historical timeframe.
McHugh said parents often go to the company’s performances for their children but are often deeply immersed themselves.
“There’s themes and stories that we’re focusing on that are definitely catered towards our adult audiences within these imaginative worlds that we know kids are going to enjoy,” she said.
With so much of our lives and consumption of entertainment and art occurring through screens, McHugh said it’s been a wonderful and unique experience to engage with people through the shows.
She said she sees imagination like a muscle and that using that muscle for art can extend to sharpening people’s minds for creative solutions in real-world problems.
“These are dark times,” she said. “We need to nurture imagination so we can imagine different types of futures and how to get there.”
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Reporter Elijah Sussman can be reached by email at elijah.sussman@peninsuladailynews.com.
