MYSTERY AT SQUIRREL RANCH
Puppet Rampage 2007
Reveiwed by Diane Koszarski

In a festival full of "rich and strange" puppet shows, Miss Pussycat's Mystery At Squirrel Ranch was, for me, one of the most gratifying. An artist from New Orleans' beleagered Ninth Ward, Panacea Theriac is one of a handful of performers integrating puppetry with the club scene. She has partnered with Dionysian one-man-band performer Quintron for over a decade now, opening or closing his alternate rock "swamp tech" music sets with her puppet fables. They are shows beautifully crafted for success in the intimate venues of an indie-rock dance club: tactile, idiosyncratic puppet characters, pithy dialogue, an electronically pixilated soundtrack and charming black light effects create a visual and engaging overture/finale to their music sets. Quintron aids in puppet manipulation and voicing. Miss Pussycat, in turn, sings back-up with a steady maraca beat during Quintron's performances. Launched with a line or two of dialogue, her quirky melodramas invite the audience to join in. Right off Mystery at Squirrel Ranch establishes trouble with rustlers at Picky Squirrel's horse ranch. When the skeletal, evil Wolf Skeleton first appears, coaxing and luring a little "Japanese miniature magic horse" off the property, we are terrified for the hapless critter, and boo aloud this villain. At the plot climax, Picky and Wolf Skeleton challenge each other to a guitar duel to settle the score; we cheer when, in striving to out-strum Picky, Wolf Skeleton's head explodes! ((The puppet's boxy skull actually pops off a neck-rod; no gore necessary to make the point). And we cheer even more when Picky, in a right-angle plot turn, calls Wolf Skeleton back to the party, welcoming him with his new green head Ð provided he stops rustling! Miss Pussycat and Quintron have also created three "fully cinematic" versions of her puppet oeuvre. (An episode from their latest epic, Trixie and the Treetrunks, was also screened at the festival, in Heather Henson's almanac, Handmade Puppet Dreams, v. III). These movies are clearly labors of love, with detailed sets, multiple camera positions, professional editing and a puppet cast of dozens. Charming, and true to Miss Pussycat's vision, but second, in my opinion, to the jolt of energy, the sheer surprise and joy one experiences at her live dance club show. Her puppets have a singular look, a cross between Steiff plush toys and South Park simplicity, a fantastic melding of vent-mouth rod puppets (the rather lumpen version so popular with youth ministry puppetry) to the outrageous Technicolor aesthetic of a Mardi Gras krew. Miss Pussycat (who in fact adopted her nom de theatre from Pussycat Caverns, the underground music club she hosted in the mid-90s) commends her experiences as a youth group puppeteer in Antlers, Oklahoma for solid training in puppetry skills, and readily cites Nancy Renfrow and Art Clokey as design inspirations. She applies her own funky retro seamstress sensibility to an ever-growing entourage of puppet troupers, some thirty strong at this point. This sense of style applies to her own wardrobe; Miss Pussycat dresses on and off stage in homemade costumes that echo a fifth-grader's school dress, topped with a signature pop-pom hair band atop her blonde pageboy. It's clear that Miss Pussycat and her puppets are kissin' cousins, which is all to the good. She uses her puppet tales, however laid-back and whimsical, to process a great deal of the world's evil, and while her animal characters satirize the alternate rock club scene where she and Quintron tour, they carry a deeper message. Spunky heroines like Picky Squirrel (and Miss Pussycat) always defy Death, and will triumph through art, one as a musician, the other as a puppeteer.