Review on the fly:
#mnfringe show 21: The Choose Your Own Adventures of Turtle Boy: perfect family fare; puppeteer and marionette Turtle Boy engage audience multiple times to steer the plot, and volunteer for cemetery and fight training scenes; charming, silly, nimble improv; whole audience very into it - 5 stars
Visiting New York City puppeteer Emmanuel Elpenord and his marionette alter ego Turtle Boy are a charming pair of entertainers with their show “The Choose Your Own Adventures of Turtle Boy.” And they aren’t kidding, there are many points in the performance where there is an option to go one way or another, on which the audience gets to vote and steer the narrative. As is common with improv audiences, there’s a lot of noise and chatter at the start, but Elpenord quickly gets the audience on board, calling for applause or cheers for an option one at a time, and then he has the final say on which group sounded more enthusiastic.
“Here’s our picnic! Only vegetarian options, because I’m a turtle.”
But the puppeteer is also quick to get the audience to bond together, and bond with Turtle Boy, right at the very start. Turtle Boy, just as he was in the previews the night before Fringe began, is a little spooked by crowds (“So many people, even more than there were yesterday!” Nice to hear the audiences are getting bigger, even though it quickly causes Turtle Boy to duck behind the performer’s leg.) Getting a clap and chant of “Tur-tle Boy, Tur-tle Boy” going gets the puppet to “come out of his shell” (OK, that joke’s out of the way early in the show, too.)
“Is the end of Turtle Boy? Should Turtle Boy give up?”
Once the adventure gets going, there are also a couple of opportunities to have volunteers come up on stage and interact with Turtle Boy. Well, the first one we had was a body in a cemetery, so not a lot of interacting there. The second option was for someone to join Turtle Boy for fight training, except it was a Battle to the Death… of Rock, Paper, Scissors. A lot of fun to be had, even for the little girl who was a corpse. Elpenord was also good about not taking both volunteers from just one part of the audience. So everyone really did feel included, which is not an easy thing to keep in balance in a show like this.
“The bridge is out! Do we make the jump or dive in the water?”
The adventure when I attended had to do with defending a secret salad dressing recipe from some competitors who sent a gang of Cajun Cowboys (the other option was Russian Robots :) to take Turtle Boy out and steal the recipe. After the inevitable action sequence of Turtle Boy battling them to a draw, he had to go on the run, after stopping off to say goodbye at his friend’s grave, and then some fight training, before a climatic car chase. Your adventure will vary. Another amusing audience interaction took place when Turtle Boy asked the spectators about the message on his friend’s grave. A very alert audience member quickly piped up with “Avenge Me!” which was a big hit.
“This salad dressing stuff is getting out of hand.”
Kids and adults alike will enjoy this one. Emmanuel Elpenord is a gifted performer, both as a puppeteer and in managing an audieince. He even does his own pre-show music, riffing on the flute in conjunction with music tracks playing on his computer. If you need something light and fun, you should check out “The Choose Your Own Adventures of Turtle Boy.”
5 Stars, Very Highly Recommended
You can find reviews of other shows in these links to my listings of 5 and 4.5 Star Shows (VERY Highly Recommended) and 4 and 3.5 Star Shows (Highly Recommended). Here's a link to a list of all the coverage of returning favorite artists from past pre-Fringe Top 20 lists of mine that are part of this year's Minnesota Fringe Festival. And here's links to the 2026 versions of my pre-Fringe Top 10 list and Top 11 through 20 for the 2026 festival.
No comments:
Post a Comment