Theater on strings
by Marli Guzzetta
The Fairy Circus is a vaudeville variety marionette show, in which a girl can change to a flower, and reality is for a brief while suspended in favor of magic.

Peter Schaefer of Tanglewood Marionettes controls 24 puppets for the magical, vaudevillian, variety act "The Fairy Circus," this Saturday.

"I don't want to give away all of the things people will see, but puppets that do more than act out a play," said puppetmaster Peter Schaefer, who will orchestrate 24 marionettes on islnd, courtesy of the Nantucket Arts Council

Set to music, the show will contain very little dialogue - making it more accessible for children of all ages. "The marionettes come out and do their tricks, and we move on from there. It's a lot of fun," said S c h a e f e r, who co-founded Tangelwood Marionettes with his wife, Anne Ware, in 1993.

Schaefer picked up his craft from his parents. His first job, when he was a teenager, was doing a puppet show for the Edaville Railroad in South Carver, Mass. After college, he worked for a puppet company in Bennington, where he met Anne. After a few years of national touring, they founded Tanglewood, where they have created a simpatico

division of labor.

"The wonderful thing about puppetry

is that you get to do everything, and the horrible thing about puppetry is that you get to do everything," Schaeffer said. "In our company, I ended up being the front- man, and Anne is much more involved in the creative bent. She has the vision. She sculpts and builds the puppets much better than I do."

"The Fairy Circus" is very much a traditional variety show, with acts meant purely for pleasure and amusement (and a few loud sound changes).

The show includes a spider named Charlotte, who likes a lot of audience interaction, a mischievous clown, a romantic duet of the mushroom girl and the flower boy, a trio of trained mice, a juggler, a contortionist and a ringmaster to hold them all together.

Schaefer doesn't do the voices of any of the puppets; Tangelwood Marionettes pre-records its dialogue, using professional actors. Apparently, this is a hot-button issue in the world of puppetry: to act - out live or to pre-record.

"It's the way we were trained," Schaefer said. "I can hire actors to do the voices really well, whereas, if I try to do a female voice, it comes out as this horrible, Monty Python-esque imitation."

After the show, Schaefer brings the puppets out so the audience can get better acquainted with all 18 to 28 inches of each of them.

Why, with so many high-tech distractions, are puppet shows still a draw for kids?

"Hundreds of reasons," Schaefer said. "Part of the fun is suspending your disbelief. Kids will take a stick and make it a bazooka or a sword; it's the same mechanism. Puppets, they start out as little dolls on strings and then suddenly, they're alive. And that's a different kind of fun than pixar. Puppetry is more like theater. You invest yourself into what you're seeing. So each time you see it, it's a different experience. That kind of thing is critical

for kids' imaginations." I

When: Saturday, Feb. 3, 10:30 a.m.

and again at 11:30 a.m.

Where: Bennet Hall, 62 Centre Street Cost: Free For more information, call 325-8588.