A round of a-paws _{by Madelaine Empson}

If you’ve got kids, or friends with kids, or even if you simply know a kid… you’ve probably seen Bluey. Created by Joe Brumm, the BAFTA and Emmy Award-winning animated television series follows the lovable and inexhaustible puppy Bluey, who learns about the world on adventures with her family and friends.

Now, a theatrical adaptation of the hit children’s show will have its New Zealand premiere after taking the world by storm. Meet Bluey, her little sister Bingo, and her parents Bandit and Chilli in the form of brilliant (60-kilo!) puppets in Bluey’s Big Play, featuring live actors, great music, and epic sets at TSB Arena on the 19^th and 20^th of April. I Zoomed with puppetry director Jacob Williams in the lead-up to the stage spectacular, which has proven so popular, there are six shows in Wellington alone!  

Where did your passion for puppetry come from and what made it stick?

I was a child actor, always involved in theatre, and I ended up living in Hobart in my twenties working as an actor and creating my own theatre. There’s a little puppet company down there called Terrapin, and they had no puppeteers, so they ran a workshop and invited me to participate. From there, they employed me to perform in their next show. I was very natural at the puppetry and loved it, and I was sort of at a point in my career where I wasn’t really enjoying acting anymore. That was 25-plus years ago, and I was very fortunate to be in the right place at the right time and fall into a career that has taken me all around the world.

What’s so wonderful about puppetry is that the focus is always on the puppet, but it has all the elements of theatre that I love. Puppetry involves the audience to invest a little more themselves. Faces have multi-muscles in them to convey emotion and tell stories, whereas a puppet might have only three moving parts. Once you’ve hooked in the audience, they’re placing so much meaning and imagination in the show itself, so it’s a real dialogue. There’s something about puppets – people place and extract humanity from inanimate objects, so it does work on a deeper level. Also, the variety of roles you can play in puppetry is phenomenal. That first show I played, I was a ballerina’s shadow, which broke away from the ballerina, morphed into a monster, ripped the limbs off her, and ate her! It was a dark piece [laughs], it wasn’t a children’s show for sure. But it just showed where puppetry can go. Shadows, giant gorillas, and directing phenomenal, successful dogs onstage.

Yes! How did you get involved in the world of Bluey?  

It’s funny, I’d never heard of Bluey. I was working in New York and came back to Melbourne and got a phone call out of the blue saying, ‘Could you be the puppetry director for Bluey?’ Of course, I said yes. I thought it would be a nice summer job… That was about four and a half years ago!

After that phone call, I just started seeing, everywhere around me, people talking about Bluey, Bluey in the shops, and I did a bit of Googling and thought, oh wow, this is really big. I’ve worked on big shows, but nothing that has the same reach as Bluey. Working on it is a once-in-a-generation experience. A month ago, we were in Abu Dhabi. Before that, Singapore, America, all through Europe. It just relates to so many people, and shows that the core values of humanity and togetherness still have something that hooks us in.

The show continues to have such a resounding impact on audiences. Do you get to experience that feedback first-hand?

I was in Chicago in the foyer watching audiences come in before the show, and what struck me was just how excited they were. Not just the kids, but the parents, the grandparents, even people who didn’t have children with them but knew the show from the kids of their friends. It was just this visceral feeling in the foyer of this excitement and this community. That’s been the case all around the world. You see the feedback through the excitement of the audience. I’ve watched the show more times that I can remember. It’s because of the audience, what they bring and their enthusiasm, that I’m not sick of sitting there, watching, and being a part of it.

Do you feel like each show changes based on the energy in the room and how audiences respond?

Yeah, and because it’s gone for four years, we’ve had the luxury of being able to really hone the puppetry, change the choreography so it’s more efficient, and find new, subtle changes to really bring the performance to a higher level. We created this show during COVID lockdowns. We did that on an Australian tour, then had six months off, then we went to America, and between that period we were allowed to have some more audience interaction, because in COVID times you couldn’t do that. We were able to then refigure some aspects of the show to make it a little more playful with the audience. The kids and the families end up leaving the theatre feeling like they’ve played games and been part of the action and part of the show.

Did the show take on a new meaning post-COVID?

It really did. We were performing to checkerboard seats, I remember, very early on. Spaces between people. I would say it’s much more of a shared experience now between the puppeteers and the audience. It just feels more together.

Even with such a hit series behind you, could you fathom the kind of global success the stage show would have?

We created it alongside Joe Brumm, Ludo [Studio], and Joff Bush [the primary composer]. One of the biggest challenges that myself and Rosemary Myers, the director, faced was being faithful to Bluey, because it had such significance to people. Having producers in the room, it felt like we were being very faithful in honouring it. So what became really exciting was putting it in front of the audience and just sharing all our hard work with them. We opened in Brisbane, and I think it was the first production in the world to open after lockdown. Joe Brumm was sitting in the audience. I spoke to him afterwards, and he just said, ‘I can’t believe people made puppets of my show, and put them on stage. That was great!’

What are you most looking forward to about the New Zealand premiere season of Bluey’s Big Play?

It’s a chance to share this live experience of Bluey with a new audience in a new country. I like New Zealand, it’s got a funky vibe to it. I’m looking forward to coming back and seeing other parts of the country. We’re playing big venues, so big seats as well – feeling that energy will be fantastic.