fringe: three tales of woe

professor forbes' three tales of woe
I'm not going to lie... if it wasn't for that fact that the two shadow puppeteers came out to take their bows at the end of 3 Tales Of Woe I may have been slightly more scathing in my review, but it's hard to really harsh when they were so damn cute and enthusiastic.

But the show definitely feels unpolished.

The three titular tales are The Raven by Edgar Allan Poe, part of A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens and Azathoth by HP Lovecraft.

I realised that I actually only know The Raven from the version that was part of the first Treehouse of Horror on The Simpons, and everyone knows A Christmas Carol, but I'm not familiar with the last story at all. I don't know whether it would have been better to not put the less well known story at the end of the show, but my unfamiliarity with the story, combined with music that was slightly drowning out the pre-recorded vocals (plus the fact I'd had a very long day) did mean that I kept losing focus.

I also think that continually turning the light that cast the shadows on and off as they changed puppets was kind of annoying. I'm not sure if that's the usual thing, but some of the changes seemed to take a little too long and I found that it took me out of the moment more than it would have done to see the puppets and sets appearing and disappering.

For the most part the puppets themselves were well done, although I'm not sure if there were some slightly rough edges to some of them where pieces were cut out or if they were supposed to be like that. And Scrooge's hat was totally distracting.

The puppetry was fairly solid, although there were limited movement to some of them, for example, even though the titular raven has the single line of dialogue, the puppet didn't have an articulated beak. And the same spiky haired puppet was used, I think, for the main character in both The Raven and Azathoth.

Don't get me wrong, The Raven was quite enjoyable and although the section of A Christmas Carol with Marley's Ghost isn't my favourite part of the book, the Ghost itself was well done... and there were some beautiful moments in Azathoth with swirling stars... but none of it was exceptional.

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