The St. Louis Zoo closes for the night. Zookeepers lock up. And out come the animals, who gather in Elizabethan costumes to put on a Shakespeare play.
That’s the concept of “Romeo & Zooliet,” a fresh adaptation of the similarly titled tragic romance. The show’s creators retooled the original story to make it kid-friendly and to put large, custom-made animal puppets at center stage.
St. Louis Shakespeare Festival performs the show at a newly built stage in the zoo through Aug. 17.
“Romeo and Juliet” famously centers on a pair of teenage lovers who defy family rivalries to wed in secret, then wind up fatally poisoning themselves.
In “Romeo & Zooliet,” the titular pair — he’s a prairie dog, she’s a bear cub — pledge by the light of the moon to be best friends forever. And rather than drink poison, Zooliet goes into hibernation early.
“We've tried to adapt it in a register that kids will understand. The significance of those early relationships is as deep and as profound [as a love affair]. In some ways, I feel like I understand the play much better now, having thought about it from that perspective. I understand the play and its extremity better,” said playwright Jennifer Joan Thompson.
Thompson freely adapted the 2015 children’s book “The Stratford Zoo Midnight Revue Presents Romeo and Juliet,” written by Ian Lendler with artwork by Zack Giallongo.
She added characters, including the nurse — who now appears in the story as a giant hippopotamus — and put more Shakespeare into it. Fans of the Bard will spot semihidden references, including an owl who accidentally quotes from “Measure for Measure.”
“There's so much that Shakespeare people can really enjoy in terms of how they've adapted that story to this zoo world. But for kids, it was so obvious how fun it would be to see animals falling in love and drinking magic potions and fighting with swords and all that,” said Tom Ridgely, St. Louis Shakespeare Festival’s artistic director and the stage director of “Romeo & Zooliet.”
Not 'The Lion King,' but a king of lion puppets
The production sprang from an idea that didn’t work out.
St. Louis Shakespeare Festival leaders wanted to stage “The Lion King Jr.” but couldn’t secure the rights to the show. With the “Zooliet” concept in hand, they reached out directly to the person who designed the much-loved animal costumes and puppets for the original “The Lion King” musical on Broadway.
Michael Curry Design is not an easy design company to book. Its clients include Universal Studios and Disney; one past project was a 20-foot lion that Katy Perry rode onto the field for her Super Bowl halftime performance in 2015.
But the lower-key concept of animal puppets performing Shakespeare in an actual zoo got Curry’s attention.
“I'm the lion king, I'm an animal expert. So you can imagine [how it sounded] when somebody said they’re going to do Shakespeare with animal puppets, and the animals are 500 feet away. I just thought this is the greatest idea ever,” Curry said. “We can't say enough about the choices the St Louis Shakespeare Festival has made. I think we have something here. Even as jaded as I am after all these years, this is really special.”
Curry’s team devised puppets for “Romeo & Zooliet,” many of which are more akin to animal costumes worn by the actors than a handheld puppet. The puppeteers also created instructional videos for each piece, designed to teach actors untrained in puppetry how to make it all work in front of an audience.
New tools, new skills
Ridgely cast actors for the show, not puppeteers. At the theater company’s Midtown rehearsal studio one recent morning, cast members were moving past their initial focus on getting the mechanics right and growing more proficient at expressing their acting instincts through puppetry.
“We're all trying things. We're exploring and playing,” said Jordan Moore, who plays Romeo. His puppet is handheld.
To operate the Juliet puppet, Ricki Franklin straps into a harness that holds up the chest-high puppet. She manipulates the puppet’s mouth, eyes and one arm. The rehearsal process has opened up the way to many new acting tools.
“Eye blinks and eye line have been something we've never had to think about as actors before, but it was one of the first things they taught us,” Franklin said.
“As living beings, we're never completely still. So even as you're listening, there has to be some sort of life you give to the puppet to make it seem like it’s listening.”
A few minutes later, the rehearsal studio was filled with actors working out dance steps while attired as bears, a red panda, a hippo, a prairie dog, an owl and a very long crocodile.
Once the show is onstage in front of an audience, a key to the aesthetic will be that theatergoers see the actors at work, manipulating their puppets. The goal is not to pull off an elaborate illusion.
“The audience keeps falling into this childhood-like imagination, where they go along with it,” Curry said. “They say, ‘OK, I know the trick here,’ and yet they keep getting pulled into the magic of believing that this inanimate object, this bundle of foam and fur and carbon fiber and aluminum, is a live animal. Their imagination allows them to make it work.”
Performances begin at 7:30 p.m. Tuesdays through Sundays. Run time: 85 minutes.
