We wanted to premiere it in New York, because New York is sort of the home of the Jim Henson Company and it’s sort of the tone and flavor, always, of the puppet work that we’ve done traditionally. And that’s what brought us here and now we’re here.
BRIAN HENSONOh, well, I can’t tell you; it would be telling you the end. It’s a one-character lip-syncing because in the early days, that’s what my dad was doing.
More Brian Henson Quotes
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And that was always my father’s favorite part about shooting as well. Often my dad would shoot very, very late, he was quite a workaholic, they would do 20, 20-hour shoots and stuff like that.
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This is certainly the raunchiest, if you use that word, raunchy. The roots of Jim Henson, though, was adult comedy.
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And if the audience is in a kind of naughty, raunchy mood, then they’re going to make naughty, raunchy suggestions and then we take them and we do the scene anyway, and that’s part of the fun.
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So while you’re trying to improvise, you’re also trying to puppeteer, you’re doing everything that you need to do to perform a puppet in our style, for a camera.
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And it should be something that only that group of people could’ve made with everybody invested.
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I think it’s a lot richer than what we call fleshy improv, I think it’s very funny, puppet improv and fleshy improv.
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We kind of lost a lot of that and puppeteers were sticking to the script and we thought everything needed to get a lot funnier, so we thought we would go to a good improv comedy instructor.
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We took a show to the Aspen Comedy Festival, called “Puppet Up” at that point, and in Aspen we just did three shows, and in Aspen, there was a producer from the Edinborough Fringe Festival, who said, “Please come to Edinborough.”
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In the show, we have recreated two sketches that my dad had, or pieces that my dad had developed. One that he had developed with my mother, one that Frank Oz had developed with my dad. And these are old pieces from the ’50’s and ’60’s, and we’re going to develop more, too.
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You get used to it, you look forward to the adrenaline of the stage fright before you go out.
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And with puppets, especially in our company, we sort of demand a very high standard of puppetry, so it’s a real technical skill.
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I have nothing really prepared,” and actually I say that, the show is not all improvising.
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But the fact that most of the show you can’t be prepared for, you have no idea really what’s coming is initially very nerve wracking, by now, it’s kind of fun.
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I always very much enjoyed arts and it was so central in my family, my mother was also an art teacher, as well as founding the Henson Company with my dad, there was a lot of art going on in our household.
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I had a plan, but then I work with an army of great artists and I want all of them to create inside that creation.”
BRIAN HENSON