Happy Puppet Hour 2 — Jacob Surovsky

Happy Puppet Hour 2 is a sequel to Happy Puppet Hour, a puppet improv show I first developed at USC. During the run of Happy Puppet Hour, my production team and I learned a ton about staging puppetry with a digital multimedia overlay, as well as developing a premise and set of characters we really loved in a free form improvisational setting. The following year, we applied for and won the Paul Backer ISP Grant from the USC School of Dramatic Arts to pursue developing a sequel, where we could take the foundational skills we learned creating Happy Puppet Hour to push the multimedia medium further, and revisit some of our favorite characters.

About the show

Happy Puppet Hour 2 opens with an introduction from Captain Morglick Longley and First Mate Terry, two aliens who came to Earth with the intent of learning everything they could about our planet’s society and culture, and presenting their findings in the form of a Late Night Talk Show called Live From Planet G. They’ve now been on Earth (aka Planet G) for five years, and in that time have grown into global celebrities. On tonight’s special episode, they are going to broadcast Live From Planet G back to Morglick’s home planet of Foogly for the very first time, and have a raucous lineup of celebrity guests and special performances to celebrate. Most excitingly, Morglick and Terry have brought back the cast of the short-running Live From Planet G Musical! based off their life story to perform excerpts from the show. Everything’s going to plan, but when an unexpected caller tempts Morglick to abandon the show, Morglick and Terry’s friendship is put to the test.

…and a musical prequel

A television play sequel…

Just as there are radio plays, where an ensemble of actors work at great lengths to recreate the setting and style of a radio drama broadcast, Happy Puppet Hour 2 is a kind of television play. We combined live performance with live-streamed video content projected onto 3 media surfaces and 2 TV screens hanging above the stage to create an immersive multimedia environment. All the puppetry content played to the camera, with puppeteers visible onstage but invisible onscreen. This created a duality in the performance where the audience could simultaneously watch the show and get to look “behind the scenes”.

While the talk show plot throws the audience into a story with very little established context for who the characters of Morglick and Terry are, the Live From Planet G Musical! is a prequel, explaining how Morglick and Terry met, how they got to Earth, and why they care so much about making a talk show. Because this musical was written here on Earth and features a human cast, all the characters in the musical are portrayed by people dressed up to look like the puppet characters we meet in the talk show.