THEATER: Planet Egg

More polished than your average tech-demo/theater-hybrid, Planet Egg takes up the baton from where the delightful Alvin Sputnik: Deep Sea Explorer left it, and crafts a two-man (and one Foley woman) performance of puppet cinema, in which a film is made before your eyes. Looking like a stop-motion short (akin to something you might see at, say, a Spike and Mike festival), Planet Egg is a dialogue-less ballad between a socket-faced, red-ribbon-legged creature who crashes on the titular planet and the lonely white radish-like creature that lives in a fortress made of broccoli. (There are also banana seesaws, carrot benches, and angry mobs of miniature mushroom creatures that like to cry out "Shroom!")

Zvi Sahar (who also created the show) works with Justin Perkins to manipulate the heads and legs of these creatures, leaping across the turntable surface of the planet as they head from one misadventure to the next. Unfortunately, while it's clear that socket-face is trying to repair his ship and escape, the nuances of each action aren't nearly as clear, and although it's easy to get caught up in the excitement of, say, a perspective-shifting chase sequence (set to terrific chip-tune music from Gad Emile Zeitune), many of the jokes(?) are lost. Nor is the entire production live: pre-recorded sequences provide the puppeteers time to change scenery and pre-recorded sounds assist Ien DeNio where Foley effects just won't do.

Planet Egg is a whimsical production, less than an hour long, but at the moment, it's a little scrambled. Here's looking forward to a hard-boiled follow-up!