If you have ever wished to see The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe reinvented as a smutty puppet show, Sammy J can make your dreams come true. The Melbourne comic hooked up with puppeteer Heath McIvor to create this spoof fantasy quest, which sees Sammy sucked from his kitchen ("Get in the fucking portal") into the magical Forest of Dreams. There, he tries to free the furry population from their tyrant king.
The show broadly delivers on its declared intention (the opening number is called Fuck You Disney): its send-up of the Shrek genre is crudely effective, and the puppetry often hilarious. It's also filthy - these puppets make Avenue Q's seem prim by comparison. The main culprit is the orange-faced king, whose proud list of depravities ends with the boast: "I've even felched a unicorn."
However, the smut fixation yields diminishing returns. So, too, does the show's undermining of the theatrical reality. Sometimes it is funny to step out of the convention, as when Sammy, swept up in a song's crescendo, rips his animated friend Farlo from the puppeteer's hands. But why tell the story if you don't believe in it? Far better to play it straight, as they do later in the piece. When Sammy callously abandons his sweetheart, Yoplait, the puppet's sadness is respected, not ridiculed; and we in the audience are surprised by tenderness rather than assaulted with the cheap laugh.
The Muppet-style animation is never funnier than in several short interludes in which two beady birds engage in gnomic chat about their love lives. And the story is effective, perhaps because it so resembles the fairytales Disney and co have hard-wired into our brains: at one point, Sammy (dressed as Rambo) is advised, "Don't start a revolution you don't understand," by a brilliantly eerie tree. This forest may not quite yield dream comedy, but it's not far off.
