ComedySportz presents Joe Sabatino's 'Puppets Here & There'

Three tables hold lots of colorful puppets of all sizes and complexities representing humans, animals, and fantasy characters. It’s like a Toys‘R’Us stuffed-animal aisle, if Toys‘R’Us still existed.

A video camera sits on a tripod with a live feed to an upstage-center television. We can watch the puppets play onscreen or watch the seven improvisors as they voice and manipulate their characters for the camera. Hence the title's other meaning: The show is both here and there.

Onstage and backstage

Puppets often create a world within a frame, such as a traditional Punch and Judy window or a Sesame Street set, that hides the puppeteers; here, it’s the TV. Sabatino also allows us to see the performers working.

They work fast and hard, selecting puppets from the tables, putting on different voices, crowding around the camera and watching monitors to make sure their actions can be seen. They even provide musical accompaniment and sound effects.

Puppets Here & There otherwise functions like a lot of long-form improvisation. After a bouncy theme song — “Good luck getting to bed with this song stuck in your head!” — they select an audience volunteer and ask if anything significant occurred in their life lately. The evening I attended the gentleman mentioned his 40th-birthday celebration in New York City, which kicked off the hourlong adventure with dozens of characters.

Whenever a scene sputtered or someone felt it was time to move on, a performer started the theme’s refrain and a new scene appeared.

Not ‘The Muppets’

Puppets Here & There isn’t afraid to be raunchy or dark. In last Friday’s show, a fuzzy monkey explained that his wife faked her own death. George Clooney, both today and at age 130, figured prominently, as did an “Over 40” club; its secret entrance code was any song by Christopher Cross. A Five Below store in the Underworld and a haunted sandwich puppet became important parts of the improvised adventure. A big red puppet pushed through street scenes shouting “Fuck you!” Ah, Manhattan!

Of course, each performance is entirely unique.

As in all comedy improv, not every joke scores, but the pace and energy don’t allow them, or us, to dwell on those occasional misses. Rob Cutler, Emily Davis, David Dritsas, Alexis Howland, Dave Jadico, Marianne Murphy, and Sabatino are verbally facile, closely connected, and adept at making their puppets visually expressive. Sabatino also made all the puppets.

My attention easily flipped between their well-composed onscreen “broadcast” and the raucous activity behind the camera. They’re so close together that it’s easy to watch both, and certainly more fun than focusing on one or the other.