Imagine a situation where The Muppets takeover Whose Line Is It Anyway?, and you’d have the rough strokes behind Puppet Up! – Uncensored; the decidedly adult show from Henson Alternative (aka HA!), the grown-up division of The Jim Henson Company.  Now entertaining guests in the Sands Showroom at The Venetian Las Vegas, Puppet Up! - Uncensored utilizes the mastery of the puppeteering technics that so endeared Jim Henson to my generation and others; and ads to it the who-knows-where-it’ll-go spontaneity of improvisational comedy.

The result of a collaboration between Brian Henson (Chairman, The Jim Henson Company; Creator/Producer, Puppet Up! – Uncensored) and Patrick Bristow (The Groundlings; Co-Creator/Director/Host, Puppet Up! – Uncensored); it’s the audience members (or at least the audience members who can be heard from the stage) who come-up with the subjects and themes that the puppeteers then act-out with a veritable menagerie of puppets.

There are a few scenes of classic Henson vignettes, that have held-up remarkably well over a half-century later (funny is funny).  It’s one of these – an update of “Windy,” the Ruthann Friedman-penned song that became a huge 1967 hit for The Association – that was my favorite.  The scene had originally aired on Episode 74 of Sesame Street’s first season (it aired on February 19, 1970), and featured Tony singing about his girlfriend, Windy, to Beautiful Day Monster.  The upbeat song is juxtaposed against the brilliant literal humor of having Windy (who can fly across the sky) encountering wind-speeds far in excess of what she's used to.  So, instead of being gracefully buoyed across the screen by gentle gusts of wind, Windy gets blown away by gale-force winds that become a hurricane – with cows and barns caught-up in the madness – all while Tony keeps singing in the foreground.

The Puppet Up! – Uncensored version features a puppet that brought to my mind the late Robert Goulet, and two shimmery lady lounge singer puppets, backing him.  While he croons and plays the recorder, they hang on to their mic stands and try not to blow away.  All the while, miscellaneous props are thrown into their faces (the previously mentioned barn, cow, etc.).

I can’t say enough about the talent possessed by this troupe.  Actually, I wish the audience had been half as clever.  I mean, how many times can someone yell “blow job” as a scene suggestion?  But the players took the suggestions, and enacted them all, terrifically.  And this is what makes it a show that one can go back and see a second or third time; because while one audience might yell “gynecologist” as a profession, another might shout “messiah” – and that’d be a vastly different show, indeed.

Puppet Up! – Uncensored
Sands Showroom | The Venetian
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