Director Rob Lutfy Talks the Shockheaded Peter Musical Play
Beth Accomando
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Steve Gouveia and Sarah Errignton in the Cygnet Theatre production of Shockheaded Peter.
Photo by Daren Scott
All the children die. That’s how Rob Lutfy describes the source material for the musical Shockheaded Peter that he’s directing at Cygnet Theatre in San Diego.
That source material is the 19th century German children’s book Struwwelpeter that served up moralistic tales in rhymes and illustrations. Heinrich Hoffmann wanted to teach his young children how to read but also how to behave. So he wrote about a little girl who played with matches, set herself on fire, and burned to death. He also wrote about a little boy who sucked his thumbs and had then lopped off.
In 1998, these stories were turned into a musical called Shockheaded Peter, created for the stage by Julian Crouch and Phelim McDermott with original music and lyrics by . It was created to suit the particular talents of The Tiger Lillies and Lutfy pointed out that the play he was handed was less than two-dozen pages.
Lutfy said it was essentially “a series of disturbing images.” So the script, created in rehearsal by the original cast, contains stage direction as sparse as “the audience is horrified.”
The challenge Lutfy faced was how to bring this unique work to life at Cygnet. Stylistically, he decided he would combine four elements: Epic Theater as exemplified by Bertolt Brecht; German Expression, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari being a famous cinematic example; commedia del’arte, a broad style of Italian physical comedy; and Grand Guignol, a sensational brand of horror theater that originated in Paris at the end of the 19th century.
The result is an audaciously inventive play that mixes music, song, dance, puppetry and pantomime to depict the demise of small children in the most ghastly manner.
“When you are enacting violence against puppets you can get away with a lot more,” Lutfy said. “You can be sillier with it. I thought about Monty Python’s way of doing violence. There’s this famous Woody Allen quote where he says, ‘Drama is I prick my finger, comedy is I chop my hand off.’ And so you have to go big, you have to go big with the violence for it to be funny especially in this play because it’s a commentary on how we raise our kids and hopefully we’ve evolved somewhat since 1845.”
Key to the success of the play are costumer and puppet designer Shirley Pierson, choreographer Michael Mizerany, and a spectacular cast led by Sarah Errinton and Steve Gouviea.
Check out the full interview with Lutfy.
Shockheaded Peter at Cygnet Theatre draws inspiration from the 19th century German children’s book, Struwwelpeter.
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