Old fashioned family entertainment — real old fashioned — is on the schedule during the annual Patriots Week celebration on Sunday, December 27, 2015.
Tucked between the reenactments of the two Battles of Trenton — the first at 11:30 a.m. at the Trenton Battle Monument on Warren Street and the second at 3 p.m. in Mill Hill Park — is a puppet-show version of the Battle of Trenton, presented by Tucker Tales at 12:30 and 2 p.m.
And while “The Trouble with Trenton” show deals with strife, it’s the type of show that would have brought colonists and royalists together — at least as audiences.
“Puppetry has been around long before the United States,” says Tom Tucker of Tuckers’ Tales Puppet Theater, a regular and popular feature of Patriots Week. “Puppetry goes back thousands of years. The form we know of today was popular in the 18th century.”
Tucker adds that both Benjamin Franklin and George Washington made journal notes about attending puppet shows, the venues that hosted them, and the number of pence spent for admission. Price, says Tucker, determined the type of show and the showplace. “The hand puppets were pretty much for the street crowd. The middle and upper classes would go see puppet shows as well, but that would be marionettes in a theater. The wealthy went to see Punch and Judy as marionette shows.”
Tucker and his wife, Marianne, are set to take audiences back to the time of Franklin and Washington as they recreate a pint-sized Battle of Trenton on the very spot that the larger-than-life conflicts occurred. “It covers Washington crossing the Delaware and the victory in a half hour. Marianne and I direct the show while the audience manipulates the puppets and the props,” he says.
The Tuckers, whose main jobs are puppetry (and performing Colonial-era music), say they love the art form and its challenges. “It has almost every aspect of theater. It has so much range.”
Tuckers’ Tales “is a two-person company dedicated to the promotion of the puppetry art form and the presentation of folk lore and folk tales through puppetry. Not all of our shows are from the genre, but most are folk tales and fairy tales. We have 30-some shows,” says Tucker of the company started in 1981. It became a full-time operation in 1988 and offers shows that run from 30 minute to an hour.
The germ for the company began by accident when the Tuckers volunteered at their Abington, Pennsylvania, church, encountered puppet productions, and got hooked.
“We met with other puppeteers, and it captured our attention and eventually our lives. It’s an art form like no other. We found out that there was a puppet guild nearby, got involved with them, and went out on our own. We basically learned by apprenticeship. The puppeteers are the most sharing with knowledge and craft. I have been involved with professional music, and no one comes as close to puppeteers in being willing to share. The reason is that puppeteers feel that the competition is poor puppetry and want to make sure that people are skilled,” he says.
Their own knowledge and skills continue to grow through their participation with other organizations, including Tom serving on the board of directors of the Puppeteers of America and Marianne acting as president of the United States chapter of Unima, the international union of marionettes, headquartered in France.
It is an interesting path for someone who never considered a career in the arts. “My college degree (from Villanova) is in electrical engineering, and I did work in that field before I became a full-time performer. Marianne has a master’s degree in physiology. We met in (Bishop Egan) high school in Bucks County, high school sweethearts who never got rid of each other. I grew up primarily in the Levittown area. My mother was a 1950s housewife, and my dad worked in the telephone company. We’ve lived in Abington for the last 37 years,” says Tucker.
Tuckers’ Tales’ involvement with Patriots Week started several years ago when the Tuckers performed acoustic and wind instrument music for the Old Barracks. “It didn’t take long to figure out that we were puppeteers. (Old Barracks director) Richard Patterson had us do shows for other events. Then he came up with the idea of the puppet show on the Battle of Trenton.” The show premiered in 2006 and is still hosted by the Barracks for Patriots Week.
“Most puppeteers work in small companies, two or four people who do everything,” says Tucker. “You’re the builder, the designer, the performer. You get to select the actor for the character. It’s the ultimate for the director and producer. A lot of puppetry is aimed for children, but not always. It is catching on in a lot of people’s imagination.”
Tucker says that among the members of the puppet family he prefers hand puppets, especially since most of their shows call for them. “But we have used every style out there. The Battle of Trenton show has some marionettes, and we’re using some stick puppets. We use rod puppets and shadow puppets, which were a popular parlor entertainment in the 18th century.”
“Marionettes are not wood,” he says, explaining how he and Marianne create the figures. “They’re sewn cloth bodies stuffed with materials. Our hand puppets can be made from anything: epoxy, wood, foam rubber. We look at the show and figure out what we want to do. Some of them take one day or some take two or three weeks.”
To make a show, the Tuckers divide the work. She creates costumes. He does scenery. Both create the bodies and the heads, and the mainly original scripts are written by whoever had the idea.
“We tell stories and we tell stories well,” says Tucker of the company’s approach. “As far as we’re concerned, the story is what it is all about. It’s like life or theater. What are you trying to say? It’s the story.”
Tuckers’ Tales Puppet Theater, “The Trouble With Trenton,” Sunday, December 27, 12:30 and 2 p.m., Hanover Street Plaza. tuckerstales.com.
