Magic and Marionettes

What: “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice”

Where: Open Eye Figure Theatre, 506 E. 24th St.

When: Feb. 10-March 4

Cost: $12 for students

Most people know “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice” from Disney’s “Fantasia.” The nine-minute short is adapted from the Johann Wolfgang von Goethe poem and set to the Paul Dukas piece of the same name. It finds apprentice Mickey Mouse stealing his master’s wand and enchanting a broom, which multiplies and threatens to cause a flood before the sorcerer arrives and saves the day.

It’s a familiar tale, but now Michael Sommers and his Open Eye Figure Theatre are adapting it into a feature-length puppet show in an attempt to expand the audience’s perspective on not only the story, but also marionette theater.

Sommers, who wrote, directed and designed the show, is a veteran of puppetry and image-based theater. It’s his first all-puppet production since 2007’s “A Prelude to Faust.” Sommers said he uses puppets because they allow him to create a world that would not be possible with actors.

“You can flood the entire world. You can transform scale; the sorcerer becomes gigantic. You can float and fly across the space. You can ride on a stick. You can be half cat and half rat,” he said.

Justin Spooner, one of the puppeteers in “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice,” directed a show entitled “Waterbox” for artist collective 1419 last fall. The show used inventive underwater puppetry to create abstract images set to music.

Sommers says that while this type of high-concept production was tempting, he ultimately kept “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice” simple in order to show off what could be done using the tried-and-true techniques of marionette theater.

“It’s all about the human hand doing something. Take the flood for example,” he said. “We’re looking at traditional ways. How do you do water? We want to create these stage pictures and events in a way that’s interesting, but everyone knows how they’re done. It’s tried and true. You raise a cloth up and it says ‘water.’”*****

Despite its traditional trappings, “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice” is a weighty and sweeping production. It is lit like an opera and set to original music by Eric Jensen. Trombone, viola, bass clarinet and xylophone underscore almost the entire show. The music is jaunty but also has deep threads of melancholy, Sommers said.

Goethe’s original poem is only about 100 lines, so to adapt “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice” into a 50-minute chamber piece, Sommers made some changes. He even added a new character, Crat.

Crat, a half-cat, half-rat servant to the sorcerer, acts as a foil to the apprentice in the story and serves as a catalyst for the changes Sommers has made to the end of the show.

In the original poem and in “Fantasia,” the sorcerer swoops in and stops the flood before the apprentice perishes. Sommers’ version delays this deus ex machina, allowing things to get even worse for the apprentice and Crat. This raises the stakes and more fully explores the apprentice’s role as the heir to the sorcerer’s power.

“The show is about the accumulation of knowledge. What do we need to know to become an apprentice and what do we need to know to become a master?" Sommers said.

With “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice,” Sommers hopes to expand the audience’s appreciation for both a story and a medium that most people are only vaguely familiar with.

“It’s interesting to me how the form can surprise people. It’s telling the same story but in a slightly different way,” Sommers said. “It really hearkens to the long tradition of marionette theater.”