Beloved puppeteer Ronnie Burkett’s 'Little Willy' is raunchy, nostalgic and sometimes uneven

Now comes the similarly nostalgia-tinged “Little Willy,” which, like his earlier show “Little Dickens,” is performed by his ragtag ensemble of characterful puppets that comprise his Daisy Theatre. The hook is that they are putting on William Shakespeare’s “Romeo and Juliet.” Amidst all the ribald, raunchy jokes, including the pun in the title, the show overflows with affection for theatre itself.

This show, presented by Canadian Stage, is Burkett’s love letter to the art form he has generously contributed to. If all the world’s a stage, its players — in his universe — are half a metre tall.

As with all Daisy Theatre productions, no script exists. Burkett, visibly pulling strings above a scaled-down theatre box, knows the general outline of the narrative, but beyond that, he can mix things up. There is also some audience participation.

 At the opening night performance last Friday, Burkett helped set the tone at the start with Dolly Wiggler, a buxom entertainer who proceeded to remove her clothes, striptease style, while delivering a variation on the prologue from “Romeo and Juliet.” “When grownups act like children, things go wrong,” she riffed before launching into a jazzy number.

The manager of this show-within-a-show is Enoch Pugh, who must find the “actors” to strut and fret their hour (more like an hour and 45 minutes) on the stage. The grande dame of the acting world, the imperious diva Esmé Massengill, demands a role. It turns out she had an affair with the Bard of Stratford-upon-Avon, who also appears as a character, centuries ago.

Esteemed thespians Lillian and Lovey Lunkhead, who have toured Canada’s provincial theatres, make appearances. Soon Lillian competes with Esmé to perform the virginal 14-year-old Juliet.

While most of the first third of the show is played for laughs, Burkett gets serious midway by introducing the baby-faced Schnitzel, who asks to play both roles in the balcony scene, and Edna Rural, the humble Alberta housewife in a print dress from Sears, who plays the nurse.

 Schnitzel, a fairy who hasn’t yet earned their wings, wears a costume (designs are by Kim Crossley) that includes blue and pink stripes. By speaking Juliet’s “What’s in a name?” speech, Schnitzel says a lot about how labels of all sorts are irrelevant. A timely message.

Edna, meanwhile, doesn’t delve very deeply into the role of the nurse — she thinks she’s a medical nurse — but does reflect on the play’s theme of love. In a beautifully written and performed sequence, she recounts how she met and eventually got married to her late husband Stanley.

As with most Burkett shows, scripted or otherwise, things do go on a while. At my performance, Burkett had to stop and ask the stage manager several times where he was in the show. And I’m not sure we needed an appearance by former Vegas chanteuse Rosemary Foccaccia, who is part of one of the big audience participation sequences.

Rosemary barks out that she needs a full orchestra and some dancers. Burkett requests a female volunteer from the audience to reveal a band at the front of the stage — it’s constructed by Eric James Ball, with puppets by Noreen Young (all other puppets are by Burkett). And then he chooses two male volunteers to join him atop the stage to manipulate the backup dancers.

I won’t spoil the visual surprise of the dancers, but I will point out that, as he did at “Little Dickens,” Burkett asks male volunteers to take off their shirts. In a later sequence, he tells another male audience member, again shirtless, to play Romeo in the famous tomb scene, with the miniature Juliet expressing grief over his apparent death, collapsing on his bare torso and, repeating the scene, inching lower each time.

Much of this feels gratuitous and low-key exploitative, which is a shame because everything up until then worked just fine. Burkett is one of the country’s most brilliant and imaginative artists.

When he pulls on his wondrous characters’ strings, he produces magic. When he manipulates audience members, not so much.