Manual Cinema: Leonardo! A Wonderful Show About A Terrible Monster

Screen Magic Dispels the Monstrosity of Ignorance

An Essay by Paulette Richards

“Put your hand out palm up, and it becomes a leaf. Be a caterpillar crawling on the leaf.” It was Sunday afternoon, January 28, 2024, and the theater at the DuSable Black History Museum and Education Center was packed with “children of all ages” who had come to see Manual Cinema’s Leonardo! A Wonderful Show About a Terrible Monster. A technical glitch delayed the opening, but Lily Emerson, the show’s narrator, seamlessly engaged the audience in a hand-puppet activity as they waited for the tech crew to resolve the problem.

Though the technical setup for the show looks complicated, director Sarah Fornace explains that it could all be done with iPhones. Down center is a camera on a metal tripod clipped to an Ikea coffee table. The camera looks down on the table where the puppeteers manipulate puppets made of cardstock and different types of paper. The combination of materials gives the puppets some dimensionality, even though they are flat. The puppets are organized in three-ring binders, enabling the puppeteers to cut from scene to scene by quickly flipping pages. Simple mechanisms made of paper tabs or wooden sticks allow them to animate the puppets within carefully composed frames.

Upstage there are two large screens made of bedsheets. The stage manager controls colored lights focused on them in QLab, changing the background to fit the mood of the scene. Here, the live actors and three-dimensional rod-and-glove puppets perform for a second camera mounted on a folding table. A monitor under the table enables the performers to hit their marks precisely, but unlike traditional monitor work for television puppetry, the image they reference mirrors their movements rather than displaying the view from the audience’s perspective. 

Leonardo began as a collaboration with Mo Willems, award-winning children’s book author, who honed his craft as a writer and animator for Sesame Street. As the first Kennedy Center Education Artist-in-Residence, Willems had invited Manual Cinema to adapt his two children’s books Leonardo, the Terrible Monster and Sam, the Most Scaredy-Cat Kid in the Whole World into a stage play with puppets. The pandemic forced them to pivot. Manual Cinema turned the story into a film instead, then proceeded to mount the stage show once live theater resumed.

The story centers on Leonardo, a cute, furry creature who is terrible at being a monster. Try as he might, he can’t scare anyone. A trio of “mean girl” monsters deride him, and his attempts to scare victims provoke riotous laughter among both children and adults in the audience. Fortunately, Leonardo has the idea that if he can scare the most scaredy-cat kid in the world it would cure him of being terrible at being a monster, so he goes to the library to do research and identifies Sam. Given that in 2022 the American Library Association documented 1,269 demands to censor library books and resources (almost double the number of book challenges reported the previous year), the catchy song that underscores the value of libraries and librarians as sources of information is a powerful antidote to the monstrosity of ignorance.

When he fails to terrify Sam, Leonardo (puppeteered by Kevin Michael Wesson) decides that, instead of being a terrible monster, he will become a wonderful friend. First, he befriends Sam (played by Julia Miller), then they meet the second most scaredy-cat kid in the world, Kerry, played by Leah Casey and her monster, Frankenthaler. The human actors appear in costumes based on the illustrations in the books. They even wear wigs made of yarn and felt to approximate the hairstyles of the characters. This performance not only necessitated facility with several types of puppets, it also required strong physical-theater skills.

The monsters team up to let the two human kids befriend each other. With helpful suggestions from the audience, Sam and Kerry find things in common and decide to be friends, even though they each have interests that the other one doesn’t care about at all. Since Sam is white and Kerry is Black, the decision to become friends is an even more meaningful rejection of fear to bridge differences. 

“Close the hand around the index finger while the caterpillar is enveloped in its chrysalis,” Emerson had instructed the audience. During the show she provides voice-overs, singing, and instrumental licks from a stool placed stage right, yet she sometimes scurries upstage to help the other three performers with three-dimensional monster puppets. The mastery required to execute the intricate choreography in a show that continuously moves the performers from the projection table downstage to the three-dimensional performance space upstage was especially evident in the scenes that show the monsters trying to scare children sleeping in bed. The “bed” consisted of a blanket draped over the performers’ shoulders as they leaned forward to simulate lying in bed. Another performer held up a pillow for them to put under their heads. They move into the frame so seamlessly that even though you can see them preparing to bring in the bedspread, it looks like the camera just cut to the shot perfectly framed. This is the wizardry of Manual Cinema—a highly developed fluency in the language of camera angles and transitions between shots—all exposed to the audience, so they can see how the magic is made as it unfolds before their eyes.

Indeed, with so many different things happening onstage all at once, Manual Cinema deliberately makes space for audience members to choose where they want to focus their attention. This approach is the antithesis of our contemporary screen economy that seeks to capture and hold audiences’ uncritical attention for as long as possible. Fornace hopes the company’s shows inspire audiences to become makers themselves and to become critical viewers of what they see onscreen.

Having welcomed a second child into her family in the past year, Fornace has become more aware of the speed of contemporary onscreen media and the way that movies and internet media feel frictionless, erasing awareness that someone intentionally crafted these images. Though Manual Cinema primarily created works with serious adult themes in the past, developing Leonardo stretched them to meet new challenges, like working in color instead of with black-and-white shadows. It also enabled them to emphasize handmade-ness and simple materials doing fantastical things. Just as Emerson encouraged the audience to “Put the two hands together to make butterfly wings,” Manual Cinema’s Leonardo shows young and old how to let their imaginations take flight.