`Caper' puppet show has holiday fun all wrapped up

Three 1/2 Stars - A perky package

By Chad Jones
STAFF WRITER

This season's most inventive and enjoyable family friendly activity is about 30 minutes long and features a cast of characters made up of a trench coat, reams of wrapping paper, tinsel garlands, cardboard boxes, packing peanuts, dinner rolls and utensils.

Lunatique Fantastique puppeteer Liebe Wetzel, with the assistance of a four-person crew, has devised an enchanting entertainment in ``The Wrapping Paper Caper," running through the holidays at San Francisco's Il Teatro 450, a theater smack in the midst of the bustling Union Square shopping area.

This is the kind of show that delights young and old alike with its inventiveness and comic flair. The adults in the audience at a recent performance seemed to be just as mesmerized as the kids throughout ``Caper's" all-too-brief half-hour run.

There's no musical soundtrack and barely any vocalizing, but the black-clad puppeteers keep their audience in rapt attention as a detective (the trench coat with an assist from a fedora and a magnifying glass) opens a cardboard box and unleashes a flurry of whimsical creatures and adventures, all of which are brought to life using everyday objects.

Subtitled ``A Tale of Holiday Mischief," the show doesn't have much of a plot, but that hardly seems to matter. By opening the box, the detective, a character that takes three people to create, releases a little goblin made up of those squiggly white packing peanuts (some people call them popcorn), and the two chase each other through various locations.

First, the detective meets a French girl composed of red foil wrapping paper, curly gold ribbon for hair and a ribbon spool for a face. She sings bits of Edith Piaf songs and waggles her hips before evaporating.

Then our intrepid detective is in the Old West where a piece of red paper wraps itself around his throat and becomes a bandana. While one of the puppeteers sings the theme from ``The Good, the Bad and the Ugly," our hero battles a snake (more wrapping paper with a red ribbon tongue) and escapes on a horse made of cardboard wrapping paper tubes.

When the horse dissolves, the detective finds himself under the sea and in the presence of a purple octopus (nothing more than a square of fabric twisted into octopudlian shapes). Then along comes a crab, two dinner rolls scuttling along on legs made of forks.

At this point the kids in the audience started competing with each other to see who could identify the next creature the fastest. Delighted and only slightly muffled shouts of ``Crab!" were especially plentiful, followed by ``Turtle!" when the dinner rolls became fins and an upside down bread basket served as a shell.

After a brief stop in a restaurant where the detective is served by a bread-head waiter with human, white-gloved hands, the peanut goblin re-appears with a gold-wrapped present in hand and a chase ensues.

After some slow-motion running, the characters disappear behind a screen for some nifty shadow puppetry involving San Francisco's distinctive skyline.

Once the detective gets hold of the present and unwraps it, the lid becomes the head of a creature that remains mysterious until one of the puppeteers meows.

A young member of the audience didn't buy the box as a cat. ``Oh, come on!" he said, probably more loudly than his parents would have liked.

An unconvincing cat is just about the only criticism that can be leveled at Wetzel and her crafty bunch of puppeteers - Jerre Dye, Julie Feinstein, Emily Fox and Cherie Panek. They keep the action fluid and funny, but even more than that, they perform with the grace of dancers.

Director Jeff Raz, a beloved Bay Area clown in his own right, no doubt contributed to the show's slapstick humor (a high-flying karate spoof of ``The Matrix" is especially good) and its general tone of artful whimsy.

``The Wrapping Paper Caper" is ideal family entertainment and may even inspire audience members to go home and enliven inanimate objects. You won't just enjoy this show, you'll be en-wrap-tured.