Seattle Children's Threater performing 'Leonardo!'

Oh, the tale of a monster who just isn't scary at all. Leonardo, a wonderful show about a terrible monster, is making its way to town at Seattle Children's Theater today. We are joined by Lily Emerson, narrator for the show. Good morning, Lily. Thanks for being here with us. So happy to be here. I love shows like these. If you haven't been to the Children's Theater, why should people go? Oh, it is wonderful. First of all, the Children's Theater. I'm from Chicago, so I've known about the Seattle Children's Theater for a long time. Actually, people are in the Children's Theater is actually one of the most respected children's theaters in the nation. It's wonderful. The work that comes out of there is great. But obviously, I love this show a whole lot. So tell us about the show. Great. So our name is Manual Cinema. The company's name is Manual Cinema, and that's very literal. So we are actually making a movie live on stage for the audience. We have a big screen on part of the stage, and then some camera feeds, and we do puppetry in front of the cameras, and then that goes up to the screen so the audience can watch everything come together on the screen, or can watch us puppeteering, or can watch me play the guitar and narrating over in the musicians' corner. There's all sorts of things happening, and there's a lot of it's really unique way to tell a story, and it's good for grownups as well as children because there's so much really interesting stuff happening the whole time. Yeah, I can imagine there's stuff that the grownups get and the children get. Absolutely. Absolutely. Okay, so tell us about Leonardo. Oh, Leonardo is an incredibly, unfortunately, very cute monster, which he realizes he wants to be a terrible monster, not a monster who's terrible at being a monster. He wants to be, you know, big and scary. So he tries and he finds the most scary cat kid in the entire world and wants to scare him, and instead learns that maybe actually being a wonderful friend is a better idea. Okay, so Leonardo's not here because he's in action. Yeah, he's very busy. Yeah, he's very busy monster. What do we have going on here today? So we brought some of our large props that we have for. So one of our camera stations, we have some binders that we sort of animate as we go. It's almost like reading the book yourself, but having a little cartoon sort of character going through. And then we also have a big live action camera station where we have things like, you know, your most libraries are like this. Right. They have some some eyes. Some personality. We have a moment of seeing Sam, the most scary cat kid in the whole world, in in school, and then Leonardo hides inside of a locker. So we've got all sorts of really cool things, makeup, the backgrounds, and then we have little characters that come out like this. Is we call him Mouse. Mouse is one of my favorite characters. With some cheese. I love cheese. I love Gouda and. And boy, I could go on. Yeah, you could go on. You do several voices. You're the narrator. Yeah. How do you do that? Can you can you give us? Oh, now it's one voice. Yeah. Give us an example of another voice, and then tell us how you do this and change so quickly. Sure. So I, it's so much fun. I get to play all sorts of like little characters, like our mouse or like their grandma who Leonardo tries to scare, who's like, oh, aren't you just so cute, my goodness. So we have all sorts of characters that pop up throughout, and if you're watching, you might if you watch me, then you'll see that like in the course of one sentence, I'll go from one character to another, to another, to another. It's real joy, and my favorite thing is when people afterwards say, I didn't even realize until three quarters of the way through that you were doing all of those voices because all of the incredible actors who are performing with me as well, everything moves so smoothly that you don't even notice because the performers are playing Carrie or Carrie and Sam or Scary Cat Kids, go right along with me, and it's like yeah, we're very in sync. It's really fun. Okay, and the story is based on books, and you're adapting that. Yeah. It's hard to do that. It was such a fun challenge. To Mo Willems' books are so unique. They have these huge, like big, colorful backgrounds, and our our characters kind of fit in those, and the colors change depending on the character's emotions. So we used a lot of that, and the screen that we have normally, manual cinema has a sort of landscape screen, but for this we have a portrait screen because we wanted it to look just like the the pages in one of Mo's books. Oh my gosh! Yeah. So exciting! We could talk about this all morning. I have one more, and lastly, before we go, so this is this is Fletcher. Fletcher is one of the other monsters. And Fletcher, is there anything that you would like to share about the show? Move, move, move, move, move, move, move, move, move, move, move. Hey, I think he said, "Thank you, Lily Emerson, the narrator of this." Yeah, for the production of Leonardo, a wonderful show about a terrible monster, and you can catch them at the Seattle Children's Theater at the Seattle Center now, and tell them about it first, and we'll have more information, of course, on our website, a link to get tickets can be found on foxorchildren. Com. Excellent. Check it out, and thanks for popping in. Yes, thank you. Move, move.