Word: muppeteers
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Yoda, a 26-in.-tall Muppet operated by Frank Oz, the man in charge of Miss Piggy, is one of Lucas' great fantastics. Part elf and part wizard, he is Dagobah's answer to the High Lama of Shangrila. He has been training Jedi Knights for 800 years. At first he hardly wants to talk to Luke. "No good," he says to Ben Kenobi, who has hovered into view once again. "I cannot instruct him. The boy has no patience. Much anger in him, like his father. All his life has he looked away-to the horizon...
...laughter?and no time to think about any confessional implications this line may carry, since the performer immediately launches into a rendition of Richard III's soliloquy, accompanying himself on a pair of "tuned chickens." But the fact is that what Peter Sellers told Kermit the Frog on The Muppet Show may be as frank a public statement as he can make about himself. It reveals his profound fear that the real Peter Sellers, at 54, is virtually a cipher, that he has no personality and that he will either not be able to find or will at the last...
...does the badinage with Kermit seem to be entirely fortuitous in its timing. Sellers taped his Muppet appearance not long before he went to work on Being There, the film version of Jerzy Kosinski's novel about how a totally blank, isolated man, whose only knowledge of the world comes from television, emerges from the Edenic walled garden he has tended all his life to become a presidential adviser, media pundit and, finally, presidential timber himself. Sellers has indicated that in this character of Chance the gardener (Chauncey Gardiner, as his fancy new friends later take to calling...
None of this works. Kane talks through her nose, and Beckley overacts. Dewhurst is physically far more formidable than her assailant and so does not seem menaced. Durning, a mild fat man who was perfectly cast as the comic villain in The Muppet Movie, jiggles too much when he runs to be credible as an implacable avenger. Moss grew years ago on Director Fred Walton's spooky trips...
MOST effective are David Claris's colorful puppets, which represent most of the characters. Members of the company wave the muppet-like Rhinemaidens about in time to the music, and open their mouths as they "sing"--even "swimming" a little bit higher for the really high notes. Life-size dummies manipulated by two actors apiece "play" Siegmund and Sieglinde about as well as most opera singers; the hand gestures and postures brilliantly satire the declamatory incompetence of most heldentenors and dramatic sopranos...