Next up at Live at the Film Forum, the series where the Northwest Film Forum produces live, cinematic happenings, is The Somewhere Girls presentation of “Don’t Assume I Cook.” Besides the requisite filmed portion, the show will involve song and dance, accordion music, and puppets. Janna Wachter is the vocalist and puppet-whisperer, Victoria Jacobs the dancer, and Jamie Maschler the pianist and accordionist.
I met up with Wachter and a bag of puppets at a Tullys to hear more about the show, which had its genesis in her attending the previous Live at the Forums and being inspired to accost Forum staff about letting her put on a show. (The show is partly about “a woman’s confidence,” she admitted to me, saying that one icon is opera’s Carmen, “the most confident woman in the world.”) That was two years ago.
From Spokane, Wachter has spent her artistic life in Seattle, studying voice at Cornish before “running away to join the circus.” How the founder of the Splash! chamber music group came to be helming an “absurdist variety show” is a little convoluted, and apparently reaches back to her childhood exposure to the Mighty Mouse theme song, Pinocchio, and Howdy Doody.
Wachter says the creative urge behind the show has “grown like a fungus,” quietly in the background for years until suddenly enveloping everything. Possibly the first outbreak was at a food festival in Stromboli, Italy, when she made an impromptu dinner theater piece out of monkfish jaws and tomatoes.
Wachter is pretty pleased with the integration of film into her work (previous performances have been more or less successful with that aspect), which she attributes to deciding to storyboard the whole thing as if it were a film shoot. That was going to be her whole presentation to the Film Forum, she said, until a colleague told her, “You’re not going to get that gig with cartoons.” Back to the drawing board. Impressed by Victoria Chaplin’s Aurelia’s Oratorio, she dreamed up a total of 15 scenes (the longest 15 minutes, shortest three minutes), packed into an economical 90-minute show.
You may or may not notice the “inverted double rainbow structure,” but it’s proof to her that she’s covered all the bases. “There is also a public service announcement. Gotta have one,” she added.
Anything with puppets walks a knife-edge between cutesy and discomfiting, and Wachter seems completely at home there, discussing her willingness to take artistic risks as akin to Carmen’s readiness for a knife fight (just “not too deep, don’t puncture the lungs!” she joked). She of course talks about her puppets as if they’re people. Roscoe’s problem, she told me, “is that he is told by the other puppets that he is a genius.”
If my notes are correct, there will also be a triangle solo. I think this show will pair well with red wine, and anyone who needs reminding that life isn’t paint by the numbers.
