Brian Henson
The challenge is, well, there's a huge challenge, which is when you're improvising, you're meant to sort of clear your mind completely, just be open and funny, and paying, you know, paying attention.Collection: Challenges
I'd say that that is a challenge, but it also is, again, it's helpful. It's helpful to have the discipline of, okay, I'm doing, I'm doing something that's quite precise over here, working the puppet, and I'm doing something that's very imprecise and creative and unleashed over here, which is the comedy side. And it's kind of nice to allow your brain to be doing those two things at once.Collection: Nice
The show is probably 60 percent improvising and 40 percent not. So there's quite a bit of it that we do have prepared and that part of it, you have memorized and you've rehearsed and you're prepared, just like any show.Collection: Shows
You get used to it, you look forward to the adrenaline of the stage fright before you go out.Collection: Looks
This is certainly the raunchiest, if you use that word, raunchy. The roots of Jim Henson, though, was adult comedy.Collection: Roots
The first show that my dad and my mom did together was for, was a comedy series, a short form that went in the middle of late-night news, and then through all of their career, it was always the "Ed Sullivan Show," it was a variety act, my dad was on the "Jimmy Dean Show" for a few years.Collection: Mom
It was actually what my dad did and with the Muppets, the years with the Muppets, it was really all targeted to adults. It was in a time when everything had to be safe for the whole family. But he was targeting adults.Collection: Dad
"Sesame Street" was really the first kid's show that my dad did. He did a couple of TV specials that were targeted for kids before "Sesame Street," but really, it was, it's kind of going back to our roots, when we start to get adult. This show gets very adult sometimes, and that's because of the audience.Collection: Couple
we sent a troupe to Edinborough, and then in Edinborough, there was a producer from the Melbourne Comedy Festival, so we went to Melbourne. So it's one of these shows that kind of organically developed and it started developing momentum way before I even thought there was a show here.Collection: Momentum
But the fact that most of the show you can't be prepared for, you have no idea really what's coming is initially very nerve wracking, by now, it's kind of fun.Collection: Fun
"Stuffed and Unstrung" started as a workshop, actually, classes within our company. We found that our puppeteers were not ad libbing as well as traditionally, Jim Henson Company puppeteers have. We're sort of famous for going off script a little bit and ad libbing.Collection: Class