Madame, the extravagantly bawdy puppet created by the late Wayland Flowers—and now starring opposite puppeteer Joe Kovacs in Madame: A Comeback From Abroad at the Cutting Room—appears unruffled no matter the question. Perhaps it's the glamorous dress she always wears, even for a noontime phone interview as she sips "coffee with Bombay Gin in it," her morning nourishment. Her answers are always punctuated by "honeys."
What has Madame been doing for the last 18 years—since her "self-imposed exile" following Flowers' 1988 death? "I was redundant in Bangkok, honey." How old is she? "Honey, you prepared to cut me in half and count the rings?" What's it like to work with Kovacs after so many years out of the limelight? "Joe's got a firm, well-placed hand, honey, and that's fine by me." Rimshot.
A puppeteer since he was 3, Kovacs provides Madame with her voice only when he operates her. He graduated from the School for Creative & Performing Arts in Cincinnati and has performed worldwide, though U.S. theatregoers are probably most familiar with his work at the Center for Puppetry Arts in Atlanta, Actors Theatre of Louisville, the Children's Theatre of Cincinnati, and the Cincinnati Playhouse in the Park. Teaming up with Madame, he acknowledges, is a formidable challenge, for she and Flowers were—from Laugh-In guest spots to Hollywood Squares to their syndicated show, Madame's Place—once among the most acclaimed puppet-puppeteer twosomes in the nation. As Madame puts it, Kovacs has "a whole lot more than just Wayland's shoes to fill, honey."
As Madame returns to her gin-tainted java, Kovacs explains how they met: "The Wayland Flowers estate wanted to bring back Madame for the last four years. When Wayland passed away, his manager, Marlena Shell, inherited everything from him." At first Shell gave Kovacs videotapes of Flowers and Madame to watch, mostly so he could work on approximating her trademark voice and get a feel for her unapologetic, dirty-old-broad persona. "It's getting inside her and getting her inside me," Kovacs says without a note of irony. "Like any ripened, worldly showbiz legend, her voice has deepened over time. I do have a little leeway in that Madame was gone for 18 years. We like to say she 'went around the world in an '80s daze.' " Rimshot.
The Cutting Room gig—which is billed as a workshop and not open for review—offers a new start for Kovacs and Madame. "We're going to try out a lot of new material, make notes, have the script change as we go, and, hopefully, get Madame's kiss of approval," he says. Fortunately, too, there are no top-billing issues: "I've been out with Madame numerous times and met people who don't even remember me; they remember her. That doesn't bother me—they should remember her. She's the starlet; I'm the necessary evil." Also making an appearance in the show, he says, is another fondly missed Flowers puppet: Crazy Mary, a refugee from the "mental hospital" at Bellevue.
"Object theatre," Kovacs concludes, "is an illusion—the illusion that something is living that isn't living. If you can convince the audience it's alive, your work is accomplished. With puppetry, you can teach the technique and the mechanics, but in the end you have to pull the life force [of the puppet] out of you in order to pull it into the show. You know, I took Madame out just last night and it's amazing—these kids in their 20s have no idea of Madame. They don't know anything about her. They don't care who she was; they want to know who she is. They want to know what she's doing there. So I don't really worry, honey. She's gonna do her thing, and I'm gonna do mine."
The workshop of Madame: A
Comeback From Abroad runs July 17–Aug. 7 at the Cutting Room, 19 W. 24th St., NYC. Tickets: (212) 352-3101 or www.theatermania.com