While Disney’s Winnie the Pooh — The New Musical Stage Adaptation creator Jonathan Rockefeller may not have initially come from a puppetry background, he considers his passion for the art form to have been percolating away during his formative years.
After all, he grew up in the hills north of Sydney watching a wealth of homegrown puppetry on TV, from Mr Squiggle, Agro, Ossie Ostrich, The Ferals, Lift Off and the 1980s puppet series Blinky Bill, not to mention Sesame Street.
Although it was not until seeing Julie Taymor’s visionary large-scale puppetry on Broadway musical The Lion King that Rockefeller began to think about creating his own movement piece with puppetry, on a slightly smaller scale, inspired by a very famous picture book.
“Eric Carle’s The Very Hungry Caterpillar was a production that broke a lot of new ground, particularly in its scale for its age demographic,” Rockefeller, who now lives in New York, says.
“In the history of Off-Broadway, there had never been a show for children so young, and people started to sit up and pay attention.”
It led to experimenting with productions Paddington Gets in a Jam and Sesame Street the Musical — both hiding its puppeteers to suspend belief these characters are real — before another childhood favourite proved inspirational and premiered at Theatre Row in New York in 2021, created by Rockefeller Productions alongside Disney Theatrical Productions.
“Winnie the Pooh was on Saturday Disney every Saturday morning growing up, so my memories are sugary cereal with cold milk watching it with my brothers,” Rockefeller shares.
“My older brother and I teased our younger brother by calling him Eeyore every time he complained, which is a nickname that lasts to this day.
“Surprisingly, despite being over 95 years old and Disney’s Winnie the Pooh being over 55 years old, Winnie the Pooh has never been brought to the stage before, except in the form of suited characters or humans playing the roles. So we saw this as a tremendous opportunity to take a very recognizable and well-loved set of characters and bring them to the stage in this way for the first time.”
Disney’s Winnie the Pooh — The New Musical State Adaptation brings A.A. Milne’s loveable characters to life as though they are real, Rockefeller referring to it as “animation for the stage” where characters move and talk so convincingly that audiences completely ignore the puppeteers and focus on the characters and puppets themselves.
“Once we were confident that the puppets could operate and move like the characters, knowing their limitations and skills (Tigger can jump as high as a human can), then we were able to craft the script and set around the characters,” he explains.
“It came down to revisiting every Pooh story imaginable, and every song that had ever been written by the Sherman Brothers, while also considering new elements to incorporate in our show. There is 95 plus years of history to consider.
“It’s a new Hundred Acre Wood tale never told before, but it incorporates everything you know and love about these characters and this music at the same time, creating a beautiful balance of old and new.
“There are so many songs and stories to draw upon, so choosing which iconic moments to adapt while also creating something fresh that long-time fans have never seen before was a delicate balancing act. Pooh was always going to have to get stuck in something, something was always going to happen to Eeyore’s house, Piglet is going to get scared and Tigger is going to destroy Rabbit’s garden. There are vignettes that are unmistakably part of A.A. Milne’s world.”
Rockefeller has also been careful to retain the essence of these Winnie the Pooh stories, likeable for their meandering tales that reflect how children think and play, where they set out to do one thing, get distracted, come up with a better idea and the story turns into something else.
“I feel we’ve crafted an experience that’s equally faithful to the characters we know and love while creating a brand-new adventure for fans of all ages.”