Ronnie Burkett plays a puppeteer whose late mentor visits him in the form of a hand puppet in Billy Twinkle: Requiem for a Golden Boy. (Epic Photography/Citadel Theatre)

Ronnie Burkett’s new adult puppet play began as an exercise in maudlin midlife navel-gazing, and ended up becoming a funny valentine to a dying art form.

Billy Twinkle: Requiem for a Golden Boy, the latest offering from the celebrated Ronnie Burkett Theatre of Marionettes, took a long time on its journey from page to stage – in this case, Edmonton’s Citadel Theatre, where it premieres Oct. 23.

“This has been in my brain for eight years,” Burkett reveals by phone from the Citadel during a rehearsal break. He first wrote the piece as a puppetless one-man show about a depressed cruise-ship puppeteer looking back on his kitschy career.

“I never had much interest or regard for [that kind of puppetry],” says Burkett, whose cutting-edge work has made him one of the world’s great marionette artists; his last play, 10 Days on Earth, has just been nominated for a Governor General’s Award.

Billy Twinkle was originally intended to ridicule glitzy variety puppet acts, while also allowing Burkett to take stock of his own life. A public reading of an early version was well received at Calgary’s International Festival of Animated Objects in 2007, but when Burkett walked backstage afterward, he chucked the script in the garbage. “It turned out to be just self-absorbed dreck,” he says, laughing. By then, he’d gained a newfound respect for the Billy Twinkles of puppetry.

And so he reshaped Billy Twinkle into an affectionate spoof of the American variety puppet acts that flourished in the middle of the 20th century. The idea of a play without puppets also went out the window. In typical Burkett fashion, the new show has a cast of 24 wood-and-string characters, all manipulated by their nimble-fingered creator. They include the denizens of Billy’s splendidly louche act: drunken opera diva Biddy Bantam Brewster; naughty old man Murray Spiegelmann, with his balloon-in-the-pants shtick; burlesque babe Rusty Knockers; and the lovable, roller-skating Bumblebear.

Then there’s Billy’s late mentor, Sid Diamond, who appears to his despondent protege as a hand puppet. Sid comes back to rescue Billy when the middle-aged puppeteer, fired from his job with Happy Sea Fun Cruises, considers leaping overboard to his death. Refusing to leave Billy’s side, the insistent Sid makes him relive his life as a marionette play in the hope that the erstwhile “golden boy” will recapture his passion for puppetry.

“It’s not unlike the conceit of It’s a Wonderful Life,” Burkett readily admits. “It’s a pretty stock setup of, ‘OK, you’re about to end it all, let’s look back.’” But don’t expect any Frank Capra-style pathos, Burkett warns. “It kind of wrecks a serious suicide scene when a hand puppet shows up wearing bunny ears.”

Billy Twinkle features 24 wood-and-string characters. (Epic Photography/Citadel Theatre)

Billy’s midlife crisis is no longer an excuse for Burkett to indulge in moody self-analysis. When Burkett began the play eight years ago, he had just ended a lengthy relationship and was preparing to leave his long-time home in Calgary. Now 51, he has resettled in Toronto with a new partner, musician John Alcorn (who composed the score for Billy Twinkle), and Burkett’s attitude is more philosophical. Now, he says, the play is simply about being in the middle of something.

“If you’re stuck in the middle of anything, whether it’s a relationship or a job or anything, I think you have to revisit the beginning of it and figure out why you were attracted to it in the first place,” he says. “That’s why Billy is made to revisit his life up to this point.”

Creating Billy’s shipboard act allowed Burkett to restage some of the forgotten routines of old variety puppeteers. Although variety acts were once a staple of nightclubs and television, there are few practitioners left today. (Phillip Huber, who did the memorable marionettes for the film Being John Malkovich, is one of the rare exceptions.) Burkett says he found himself playing the eager student again as he sought out old-timers who could teach him gimmicks like making a puppet blow up a balloon or do a strip tease.

“I had to go meet an 80-year-old puppeteer in Los Angeles last October, because he’s one of only two or three guys left who know how to make a puppet take off its clothes layer by layer,” Burkett says. “I had to start asking again, ‘How do you do that? And how do you blow up a balloon? And how do you make puppets with moving eyes and mouths?’ Because those [variety] puppets always had animation in their heads.”

Oddly enough, that animation proved the trickiest thing to master. Burkett says he was especially keen to have the marionettes of the young Billy Twinkle move their eyelids. “You think, what a little treat it would be to see the Billy puppets blink. But, oh God, the mechanics and the problems with doing that!”

Burkett himself plays the adult Billy Twinkle – a leftover aspect of the original one-man-show concept. It may be the largest role Burkett has taken on as an actor rather than a puppeteer. Not that he has ever been shy of interacting onstage with his carved characters, in full view of the audience. In fact, it’s a Burkett trademark, going right back to his first Theatre of Marionettes show, Fool’s Edge (1986). He even embodied a string-pulling Jesus in the provocative Street of Blood (1998), part of his landmark Memory Dress Trilogy, and performed without puppets for long stretches of Provenance (2004).

Burkett says the biggest challenge has been adopting Billy Twinkle’s razzle-dazzle stage persona. “People in showbiz have a certain aura that they can present onstage – that toothy grin, that connection with the audience that is completely false yet seems sincere,” he notes. “It’s really hard if you haven’t had a career of doing that. In the first week of rehearsal, I just felt like a big cheese ball.”

Ronnie Burkett sits with puppets from his 2001 production, Happy. (Reuters)

Although Alberta boy Burkett has long been a favourite with Edmonton audiences, Billy Twinkle is the first show he’s done at the Citadel. The city’s flagship theatre made up for lost time by commissioning this play, in collaboration with several other Canadian and international producers. After its Edmonton launch, Billy Twinkle will tour to Ottawa’s National Arts Centre and the Vancouver East Cultural Centre, before heading abroad to the Barbican in London, the Sydney Opera House and Melbourne Arts Centre in Australia. Other dates in Canada and the U.K. are also scheduled. Burkett says the show will be on the road until at least the end of 2010.

Perhaps it’s the play’s themes, or maybe it’s the federal government’s cuts to arts touring grants, but Burkett finds himself musing about the future of his Theatre of Marionettes after Billy Twinkle’s run.

“It’s pretty tenuous,” he says. “Just when you start building up a career to where international touring is feasible, that might become prohibitive for a whole bunch of reasons – certainly, the will of the current government to not encourage that [is a factor], but other things as well. More than anything, I’m in the middle of this little company’s life. In 2011, it will be its 25th anniversary. Do we become domestic at that point? Do we look at [touring] the States again? It’s not really in my control. We’re just going while the going’s good.”

Still, Burkett has high hopes for his new production’s earning potential. “If Billy Twinkle works,” he says, “this might be the most commercial show of them all.”

Billy Twinkle: Requiem for a Golden Boy by Ronnie Burkett Theatre of Marionettes runs at Edmonton’s Citadel Theatre to Nov. 9, at Ottawa’s National Arts Centre Nov. 25-Dec. 6 and at the Vancouver East Cultural Centre Jan. 20-Feb. 8, 2009.

Martin Morrow writes about the arts for CBCNews.ca.