Elmo and his buddies brighten up the stage in "Sesame Street Live"
2 Mar 2007
An artsy adventure
Elmo and his buddies brighten up the stage in “Sesame Street Live”
Professor Art must be one of those Renaissance men like Leonardo Da Vinci, equally adept at painting pictures and designing scientific inventions.
Not only does the “Sesame Street Live” character enjoy coloring with his friend Elmo, he builds an invention that enables Ernie, Bert and the rest of the gang to enter some “giant-size coloring-book pictures.”
If you visit the Scranton Cultural Center today through Sunday for “Sesame Street Live: Elmo’s Coloring Book,” you can accompany Elmo and his buddies to ancient Egypt, the Land of the Dinosaurs and a musical junkyard.
“We learn about triangles in Egypt with the pyramids,” Matt Furtado, the actor who portrays Professor Art on stage, said last week in a telephone interview.
“We learn about King Tut and how much he loves triangles. Who else would build pyramids except a triangle-lover?”
In another segment, Sesame Street characters play at being paleontologists. “We can learn what dinosaurs were like because of the bones they left,” Furtado said.
“It all weaves together into this nice, musical story,” he said. “I think we’re definitely one of the best family musicals on the road today.”
As the “only one without fur” in the cast, Furtado believes the grown-ups in the audience identify with him.
“A lot of parents watch me. The other characters in the stage show are all voiced by the actual voices from the TV show. We have a big recorded track. But I’m actually live and speaking to the audiences.
“Professor Art is almost an absent-minded professor. He gets very excited about his work as an artist, and he plays the straight man to a lot of these comic characters and helps them learn things along the way, kind of as an adult.”
Furtado didn’t want to give away too much of the plot but did admit that “Oscar becomes a little more mellow in the show, and everybody’s a little alarmed. The audience has to help us get him back to his grouchy old self.”
One of the fun aspects of touring with the show, the actor said, is that cast members can see how they’ve inspired children to be creative.
“We love when we get coloring pictures sent back to us. Kids sometimes send them back with one of our ushers. We post them backstage.
“When we leave the theater (out of costume) we walk among the audience and hear people talking about their favorite parts, singing and dancing and holding Elmo balloons. It’s neat to see the reaction of these kids.
“It’s something they’ll never forget,” he predicted.
Mary Therese Biebel
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