A Choose-Your-Own Rock show puppetry experience
Photo by Richard Termine, La Mama, NYC
Roles: Co-creator, writer, musician, co-composer, performer, puppet-maker, puppeteer
Adventure Pizza is an interactive choose-your-own-rock show puppetry experience. This unique show is inspired by a love of interactive games and books, live performance, pizza, and the transformative magic of puppets. It was created with Leigh Walter and Dan Brennan for Monsterface Industries.
In Adventure Pizza, you come home from a long day wanting only one thing: a large pizza. Alas, every delivery person on Earth has mysteriously disappeared.
You must choose to go and get the pizza yourself, battling ninjas, animated discarded pizza crusts called “Crusties” and most terrifying of all, your own internal demons...
Adventure Pizza follows a branching map wherein audience choice dictates what song is next, where the story goes, and who your character becomes. Through a variety of interactive methods, the audience stands in as the lead character with control of the story. Each different choice has a meaningful and cumulative impact on the entire experience.
photo by Richard Termine
In 2023 Marty Allen and Leigh Walter premiered the first live staging of Adventure Pizza at La Mama’s Puppet Slam, a short selection from the overall piece titled (A Slice of) Adventure Pizza.
For the live iteration Marty and Leigh invented the Choice-O-Meter as primary method to gauge live input, using real-time audience choices to guide through distinct paths.
Multiple sets, puppets, and entire songs are created for each branching path.
In June of 2023, we were honored to have a photo from Adventure Pizza shared as part of The Jim Henson Foundation's exhibition of the amazing Richard Termine's work, Puppet Theater Today.
Originally envisioned as a live show, Adventure Pizza was first adapted as a Twitch stream during a residency with the Object Movement Festival in 2020, which had pivoted to an online format due to quarantine.
Above is the captured premiere.
For the Twitch Stream, we staged several early scenes. The audience was presented with on-screen choices, and real-time votes determined the path that was shown.
Much of the show including puppets and set pieces was created using real pizza boxes.
Still an evolving work-in-progress, to date Adventure Pizza has had selections shared as a live Twitch stream and with a live audience at La Mama’s puppet slam. The hope is to to eventually evolve the piece into a fully immersive live performance for families.