Time was when itinerant storytellers formed roving bands that toured the world with banjoes and tubas, making a ruckus and telling tales with puppets on their hands. Well, Puppet Uprising returned to these roots with a sextet of notorious performers who made a St. Patrick's Day stop in Philadelphia for a top-notch evening of low-brow cabaret capers. More than 60 people crammed themselves into the 40-seat Walking Fish Theatre in Kensington to see puppet shows, music and human oddities from the wilds of Wisconsin, to the Green Mountains of Vermont, and all the dumpsters in between.

The six-member Boxcutter Brass Band kicked things off with a roster of tunes from the Bread & Puppet Circus Band songbook (most of the Boxcutters are former members of Bread and Puppet). As three two-person puppet companies (The Dolly Wagglers, Modern Times Theater, and RPM Puppet Conspiracy) they performed a cardboard puppet show about a lumberjack who invents a magic toast machine, a Punch & Judy show about agrarian self-reliance, and a toy theater show about evangelical lightbulbs and industrial collapse. The Cabaret was also peppered with cantastorias and kranky shows about the reclamation of chores, a lass who falls in love with a cow, and the two types of bullshit: that which comes from the bull, and that which comes from the human mouth. Musical numbers included old-time fiddle tunes, a water-gargling duet, and Leo the Human Xylophone ended the evening by playing the theme from Rocky on eight differently pitched bells sewn to various parts of his body.