Puppet Uprising joined forces with Feet Actice (the monthly dance/yoga/vegan cupcake party at Studio 34 Yoga/Healing/Arts) to present an original touring play by the Missoula Oblongata for two nights in West Philadelphia. The audience packed itself into the big yoga studio to laugh and cheer and become a cacophonous mob of writhing tarantistic townspeople before streaming out to devour Jason Schoen's gross of gourmet vegan cupcakes—'twas very much in the spirt of the Missoula Oblongata's play, though the unitiated might have suspected that the Uprising crowd had been practicing. Practicing what? Some or all of the above to be sure.

Set just after World War I, The 50 Greatest Ladies & Gentlemen tells of two brothers: one who shipped off to the French trenches, and another who stayed back in the U.S.A. to build submarines. When the veteran brother returns from Europe decorated a hero, a mysterious letter from the other brother leads him to a desolate factory town whose entire population (almost) have been swept up in a mass tarantism—a dance mania that causes everyone to twitch and jerk about and rip the flesh from everything. A breakfast-loving mammal-like spider and a breakfast-hating spider-loving doctor appear to be the only two inhabitants uninfected by the tarantism, and their contradictory worldviews seem to pull at the very edges of a social fabric in this place where society has pretty much collapsed in a writhing mob of cacophonous bodies. Our hero must wrestle with the doctor's haughty cynicsm, his brother's failure to recognize him, the potential effects of dubious arachnid bites, and the haunting horrors of the war which would not, in fact, end all wars.

The 50 Greatest Ladies & Gentlemen was written by and starred Donna Sellinger as both the brothers, and Madeline ffitch (yep: "ffitch") as the spider and the doctor. Madeline and Donna also conceived and constructed the bulk of the lights, scenery, props and puppets for the play. Music for The 50 Greatest Ladies & Gentlemen was written and performed live by Travis Sehorn (The Last Hurrah of the Clementines) and Charles Leo Gebhardt IV (The Wonders of the World: Recite) who acted as a sort of ghostly chorus of semi-visible character-commentators. Philly's own Sarah Lowry directed the show.

Visit the Missoula Oblongata's website here or search for the Missoula Oblongata in the Puppet Uprising Archive.
Hear the music of Travis Sehorn here and the music of Charles Leo Gebhardt IV here.
Check out what's happening at Studio 34 Yoga | Healing | Arts here and about Feet Active here.
And also check out this review of the show by Tracey Coretta.