Prior to attending Pico and The Golden Lagoon at the 2023 Victoria Fringe Festival, I’d only ever seen one theatrical performance in my adult life. It was an experience I walked away from with the opinion that live theatre is profoundly boring and not something I’d ever want to do again.
Then I got an email from the editor of this lovely publication asking if anyone would be interested in attending and reviewing performances in Victoria’s upcoming 37th annual Fringe Festival. I was desperate enough for that funny little thing called “experience” that most employers seem to think of as a “necessity” that I replied in the affirmative. Ultimately, this course of events resulted in me sitting in the back row of the Roxy Theatre watching an Australian-Canadian puppet show all the while desperately trying to ignore the egregious feelings of self-consciousness that naturally occur when one is a 20-year-old man sitting alone in the back of a dark room watching a children’s puppet show.
It was a surprisingly enjoyable experience.
Pico and The Golden Lagoon is the result of a two-person team: puppeteer Sally Miller and musician Jesse Hamilton. Over the course of its 45-minute runtime, the show follows the adventures of Pico as she tries to get her airplane back up and running after being forced to crash-land on a mysterious island. She makes new friends, observes the local wildlife, and learns about solar power while Jesse pleasantly strums his guitar in one corner of the stage and a sign-language interpreter interprets away in the other.
Although the show was marketed as being educational, the educational topics that are explored are only breached on the very surface level. It serves as a great introduction for anyone under the age of six, but it’s hard to imagine that anyone older would be learning any new information. That’s not to say that Pico and The Golden Lagoon wouldn’t be entertaining to those children, just that its value as an educational form of entertainment becomes increasingly limited with each year past the age of five.
The puppets themselves range from simple to for-a-second-there-I-though-that-might’ve-been-taxidermy, and while Sally is the only person behind the curtain, each character had its own distinctive voice.
This show also involved a high level of audience participation. From the tried-and-true method of loudly yelling open-ended questions into the void Dora the Explorer-style to an energetic dance number, the kids in the auditorium were seemingly thrilled to take part. The dads in attendance seemed equally thrilled to yell absurd things every time the opportunity presented itself, but that’s nobody’s fault but their own. All this noise, combined with how loudly the audio from the stage was being amplified in the small space, was an uncomfortable thing to experience and could potentially cause significant distress for anyone with hearing sensitivities.
All in all, Pico and The Golden Lagoon is a fun little story that is slightly educational, fun for kids, and entertaining enough for adults. If you have kids under the age of six and want to spend some time with them that doesn’t involve a screen it’s, at the very least, an option worth considering. Or you just forget about the evils of modern technology and put on Sesame Street. I’m not sure a kid that young would care enough to notice the difference.
The Victoria Fringe Fest runs until Sunday, September 3.