Dreamcats! A Shadow Puppet Fairy Tale Opens a Galaxy of Wonder
On a gentle April evening in NoHo, before the house lights had even dimmed, the audience was already being coaxed elsewhere. A guitar and a Debussy inspired harp took turns threading the air, and with that first chord, the outside world — the roar of Lafayette, the clatter of Bowery — quietly surrendered. What followed inside the intimate black box of the Gene Frankel Theatre was not merely a musical. It was, in the best sense, an illumination — the kind of hour in a theater that reminds us why we keep coming back, the kind of hour that lingers afterward, like a small luminous moon behind the day.
Charlotte Lily Gaspard. Courtesy charlottegaspard.com
A Small Cosmos of Handmade Silhouettes
Dreamcats!, the world-premiere shadow-puppet musical from Brooklyn's ever-enchanting Midnight Radio Show, is a science-fiction fairytale in the key of tenderness. Moreover, it is a sixty-minute parable about love and kindness masquerading, rather brilliantly, as a children's show. Written, directed, and designed by the company's multifaceted enchantress Charlotte Lily Gaspard, the piece gathers a septenary ensemble, a small cosmos of handmade silhouettes, and a constellation of musical idioms — hip hop, gentle grooves, light gospel, techno, and ambient lullaby — into a single, rapt, hand-cut universe.
A Galaxy Blooms Behind the Screen
The curtain rises, if one can call it rising in this kind of puppet-first cosmology, on a dazzling mermaid who sings “The Unseen” as she undulates through a flowing seascape. Already, within two minutes, the aesthetic signature is unmistakable: Dreamcats! aims at the sublime and lands there with the casual grace of a cat on a windowsill. From there, we are whisked outward — to faraway galaxies, to a mysterious, evocative map of the stars, to a forest where Mysticals scamper and where scholars of dreams solemnly debate the meaning of a purr.
Justin Gordon and Charlotte Lily Gaspard in a Scene from Dreamcats! at the Gene Frankel Theatre in NYC. Photo by Richard Termine
Our hero, a daring cat named Puccini (a name whose operatic lineage is played just knowingly enough), loves his best friend, the Princess of the Dreamcats. Their King, however, has other plans. Betrothals have been written; rules are rules. What unfolds from there I shall leave you to discover for yourself, except to say that the tale carries the time-tested architecture of a thousand bedtime stories — the imperious sovereign, the forbidden love, the long road home — yet told here with such bright originality that the familiar bones of the myth feel entirely re-boned.
Charlotte Lily Gaspard's Incandescent Artistry
To watch Gaspard work is to witness someone who has thought deeply about enchantment as a serious craft. Her puppetry — cut paper, layered silhouettes, moving light — belongs in a conversation about the idea that the most generous American art refuses to condescend to its audience. Gaspard refuses to condescend. While Gaspard brings a sense of context and moral attention, the final product glows with the descriptive abundance associated with Virginia Woolf's “moments of being” and with rapturous, sensuous theater. Unsurprisingly, La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club has named her a resident artist, and her February 2026 world premiere, Mia M.I.A., ran there to deserved acclaim.
Charlotte Lily Gaspard Back Stage in Dreamcats! at the Gene Frankel Theatre in NYC. Photo by Richard Termine
A Septenary Company of Extraordinary Commitment
The company assembled for Dreamcats! is exactly the kind of small, fiercely calibrated ensemble that off-Broadway exists to cultivate. Justin Gordon gives Puccini a tender, open-throated ache; when he sings “Everywhere I Go I'm Lookin' for Her,” the yearning is Puccini's ardent lineage transposed into a cat's fur and a boy's heart. Gaspard herself appears as the Princess — poised, silvery, faintly otherworldly, as though just arrived from the next dimension over.
Maria Camia, that singular Filipino-American visual-theater artist, invests King Marl with equal parts regal comedy and flinty paternal gravity; her command of a character's silhouette is virtuosic. Moreover, Tau Bennett, as the Blue Bird, finds a fluttering, forgiving warmth — a small part whose quiet gravitational pull on the story's moral arc is best felt in the room. Finally, the puppeteers Laurynn Starkey and Lana Tleimat are a revelation: two pairs of hands animating several galaxies and countless small wonders, and the audience's audible gasps over the hour are earned and then earned again.
Tau Bennett as Bluebird in a Scene from Dreamcats! at the Gene Frankel Theatre in NYC. Photo by Richard Termine
A Score That Wanders Across Worlds
The music, composed by Doc Frost and Nebraska (formerly Jessie Davi), with additional resident compositions by Sabrina Chap, Zera Bloom, and Malik Work, refuses to settle into any single tradition. Consequently, the production moves from a Debussy-adjacent preshow reverie through light gospel, techno pulses, and hip-hop and spoken word, into passages of almost ambient tenderness. It is a serious argument that fairy tales need not be scored like Rodgers and Hammerstein retreads. On the contrary, they can be scored like the inside of a human day.
Puppetry as Visual Poetry
Dreamcats! extends a long, honorable lineage. One naturally thinks of Jim Henson, whose creatures taught American audiences that felt and foam could hold a soul; of Lotte Reiniger, who, in 1920s Berlin, cut the first full-length silhouette feature the world had ever seen; and of Lou Bunin, whose stop-motion Alice still feels like a fever dream that escaped from a dusty attic. Dreamcats! converses with all three and holds its own.
Meanwhile, Andrew Robinson's set, Sophie Yuqing Nie's sound design, and Ash Winkfield's dramaturgy conspire to make every shift of light feel philosophically deliberate. Choreographer Emily Edwards, abetted by associate directors Cleopatra Boudreau and Malik Work, brings a dance vocabulary to the piece that reads as much like punctuation as like movement. Together, these artists — the full team credited on the Dreamcats production page — achieve a rare equilibrium between rigor and delight.
A Scene from Dreamcats! at the Gene Frankel Theatre in NYC. Photo by Richard Termine
The Quiet Shape of Kindness
What lingers, finally, is not the visual pyrotechnics; it is the ethic. Kindness — quiet, unshowy, reciprocal in ways the show earns rather than explains — is the secret gravitational force of this universe. Have you ever told someone, Gaspard asks softly through her characters, that you will dream of them until you meet again? One leaves the Gene Frankel Theatre wanting to tell someone exactly that — and perhaps to dream a little more generously oneself. As for how Puccini and his Princess fare against a sovereign's decree, and what precisely transpires in that distant galaxy — well, one must really come and see.
This is a show for the whole family! The runtime is about 70 minutes without an intermission.
Cast
Tau Bennett — Blue Bird Maria Camia — King Marl Charlotte Lily Gaspard — Princess Justin Gordon — Puccini Laurynn Starkey — Puppeteer Lana Tleimat — Puppeteer
Artistic
Writer & Director: Charlotte Lily Gaspard Lead Puppetry Design: Charlotte Lily Gaspard Original Music: Doc Frost and Nebraska (FKA Jessie Davi) Additional Compositions — Resident Composers: Sabrina Chap, Zera Bloom, and Malik Work Associate Directors: Cleopatra Boudreau and Malik Work Choreography: Emily Edwards Dramaturg: Ash Winkfield Sound Design: Sophie Yuqing Nie Set Design: Andrew Robinson Producing Company: Midnight Radio Show
A scene from Dreamcats! at the Gene Frankel Theatre in NYC. Photo by Richard Termine
Dreamcats! A Shadow Puppet Fairy Tale Opens a Galaxy of Wonder
Writer & Director: Charlotte Lily Gaspard
Gene Frankel Theatre
Address: 24 Bond Street (between Lafayette & Bowery), New York, NY 10012 Phone: (212) 777-1767 Subways: 6 to Bleecker Street; B/D/F/M to Broadway/Lafayette Website: genefrankeltheatre.com Instagram: @genefrankeltheatre
Midnight Radio Show
Based in: Brooklyn, New York City Website: midnightradioshow.org Instagram: @midnightradioshow Facebook: facebook.com/midnightradioshow.org
La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club
Address: 66 East 4th Street, New York, NY 10003 Website: lamama.org
Tickets to Dreamcats!
The production runs April 23 – May 3, 2026, with performances Thursday–Friday at 7:00 p.m., Saturdays at 5:00 p.m., and Sundays at 2:00 p.m. Running time is 60 minutes. General admission is $33.23; children's tickets are $22.83; early-bird tickets, where available, are $28.03. Reserve seats at the official ticketing page or via the Midnight Radio Show Dreamcats! page.
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