Driveway Follies
3854 Greenwood Ave., Oakland
Oct. 30 & 31, 2023
www.DrivewayFollies.org
[email protected]
For many, November is the month of the dead. We poke fun at death the evening before November begins on All Hallows’ Eve. It’s fun to make fun of death. And it’s fun to make people happy making fun of it.
When there’s a once-a-year community event that rejoices so thoroughly in this age-old nose-thumbing, our caricatures of the ghoulish transform ghoulishness into delight.
“Driveway Follies” on Greenwood Avenue is a bezeled jewel of this Halloween jest. It draws not only immediate neighbors for its two-night performances, but those from afar, all of whom want to see and hear the joys of razzing the Grim Reaper.
Driveway Follies was founded by Larry Schmidt, who died in of pancreatic cancer in 2019. Schmidt made costumes for the Oakland Ballet and was a member of the San Francisco Puppet Guild. He also studied Indonesian mask dance and built marionettes. His passion for puppets inspired him to present a three-act Halloween variety show in his driveway in 2007 with just three puppeteers.
This year marks the production’s 16th anniversary and now features six puppeteers, three stage managers, and over a dozen volunteers. The performances are held on the 30th and 31st of October each year. And every year the puppets, music, and sets are different from times previous.
The crowds were shoulder to shoulder this year in the closed-off street where the laughter and chatter and hoots and screeches of the clamoring throngs all pushed toward the irresistible energy at the small stage. There was nowhere to see the storied marionette show lest one was seven feet tall. But I spied a steep hill beside the house where tree branches and dense ivy made a labyrinth, blazing a trail up a rise of that tangle to see the performance.
Even if my mini-hike hadn’t paid off (it did), the visual delights of Driveway Follies were abundant beyond the stage. Black-and-white projections of spookiness were lit upon the house on Greenwood, constantly changing frames. At the top of a brick staircase lined with jack-o-lanterns was a deck filled with more scary lighted projections; a tree with a face where a skeleton clung to a branch; and a cauldron stirred by an ancient hag whose boiling concoction one little girl wasn’t very sanguine about standing next to, posing for her parents but obviously glad to be away from the frightening witch once their photo was snapped.
Founder Larry Schmidt’s life partner, Carl Linkhart, whom I spoke with briefly inside his delightfully decorated home, now sustains the production. A soft-spoken man dressed in perfect Halloween attire, Linkhart voiced the part of Jitters, a cute little marionette bat whowas the familiar to our marionette introductress, a witch on a broomstick named “Aunt Grandma” (voiced by Opie Bellas).
The emcee, “Augusta,” a wide-mouthed hand puppet played by Maria Rodriguez, got the four-act show going. She emerged from a small side-stage curtain to set the larger stage before their patterned curtains opened. Accompanied by her sidekick Griffin, who was dressed in a red usher’s uniform like one from an early 20th century movie house, Augusta told jokes, took questions, and welcomed jokes from the children in the audience. “How do you know when a joke is a dad joke?” cried out one kid. Augusta didn’t know. The boy’s punchline: “When it becomes apparent!” Peals of laughter.
After Aunt Grandma’s intro, we were given a whirr of black-light puppets in “Halloween Spooks” — a peppy bit of visual candy. The next piece in the quartet of performances was “The Firebird Suite: V. Danse Infernale,” in which a pair of winged beasts with huge teeth flew and snapped at one another to Igor Stravinsky’s music in a dazzling dance that demonstrated the deft skills of the marionettists, the act punctuated by a scowling, wizened wizard who literally dropped in.
The third act, and my favorite, was “T’aint No Sin to Take Off Your Skin,” which featured a clown who did indeed take off his skin, dancing as a (sometimes dismembered and headless) skeleton throughout the old 1929 tune.
Finally, there was the showstopper: “Mysterious Mose” wherein a behatted character in checkered pants and spats flew, shunk, stretched, transformed into a snake, and multiplieds into five of himself all under five minutes.
At the end of the show, kids and parents alike left the seating area so another audience could be wowed. Driveway Follies runs from dusk until 10 p.m., so the amount of coordination, expertise, and stamina it took to put on this fantastical production was intense. The fact that Driveway Follies was performed for more than one night is remarkable. But there was no denying the pleasure the performers, crew, and Mr. Linkhart took in giving the neighborhood such memorable riches. It slaked that wide-eyed eagerness we all have to mock the next world. Making people laugh is fun. Bravo!
