Last Friday I went to go see Manual Cinema’s Frankenstein presented by ArtsEmerson. I didn’t really know what to expect, but I was in the mood for some Victorian horror, and I do love me some Mary Shelley. The show’s description promised “more than 500 handmade puppets” plus “animation and live music.”

Not only were there over 500 puppets (most but not all of them shadow puppets), and live music, and animation… there was also singing, acting, costuming, a gender-bending Doctor Frankenstein (!!), and robotic tambourinists.

And they all came together create—of all things—a movie.

In short, it was one of the most impressive and entertaining things I’ve ever seen happen on a stage. I still can’t fully wrap my head around it.

“How would I even begin to describe this to people?” one audience member asked Manual Cinema in their Q&A after the 70-minute performance/movie. The audience had lots of questions, and most of them boiled down to the same one I had: How?

“It’s like going to see a movie, but the movie is also being made right in front of you,” was one answer to the question.

I admit, it took me a good fifteen minutes to figure out the full wizardry of what was happening on stage. I was too busy watching the four musicians (plus some robots) and the large screen above them, which projected a silhouette animation telling the story of how Mary Shelley came to write Frankenstein after the sudden death of her baby, Clara.

Then suddenly I noticed that behind the musicians, near the back of the stage, there were people in full Victorian costumes acting against a white backdrop, providing some of the silhouettes on the screen above.

Oh cool, I thought, some of these scenes are happening live! But, um, where are these 500 puppets at?

Then, to my total bafflement, I noticed the costumed actors rushing back and forth between the shadow screen and what appeared to be some kind of lightbox down low.

Wait… I thought, are they… creating these animations right now? LIVE? With shadow puppets? HOLY SHIT THEY ARE!!

MANUAL CINEMA. DUH. GOT IT.

Sometimes in the silhouette scenes, it was hard to tell the difference between puppets and humans. Judging by the one (surprisingly intense) puppetry class I took in college*, shadow puppetry is a deceptively difficult artform. To see this level of detail and mastery was mind-bending.

Just when I thought my mind could be more blown, the puppeteers/actors moved to the other side of the stage to tell the Frankenstein portion of the story, and Mary Shelley became a drag Doctor Frankenstein acting in a silent-movie-era film (I know, this is very hard to visualize and explain). These were some of my favorite scenes.

Frankenstein’s creature was played by both a 3D puppet (made of ripped purses and other found textiles) and an actor/puppeteer in costume (who ALSO played Doctor Frankenstein’s wife… like, come on!). Everyone in the incredibly small cast, including the musicians, played multiple parts.

The live “movie score” included spotlighted musicians taking turns playing the waterphone during some of the creepier scenes. Even the way they played the instrument varied, with both bow and mallet. Everything about the performance/movie was intentionally multi-faceted like this.

For the movie’s “credits,” the cast took a traditional bow before running around the stage with name cards, holding them up over each performer, puppeteer, and musician’s head.

Maybe most incredible to me—during the Q&A portion, they told us that the manual movie we just watched was in no way recorded! The next night, they would do it all over again, and so the movie is never 100% the same. I just love the concept of a taking a visual art like film and making it ephemeral.

*Note: I will never forget my Katrina Van Tassel shadow puppet doing an accidental backbend during my one-and-only performance of The Legend of Sleepy Hollow in front of my puppetry professor and classmates. Yes, it’s possible to fail puppetry.