Review: Kafka's Metamorphosis: The Musical! With Puppets! at Edinburgh Festival Fringe

The Edinburgh Festival Fringe is the biggest arts festival in the world, with over 3,700 shows. This year, Playbill is in town for the festival and we’re taking you with us. Follow along as we cover every single aspect of the Fringe, aka our real-life Brigadoon!

As part of our Edinburgh Fringe coverage, Playbill is seeing a whole lotta shows—and we’re letting you know what we think of them. Consider these reviews a friendly, opinionated guide as you try to choose a show at the festival.

“Huh,” Gregor Samsa says, perplexed, contemplating his comically vague and indistinct new body. “This is new.”

Young Gregor, the protagonist of Franz Kafka’s infamous absurdist novella The Metamorphosis, has awakened to find himself transformed, nearly, into an insect that is oftentimes represented by a cockroach. Gregor cannot go to work. He cannot flip from his back to his stomach to crawl out of bed, and he cannot communicate with his emotionally distant family. His human spirit is confined in a critter’s existential crisis.

These are the trappings for Kafka’s Metamorphosis: The Musical! With Puppets!, an odd yet sweet interpretation of the work at the Fringe in celebration of Kafka’s 100th birthday. The felt-covered author, earnestly puppeteered by Blake Du Bois, contextualizes his life, his work, and his life’s work with charming melancholy. Both the characters of Kafka and Gregor (the latter also performed by Du Bois) yearn for tenderness from their families, notably from their father, who once locked Kafka on a frigid balcony for hours as a punishment for whimpering.

Morgan Smith, Blake Du Bois, Kaia Fitzgerald, and Luis Rivera

The new musical (with puppets!) comes from Matt Chiorini (book, music, and lyrics) and Travis Newton (music) with direction by Alan Muraoka (Sesame Street). With Music Director Andrew David Sotomayor (Tootsie and Escape to Margaritaville) pulling the heartstrings, the show sounds fantastic, though the songs don’t linger on the tongue. The musical allusions harken to something Eastern European, something Bohemian, even, but nothing quite as unconventional as its subject matter. It’s familiar, and it makes for a fast hour, but something else about the bops and ballads feel incomplete, as if they’d been cut off before reaching a crescendo.

This is not unlike Kafka’s own life, as we learn the prolific writer devoted much of his time to his craft, only to destroy the vast majority of his work before succumbing to tuberculosis at age 40. Kafka’s Metamorphosis is equal parts a spirited retelling of a seemingly inaccessible work and an inventive opportunity to position its author front and center. There are all the elements of a tear-jerker here, themes of loneliness, isolation, abandonment, and deep longing pervasive through Franz and Gregor’s parallel lives. The show has many legs on which to stand for future (though whether the legs number four, six, or more I am not sure), grounded in Du Bois and company’s touching performances. And the audience, even in brief moments of participation, delights in it, “awwing” regretfully and laughing enthusiastically throughout.

The performance is bittersweet in its seemingly premature ending. As my appetite was whet for Kafka—the man, the musical, and the puppets(!)—the spirited troupe were on their feet for the finale. With heart, music, and puppets, Kafka might be for everyone. The metamorphosis just may not yet be complete.

Kafka's Metamorphosis: The Musical! With Puppets! is performed at Pleasance Dome until August 26. Tickets are available here.