Puppet regime

The state of entertainment is a little overwhelming these days, as anyone who’s ever stepped into the Paramount can tell you. It’s refreshing, then, to see people reviving older, more intimate types of storytelling. This week’s Crime and Puppetry Cabaret features performers from all over—here, the U.S., and France—set to engage audiences with toy theatres, fairground style puppeteering, tap dancing and other once-popular, now uncommon forms.

Montreal’s Le Petit théâtre d’absolu presents their show Paris in the 19th Century, Part IV: La Commune, as they kick off a jaunt across the Atlantic that’ll see them playing around France and Italy. Yank Claire Dolan will be performing The Further Adventures of Go-Go Girl, a “cantastoria,” which is an old form combining painting, singing, and sometimes puppets. Vermont’s Insurrection Landscapers will be doing a kind of punk hand-puppet thing.

Other attractions will include local crackpot Josh Dolgin doing magic tricks and the accordion-and-tap-dance stylings of Big Gold Hoops and Kosher Dill Spears. The Cabaret goes down three nights at three different locations: April 16 at the Casa del Popolo (4873 St-Laurent), 9 p.m.; April 17 at Open City Productions (279 Sherbrooke W., #311), 7:30 p.m.; and April 18 at Café Ludik (552 Ste-Catherine E.), 9 p.m. All shows are $5. :

—Mark Slutsky