Review: In "Dreamcats!," the Fur Flies…into Space

Dreamcats!

Written and directed by Charlotte Lily Gaspard

Music by Nebraska (FKA Jessie Davis), Sabrina Chap, Zera Bloom, Doc Frost, and Malik Work

Presented by Midnight Radio Show at The Gene Frankel Theatre

24 Bond Street, Manhattan, NYC

April 23-May 3, 2026

Puppeteer Laurynn Starkey. Photo by Richard Termine.
Cats, as anyone who lives with them knows, spend a lot of time sleeping. But what if all that shuteye were not merely relaxation but research? In Dreamcats!, the family-friendly world-premiere puppet musical from Brooklyn-based science-fiction fairy-tale theater company Midnight Radio Show, the eponymous Dream Cats are an ancient race who live cloistered from the rest of "the fantastical galaxy" on the planet Dicee One-I, where they collect and study dreams in pursuit (or purr-suit?) of "understanding all the riddles of existence." Written and directed by Midnight Radio Show creative director Charlotte Lily Gaspard, Dreamcats! fuses live action, different types of puppetry, and a style-hopping set of songs into an inspired, genre-bending adventure that highlights the importance of curiosity, resilience, and love.
Charlotte Lily Gaspard. Photo by Richard Termine.
Many of us have had the pleasure of stumbling across some captivating oddity or another while surfing the broadcast waves in the small hours, and Dreamcats! frames its own sci-fantasy story as an episode of the Midnight Radio Show. As part of this frame, a mermaid puppet, blue, sparkly, and floating above cloth waves, sings a preface promising a story of a "master of dreams" and a princess locked in a tower, after which comes a comedic "interlude" in which three scientists give the audience a brief history of the fantastical galaxy from its origins, before the show segues into its main story, "The Origin of Puccini." Puccini (Justin Gordon) is not just any Dream Cat but one of the top dream researchers on Dicee One-I. Still, he is not an aristocrat and is therefore considered unworthy of the love of Princess Weymira (Charlotte Lily Gaspard), who, as has often been royal women's lot, was betrothed to another since before her birth. Puccini and Weymira are always voiced by Gordon and Gaspard, but they are embodied sometimes by those actors in costumes and makeup, sometimes by 3D cat puppets, sometimes by some of the production's beautiful, detailed shadow puppets, and sometimes, to great effect, more than one of these simultaneously. Puccini and Weymira decamp to a forest together, where they encounter some fairies, Weymira admits her "blasphemous" desire to explore beyond their world, and the pair share their feelings for one another. (The forest portion of the set also doubles as a place where young audience members can get their photos taken after the show with the human versions of Puccini and Weymira.) After Weymira leaves the forest, Puccini also meets a Blue Bird (puppeteered by Tau Bennett) and a Pink Flamingo (Maria Camia, who makes the smartly designed costume work not unlike a puppet). The Flamingo is accompanied a number of other birds (groups of small, simple puppets), and all of these avian contacts will become important when, alerted by feline gossip about his daughter, Weymira's father, King Marl (Maria Camia), locks her in a tower and devises a spaceship-related plan to get Puccini out of the way.
Tau Bennett, Justin Gordon, Charlotte Lily Gaspard. Photo by Richard Termine.
The production may be child-appropriate (and the kids in front of us at the performance we attended were certainly all in), but one is also reminded of Shakespeare's sonnets when Puccini raps in "Till the End of Time" about how the Princess is immortalized in his rhymes or of the symbolism in Susan Glaspell's play Trifles when Weymira wants to release her father's caged bird. Alongside the thwarted love plot, struggle and aid also emerge as themes that resonate across age groups. Puccini says in the same song that what matters is not the magnitude of the adversity that one faces but how one responds; Weymira, contemplating escape from the tower, says that giving up, crumbling "in the face of adversity," is the worst thing she could do; and the cats' interactions with the birds demonstrate interspecies empathy and cooperation (and underscore associations between flight and freedom). Gordon and Gaspard are fabulous as our feline leads, and rest of the cast, Camia, Bennett, and puppeteers Laurynn Starkey and Lana Tleimat, bring a sense of humor, play, and wonder to Puccini and Weymira's puppet forms and the rest of the inhabitants of the world of the Dream Cats (there is even, during one song, tail choreography). The songs feature stripped-down instrumentation, such as acoustic guitar and hand percussion or piano and drums, that leaves plenty of room to appreciate the cast's vocal performances and boasts stylistic influences ranging from jazz to hip hop (though if you're expecting metal as well, "Rainbow in the Dark" is not in fact the song by Dio). In the end, the play does not avoid loss but tempers it not only with hope but with the possibility of communication and reunion within dreams. Even then, there is a lovely seam of wistfulness that runs through the show's final song and scene. You don't have to be, as these reviewers are, crazy cat people to have a dream of a time at Dreamcats!. This we swear, after Puccini, by "all the balls of yarn."

-John R. Ziegler and Leah Richards

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