E-Mail This Article to a Friend Fowl play Chicken Little stars in a puppet opera BY LIZA WEISSTUCH

When the sky tumbled down on Chicken Little, it actually raised windows of opportunities for the legendary farm bird. Forget the prophecy of doom you’ve heard so much about. According to puppeteer Susan Vitucci, there’s a beyond-the-storybook drama so shocking it may change your mind about the neurotic chick, and Vitucci reveals it all in about an hour — in Italian. And did I mention that Ms. Little and her friends and lovers are portrayed by four-inch opera-singing clothespin puppets? (Not to worry: giant screens broadcast enlarged images of the action and English supertitles.) The play, La Pulcina Piccola, or Love’s Fowl, is on the bill of Puppet Showplace Theatre’s Festival of Puppet Musicales, which will play next weekend at Longy School of Music.

What Vitucci’s puppets lack in size they make up for in character. The principal chicken, after all, is a diva type who makes her grand entrance on a scallop shell posed as Botticelli’s Venus.

Like any great opera, this one has crime, passion, adventure, and suspense. But unlike timeless epics by Wagner and Verdi, this one, Vitucci says, started as a joke when she was working at the 92nd Street Y. While hanging with the stagehands, one of whom "had a thing for chickens," a goofy joke set Vitucci speculating on Chicken Little’s fate had she been prima poultry. She dashed off a script and was going to try it as a birthday show for a nephew, but it metamorphosed into a production with music and crew, so her nephew got a Lego set instead. At that time, all the props, puppets, and technical necessities fit inside a 24x4x5-inch cardboard box.

"Even then I knew this was big," Vitucci says, speaking over the phone from her New York home. "There was a certain grandness about this character. Then as soon it was [translated into] Italian, I knew it was bigger than anything it had been. There was something about the heart of the character that is big, that makes me feel good, that makes other people feel good."

The translation came about because Vitucci was taking an Italian class, and the final project was to present 10 minutes of anything in Italian. "The story of my life was way too depressing, so I went back to the puppet show. The original took nine people to run. This one I did in the classroom and I killed with it. Then I knew I had something."

That something was a series of silly sight gags that she pecked to perfection in cafés and salons in New York. The ultimate metamorphosis occurred not long before she took it to the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. When Henry Krieger saw her perform at the West Bank Café, the Tony-nominated, Grammy-winning composer of Dreamgirls and Side Show asked whether she would let him set the show to music. From then on, Vitucci was thinking far out of that cardboard box as Krieger and screens and supertitles got implicated.

If the notion of a nugget-size chicken prima donna belting arias whets your operatic appetite, consider that the festival also offers Backstage Carmen, Julie Goell’s "mopera" in which she appears as a theater cleaning lady who delivers all the major arias of Bizet’s classic while her cleaning supplies fill supporting roles. Or if you have an easily awakened inner child who’s whining for entertainment, he/she might be calmed by Liz Joyce’s Song of Sixpence, which is based on a 1925 musical setting of the classic nursery rhyme that she bought at a yard sale for a not much more than sixpence.

"People constantly tell us that Puppet Showplace productions are some of the most powerful theater they’ve seen in years — they’re so bored with theater they’re seeing lately," said PST artistic director Karen Larson. "People really reconnect with how delighted they can be with puppets."

La Pulcina Piccola, or Love’s Fowl is presented as part of A Festival of Puppet Musicales next weekend, February 19 through 21, at Longy School of Music, 27 and 33 Garden Street in Harvard Square. Tickets are $9 to $24; call (617) 731-6400.