Nominated for Spirit of Raindance Award
The legendary ventriloquist Shari Lewis rose to stardom with her beloved sock puppet Lamb Chop. When her popular children’s show gets cancelled, Shari must find a way to make peace with her alter ego. Together they spend decades reinventing themselves until Shari’s unlikely comeback where she becomes a fierce advocate for children’s education.
When ventriloquist Shari Lewis broke into show business in the early 1950s, she immediately stood out as a singular talent.
Shari was gifted with a clear-eyed determination to make it big in the male-dominated world of puppetry and with a technical skill that at times appeared supernatural. She could yodel with her mouth shut; she could simultaneously sing and make clicking sounds; and she could memorise 12 songs, 36 pages of script and 72 commercials on a weekly basis.
A pioneer of children’s television, Shari educated and entertained an entire generation with her colourful cast of puppets – Charlie Horse, Hush Puppy and the eponymous woolly sheep Lamb Chop, an instant hit with kids and grown-ups alike.
This documentary celebrates Shari’s remarkable achievements, and it goes deeper, revealing puppetry to be an art form capable of more than just entertainment. For Shari, puppetry was a means of accessing various parts of the self, it was a tool for exploring complex personal relationships, and it was a way of communicating with something beyond the material world. “I kept looking for God in my puppets,” she says, “And could not find one, until… Lamb Chop.”
A poignant portrait of one puppeteer and the multitude of characters she contained.
Review by Joanna Boyd
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