Leonardo! A Wonderful Show About a Terrible Monster

Experience a performance unlike any other as everything that’s usually behind the scenes is brought on stage for the audience to enjoy. Leonardo is a terrible monster. He tries hard to be scary, but he just isn’t. One day, Leonardo meets Sam, who is the most scaredy-cat kid in the whole world. Will Leonardo finally get to scare the tuna salad out of someone? Or will it be the start of an unlikely friendship? But wait! The plot thickens when Leonardo and Sam meet Kerry—an even scaredier-cat—and her monster friend, Frankenthaler. Kerry and Sam need to make a big decision: will they just be scaredy cats, or can they become friends?

Leonardo! A Wonderful Show About a Terrible Monster uses hundreds of illustrated paper puppets, book pages, two-dimensional props, furry monster puppets, and songs to bring Mo Willems’ books to life. Manual Cinema aims to re-create the experience of holding one of Mo’s book pages, which are big, bold, colorful, full of visual rhythm, with a playful use of scale. Like all Manual Cinema productions, there is no wrong way to watch the show: either on the big screen like a traditional movie or on the stage below, where the artists create the story in real time. Inspired by the Mo Willems’ books Leonardo, The Terrible Monster and Sam, The Most Scaredy-Cat Kid in the Whole World

Using vintage overhead projectors, multiple screens, puppets, actors, live feed cameras, multi-channel sound design, and a live music ensemble, Manual Cinema transforms the experience of attending the cinema and imbues it with liveness, ingenuity, and theatricality. The company was awarded an Emmy® in 2017 for The Forger, a video created for The New York Times and named Chicago Artists of the Year in 2018 by the Chicago Tribune. In 2020 they were included in 50 of Chicago theater “Rising Stars and Storefront Stalwarts” (Newcity). Their shadow puppet animations were featured in the 2021 film remake of Candyman.

Manual Cinema is an Emmy Award® winning performance collective, design studio, and film/video production company founded in 2010 by Drew Dir, Sarah Fornace, Ben Kauffman, Julia Miller, and Kyle Vegter. Manual Cinema combines handmade shadow puppetry, cinematic techniques, and innovative sound and music to create immersive stories for stage and screen. In 2022 they premiered Leonardo! A Wonderful Show About a Terrible Monster, an adaptation of two books by celebrated children’s author Mo Willems