Adam Fane

By
November 2024 View more

By Jen Banowetz

This Aurora actor loves playing both humans and creatures

Adam Fane
Disney’s Frozen the Broadway Musical runs through January 19 at Paramount Theatre in Aurora.

If you’ve always wondered if reindeer really are better than people, ask Aurora actor Adam Fane. He’s played both.

Having just wrapped his role of security-guard-turned-stripper Malcolm in Paramount Theatre’s fall production of The Full Monty, Fane is happily suiting up to play/puppet Sven the Reindeer in the theater’s Midwest regional premiere of Disney’s Frozen the Broadway Musical. “I oscillate,” he says, “between being just a regular human actor and then an actor who’s attached to a piece of felt.”

In fact, this is Fane’s 10th time on the Paramount stage as a working actor (an important distinction, not counting a 2002 Fox Valley Park District production when he was kid). Six of those 10 professional Paramount roles were humans; four were performing complicated puppets: Milky White from Into the Woods, Audrey II in Little Shop of Horrors, Flotsam in The Little Mermaid, and now Sven. We caught up with Fane as he prepared for his staring role as this antlered best friend with a soft spot for carrots.

Q: What’s it like to play a reindeer?
A: We’re just getting into it right now with the puppetry, but it’s like I approach a lot of characters, especially lovable sidekicks. He’s like man’s best friend, always—he’s gonna have a little puppy in him. He’s full of light and love, and I can’t wait to share that with the audiences.

Q: Is puppetry something you’ve always been interested in?
A: Well, I grew up enamored with Jim Henson and the Muppets and Sesame Street and the like, just watching it on TV, watching The Muppet Movie, watching Kermit and Miss Piggy and Big Bird. But it really started for me actually with a different musical, when I was 13 or 14, called Avenue Q. Not safe for children, of course. But that followed me into college, and shortly after, I did the Chicago premiere of Avenue Q. I actually did it twice: the nonunion premiere in 2012 and then the Equity premiere in 2014.

Q: Do you prefer acting as a human or as a puppet?
A: I’m kind of loving my in and out right now…I get to have the best of both worlds, and I don’t prefer one expression over the other. [With The Full Monty] I’m in a show where I have lots of lines and choreography. But Sven is a silent joy. He doesn’t have any lines, but I get to fill in the story with the expression of this lovable reindeer.

Q: How does Sven work?
A: We did puppet workshops where they brought in the prototype by our puppet designer, Jesse Mooney-Bullock, who I have the honor of working with a third time at the Paramount. He is excellent and nationally revered. [The puppet] is like a cross between a mascot costume mixed with War Horse.

The two front legs are my two front legs, and the back two legs are on like this wagon. Inside of the head, I have operation for a little thumb trigger for his eyelashes and his eyelids to lower and open. A third trigger—this little dowel that controls his ears so you can have like modes of surprise or cowardice—if the ears are in, if the ears are up, kind of like a dog does. And then of course the mouth [opens]. I think about it kind of like dance because if they’re all used as one, they can change range of emotion very quickly.

Q: What was you theater experience like as a student at West Aurora High School?
A: I think public school drama programs are so, so, so very important. At West Aurora, I don’t know if I went through the golden age there or what, but we were doing things in our high school that weren’t happening [elsewhere]. My sophomore year, we did the high school premiere of Cats. My junior year, we did the high school premiere of Miss Saigon. Senior year, we acquired the rights to Rent school edition [and we were the first to do that]. I was just so very fortunate to be in that program.

 

Photo: Amy Nelson