There is commedia dell’arte and the circus in it, of course, but also the great silent-film comedians, especially Buster Keaton. I have spent my fandom-which until last night was only online-thinking about what sort of character Geier has created. By the end of it, the mood was like that at a Jimmy Buffet concert, with the crowd singing along, batting around balloons, and hugging each other. “That’s so sexy,” he silently mouthed, and the crowd went wild.) For the most part, his message is love and inclusion. (One man ran his cupcake over to a child in the audience, and Puddles pulled a face of delirious admiration. He made people sing and act things out and fed some cupcakes or coffee. His act is as much pantomime and performance art as concert and uses props, multimedia, and audience participation. Puddles is on the road most of the year, including internationally at venues such as the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. Just when it started to seem like genuine commentary on popularity contests and fame media, the video ended, a giant red X came onscreen, the buzzing noise of rejection blared, and Puddles jumped with fright. There his AGT performance was cut with other footage, and he sang REM’s “Losing My Religion” in his profundo voice: “That’s me in the corner / That’s me in the spotlight / Losing my religion / Trying to keep up with you / And I don’t know if I can do it / Oh no, I’ve said too much / I haven’t said enough…But that was just a dream / Try, cry / Why try? / That was just a dream, just a dream, just a dream….” He began the show by straining-for several minutes-to slide a four-legged stool to center stage then sat, facing away, and watched a giant screen with the audience. In his duet with Haley Reinhart he is visibly hurt when she sings, “I went to school and I was very nervous, no one knew me, no one knew me….”
In a video with circus performers, he shrinks from a lady in a red flamenco dress she scares him. One young woman shouted over and over, “Puddles, jump! I’ll catch you!” Puddles, who does not speak but has a very emotive face, stopped and looked down at her, like, “Wtf?” The audience laughed. The crowd on the main floor strained to see and shot their own photos and video. The concert started with Puddles greeting the audience and posing for selfies in the balcony. (His real name is Mike Geier, but he prefers not to talk about that.) Purists say he was not at his best there, and it was all a setup anyway, since AGT pretended he was an amateur weirdo on a stage for the first time but in reality had been performing professionally since the early ’90s.
You might recognize Puddles from America’s Got Talent. Would you refuse to go to a hockey game because Jason wore a facemask? But I beg you: Do not join the herd who reflexively say they hate clowns because Pennywise. Sure, he is a hulking, baldheaded man in Pagliacci makeup, a white clown suit with fuzzy buttons he plays with distractedly and sometimes suggestively, and a tiny gold crown askew on his massive, sweating head. He does a spot-on Johnny Cash and sings “The Sound of Silence” in that voice, as well as various mash-ups such as the lyrics of “Pinball Wizard” to the tune of Cash’s “Folsom Prison Blues.” He does a moving rendition of “America The Beautiful.” He sings everything from what I suppose we are calling old standards-Cheap Trick’s “I Want You to Want Me,” David Bowie’s “Space Oddity”-to Sia’s “Chandelier and Lorde’s “Royals.” He does excellent covers of Chris Isaak, Nick Cave, Los Lobos, Don Ho, Bonnie Tyler, Roger Miller, The Cure, and Willie Nelson. Most of that is wrong, I can tell you, as someone in the know: He is actually 6’8” is often joyful, playful, tender, and childlike and has a voice that can range from operatic to metal. If you are still living in the time period of your life before Puddles, he is the singer and cabaret performer sometimes billed as “a seven-foot sad clown with a voice like Tom Jones.” I felt like the guy in front of me in line for the second Star Wars movie, in 1980, who poured bags of loose change onto the ticket counter and cried, “I’ve been waiting for this for three years!” Puddles Pity Party was in town last night.
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