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It’s sad Chicago is afraid of giant street puppets

In the summer of 2014, an ordinary young boy from Liverpool, England, decided he’d finally seen something bigger than the Beatles.

He’d stood in a crowd of about 300,000, watching three giants marauding across his city for three solid days. He’d been able to touch these giants. He had climbed on their backs. With his dad, he’d traveled with them all over town — to neighborhoods he’d never seen, past tens of thousands of people, many picnicking in the city’s parks. Not an inch of space was free — people had grabbed windows, balconies, every patch of stone or grass. He laughed as one giant hitched a ride on a public bus. He might have seen 5-year-old Amber Travers, a survivor of meningitis, convulse with laugher when one of the giants, a dog named Xolo, peed on the floor.

He’d struggled to get home that summer night because tens of thousands of people, many coming from hours away, had clogged Liverpool’s transit system. On the way, he’d encountered children crying because they thought they might arrive too late.

One of Liverpool’s parks had been spontaneously spruced up by local residents, when they heard the giants were to rest their heads there. Nobody had been alive when anything so big had happened in Newsham Park — for that would have been in 1891 when Buffalo Bill brought to town his Wild West show. Another puppet had laid down her head in a civic building; 42,000 people paid her a visit.

Hundreds of police officers had attended to the giants, riding around them in a joyous cavalcade of police motorcycles, followed by a pipe-and-drum band. When the puppets finally went to sleep in the park, they did so as John Lennon’s “Imagine” boomed around the city that loves him so much, they named their airport Liverpool John Lennon Airport.

“This is brilliant,” the boy said to his dad. “But why have the giants come back to see us?

“Because this is Liverpool, son” said his dad, laughing. “This is where special things happen.”

This could have been Chicago, where a special thing exactly like the special thing that bewitched Liverpool twice over, is not happening.

No giants are coming to Chicago.

In Liverpool, the excitement was so intense, the buoyant Liverpool Echo wrapped its regular issue in a 16-page giants souvenir featuring Royal de Luxe, the French mechanical marionette street theater company featuring puppets as tall as 50 feet. The issue sold out all over town and contained the stories of the boy and young Amber (and many more) described above.

But Royal De Luxe will not perform here in June as expected. In public, city officials have cited the difficulty of raising enough private money to pay for the event, which is no doubt part of the reason.

But on a deeper level, this cancellation suggests something more.

It has come to this, Chicago: We cannot guarantee the peace and safety of puppets and kids.

We don’t trust ourselves to walk freely in all the city’s neighborhoods, mingling with Chicagoans we don’t know, learning from them things we need to learn. We are too worried that it won’t go well, or that security will be a problem, or that it will cost too much, or the situation will get out of control.

We are uninterested, it seems, that the giant puppets of Royal de Luxe of France have brought smiles to millions in Singapore, Nantes, Guadalajara, Berlin, Santiago, Reykjavik, all without any particular security at all. And that they and their partners at the Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs and Special Events were all set to bring the giants to Chicago next summer — to Bronzeville, to the West Side, to the waters of Lake Michigan.

They were to celebrate the city of neighborhoods: One puppet was to spend the night in Bronzeville and awaken there and remind the young people of that neighborhood of what brought them to that place, about those who traveled on trains from Alabama or Tennessee. Another was to begin in the west and reveal all that immigrants bring to this city. The whole idea was to explore the diverse experiences that have brought us all to this place, together. The giants were supposed to encourage us to travel all over town, following the gentle colossi and the army of people needed to operate them.

It’s not hard to understand why the city chose to cancel the event. It required a lot of private money to be raised, since Chicago is never entirely comfortable with public money being spent on the arts, even if the giants might have been able to do for Chicago’s children what humans demonstrably have not, to date, been able to do.

Though city officials said issues of public safety and security were not been part of the decision, it’s not hard to understand the worry that the processions of people might have turned into protests or ugly encounters with the police. Some would have been reluctant to head with their children into what are perceived as dangerous neighborhoods in which to travel. And since this is a city of a certain unvarnished cynicism, there would have been plenty of columns and opinion pieces on why this was all a waste of time and money. Giant puppets, for God’s sake. And if it turned out to be one great, joyous street party? Well, columnists can always change their minds. But that does not make it any easier to get something like this done.

Albeit on a very different scale, Royal de Luxe would have been blazing a trail started by Redmoon Theater, now a company fallen on hard times. The Great Chicago Fire Festival was a bust the first time in 2014, and only a qualified success the second, but, as throughout Redmoon’s history, its heart was always in the right place: to bring neighborhoods together and solve our problems together. This you do not achieve merely by having a New Year’s Eve spectacle downtown, designed to fill hotel rooms. (Redmoon recently canceled its New Year’s Eve Revolution and is struggling financially.) There’s nothing wrong with that, but it would not have achieved what these giants might have achieved. And most of our kids are in bed — or should be in bed, before midnight.

Perhaps you’re thinking it’s absurd to argue that giant puppets — French giant puppets, at that — could have brought Chicagoans together, thrilled us, made us feel safer, offered more of us access to world-class art, right in our own neighborhoods, even those of us who rarely ever see downtown. And given all that has gone on in Chicago the past few weeks, I probably would have made the same call.

Pull the plug on the giants. Too difficult to pay for, deal with, pull off, too risky in all kinds of ways. Too many guns. Too many investigations. Too many other pressing problems, financial and otherwise.

But forgive me for wishing it were otherwise, hoping it might be otherwise in future years. What can heal this city if not the arts?

All you can do is imagine. Stephen Sondheim said it pretty well in “Into the Woods”: “A big tall terrible giant at the door / A big tall terrible lady giant sweeping the floor / And she gives you food, and she gives you rest / And she draws you close to her giant breast / And you know things now, that you never knew before / Not till the sky.”

CJones5@tribune.com

Twitter @ChrisJonesTrib