LITTLE ROCK — Talk to Paul Zaloom, and he’ll confess he’s not much of a scientist.
But he certainly plays one, first on the popular 1990s television show “Beakman’s World” and now in the touring production “Beakman on the Brain,” which will visit Fayetteville on Thursday.
Actually, he says, he’s not much of actor, either.
“I’m a puppeteer, more than an actor,” he says by phone from his home on the West Coast.
Truth be told, he’ll be a little bit of all three when he visits the Walton Arts Center for a kid-friendly show next week. It will be his second performance in Fayetteville;
he previously brought his “Beakman Live!” tour to the same venue in 2008.
Zaloom, a puppeteer and actor who has won several awards for his one-man stage shows, created the Beakman character for the television show. Several people auditioned for the part of the zany, fast-talking scientist with wild hair and a chartreuse lab coat, Zaloom says, but none of them seemed to work.
“They needed to have the edgiest, weirdest guy. That was me,” he says.
Beakman may have been weird, but he’s found lasting popularity. After the television show stopped airing, Zaloom resumed a stage career before taking Beakman on the road. The first production, “Beakman Live!,” was more of a general overview of the Beakman brand of madcap science.
The new show is more specific and focuses on the human brain. The idea came to him as he didsome scientific research in preparation for this next show.
“I found the brain and brainscience fascinating,” Zaloom says. He also found something else.
“There is no one doing this,” he says.
That means that all the gags and illustrations that audience members will see onstage Thursday night will be Zaloom’s creations. The show contains a series of optical illusions, games, puppets and videos, geared toward those between the ages of 6 and 12.
“Explaining neuroscience to a 6-year-old is an interesting task,” Zaloom says, but that’s exactly what he does in the show. It’s not done through pandering, Zaloom says, but rather by deciding what is the essential element of each fact he shares. Through many of the elements are indeed elementary, Zaloom says he sees a lot of adults at hisshows, too, perhaps half who watched him on television as a child and half who are there to learn a bit themselves.
He says that 53 percent of his television audience was, in fact, adult. He speculates they were watching him as an introduction into harder scientific concepts.
“Many people grow up thinking science is hard to grasp, which it’s not,” Zaloom says.
Not even for a puppeteer.
***
FAQ
‘BEAKMAN ON THE BRAIN’
WHEN - 7 p.m. Thursday
WHERE - Walton Arts Center in Fayetteville
COST - $9-$17
INFO - 443-5600 or www.waltonartscenter.
org
Whats Up, Pages 19 on 02/18/2011