After a sold-out New York premiere, Tommy Nguyen and Doug Fitch bring “The Magnificent Ms. Pham” back to TurnPark for two nights on the water, framed as a country-western musical about one woman's escape from Vietnam by boat.
On Friday, August 28, and Saturday, August 29, TurnPark Art Space turns its quarry lake into a stage for dragons, lion dogs, and a fleet of hand-carved puppets, telling the story of one woman's exodus from Vietnam by boat—reframed, unexpectedly, as a country-western musical.
“The Magnificent Ms. Pham,” billed as the world's first Vietnamese-American water puppet show, retells the true story of a Vietnamese refugee named Kim Pham. Pham grows from a village girl on a water buffalo, then a young romantic in Saigon, then a “boat person,” then, eventually, the mother of four sons in Houston. Along the way she's guided by two figures out of Vietnamese legend, the warrior Lady Trieu and the literary heroine Lady Kieu.
The show borrows its magical and complex style from the historic art of Vietnamese water puppetry, or mua roi nuoc, and sets it to 16 original songs spanning rock, pop, and country, composed by downtown theater artist MUR with additional music by Hao Le—all inside about an hour.
The show's development includes installations at TurnPark over the past two summers. It began as a workshop production at TurnPark's 2024 Summer Festival, then returned a year later, reworked around a single movable dragon carrying an entire puppet village on its back,for the 2025 festival. This past February, the finished show had its official premiere at HERE Arts Center in Manhattan, as part of Puppetopia, the puppetry festival HERE co-curates with MacArthur fellow Basil Twist. The two-week run sold out; New York Theater called the result "elaborate" and "tuneful," noting it was a lot to pack into an hour—elephants, dragons, demons, and 16 songs, threaded through Vietnamese history and myth.
"The Magnificent Ms. Pham" is the first production from Puppetual Motion, the company Nguyen and Fitch founded together. Nguyen designed and sculpted the puppets; Fitch designed and engineered the water stage itself. Nguyen, a Vietnamese American artist based between Brooklyn and Philadelphia who teaches animation and comics at Pace University, has described wanting, as he told JoySauce, "to immigrate the form"—bringing a centuries-old Vietnamese tradition into a new, specifically Vietnamese American context. Fitch brings a long resume in theatrical spectacle: he's directed for the New York Philharmonic and Los Angeles Philharmonic, designed productions at the Santa Fe Opera and the Metropolitan Museum, and returns here to what TurnPark calls his puppetry roots.
The production was developed in part with a Workshop Grant from the Jim Henson Foundation, the only US grant-making organization dedicated specifically to puppetry. Past recipients include Julie Taymor, before she staged “The Lion King” on Broadway, and Basil Twist himself.
Both performances run at 7pm at TurnPark's outdoor quarry, part of the sculpture park's 10th anniversary season. General admission is $35. On both nights, TurnPark will get an early start on Vietnam National Day, observed nationally on September 2, with Vietnamese food and live music before the show and during intermission.
TurnPark itself, built into a former marble and lime quarry, has spent nine seasons turning an industrial scar into a 16-acre landscape of hills, meadows, and a 65-foot vertical drop, threaded with an outdoor sculpture collection. A water puppet musical staged on its own lake is, in that sense, right at home.
2 Moscow Road, West Stockbridge, MA 01266
Tickets at turnpark.com.
