The play opens on a subway in present-day China, among young people in designer labels lost in their phones. A phone rings: “Mulan, come home, your father is sick.” Her father no longer recognizes her. To support him she auditions for a film and asks to play Mulan, and the legend begins as a play within a play. In the ballad, Mulan takes her father’s place in the army; here, a daughter takes her father’s place at home. Wanfeng Hu described the aim as letting the ancient Mulan and a contemporary young woman “blend into each other,” so that the story speaks to parents and children today.

The prologue ends with the Little Puppet asking, “What is the girl thinking? What does the girl remember?” The line comes almost word for word from the ballad, where it is asked of Mulan at her loom. In the play, the question comes right after we learn the father has lost his memory.

Tito Lorefice’s concept was that the audience should never feel it is watching actors move puppets, only puppets with lives of their own. The present-day scenes are played mostly by human performers; the legend is carried by shadow puppets, rod puppets, bunraku-style puppets and large creature rigs of many sizes “coexisting in the same universe.” The ballad’s images become objects on stage: the hares of the final verse built as walking rigs, the loom worked by twelve fairies, the village market crowded with puppets.

Each department drew the line between the two worlds. Lighting used cold, high-color-temperature white for the present and warm light for the past. Costume set modern dress against ancient, and Mulan’s army in pale linen against the enemy in dark. Sound moved from an opening rap and a zombie dance to music for the legend. Most transitions between the two worlds involved several departments at once, which is why so many lines on the cue synopsis list lighting, sound, rail and video together.

The production invents episodes the ballad never had: sheep lanterns that take a mountain, a raid that burns the enemy’s grain, a seduction that captures the enemy chief. It adds comedy, too: a cockfight in the village, a busker, and a pair of market sellers named Spear and Shield, a nod to the Chinese idiom 自相矛盾 (“spear and shield,” meaning to contradict oneself).

In China, puppetry is usually filed under children’s theater. Puzzle was built for adults: a family story about illness, memory and duty, told with the full range of contemporary puppet technique. Professor Hu’s summary at the wrap meeting was that the production had begun to change that perception.

At the September 24 technical coordination meeting the designer wanted real wooden abacus beads; the technical staff warned that solid wood cracks. The disagreement looked like one about material. The real need was the sound of the beads, and once that was stated a second solution was available: “If it’s essential, we can support it with a sound effect.” A prop problem became a sound problem.

“Too tight and the performers can’t pull it, too loose and the effect is wrong” became gaps tied into the band. A mountain that had to read as “flat and fully wrapped” could not be built until it was specified as ring sizes and spacing. A puppet head out of reach became a pole about five meters long.

Whatever we agreed on went onto the paperwork. At the opening subway sequence, a single row of the master cue sheet carries five departments: lighting, line set J27, the scene shift, the projected route map and the sound cue.

At the wrap meeting, video reported that many timings had remained “blank, somewhat arbitrary.” Lighting’s goal of hiding the puppeteers depended on costume, and the two were never fully aligned. Anything we left to “settle on site” came back as guesswork in performance.

Several performers worked inside full head masks or behind large puppets, which muffles the voice and shifts it off the puppet. Each performer’s mic position was chosen for the mask, forehead or a specific cheek, with a level trim noted on the mic plot. We held two mic checks in the theater before tech.

A single puppeteer could voice five roles across a performance, from a villager to a soldier to a fairy, often in chorus. I laid out the mic plot by scene so I could see at a glance which channels were live.

A puppet has no breath and no footfall. Its life on stage comes partly from sound: the shuttle of the loom, the beads of the abacus, a flock taking off. These effects were cued off the puppeteers’ movement.

Music is pulled down whenever a puppet speaks, so that the audience locates the line in the puppet. “Bring down for the little puppet” appears more than once on the cue sheet.

Minutes before the third performance, the ribbons on one side of the giant loom tangled beyond repair. The team cut that side free and played the scene with the other; the scene shop repaired it before the next performance. Because the scene’s cues were fully documented, the team knew exactly what the scene still required and made the decision in minutes.

The playback Mac was set up so nothing could interrupt it: Do Not Disturb on, notifications and system alert sounds muted, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth off, automatic updates and sleep disabled, every other application closed, and the QLab workspace saved and checked before the house opens.

Every music cue needs a planned exit: a fade cue ready to fire, a known way to stop all audio, and a clear sense of which cues can be skipped if a scene is cut short. Wireless mics are checked one by one at the pre-show line check, with spare batteries and a plan for swapping a failed pack.

Problems get solved over headset with the stage manager. The sound operator holds, waits for the stage manager’s call and adjusts levels for whatever the scene has become.