Zach Binder and co-star Ticklemuff.
Ventriloquist Zack Binder Hits Provincetown
by Steve Desroches
All it can take is one brief moment to inspire a child forever. When Zack Binder was six or seven years old his parents took him to Canada’s Wonderland, an amusement park just outside of Toronto. And despite all the roller coasters, carousels, arcade games, clowns, and kiddie rides, it was a ventriloquist that had Binder completely mesmerized. While still quite young Binder understood there was an illusion going on, that the puppet’s voice came from the person holding it. But no matter how hard he looked, he never saw the puppeteer’s lips move. The gaze of a child, particularly an inquisitive one can be intense. But Binder never even saw a quiver or a twitch of a cheek.
“I thought it was absolute magic,” says Binder. “From then on it was in my brain.”
All these years later, Binder is embarking on his first major tour as a ventriloquist, with a stop in Provincetown at Red Room for Family Week, where he’ll introduce audiences to his buddy Ticklemuff, a character that has an international following online and passionate fans. But just how does a child go from seeing a ventriloquist to becoming one? Piano, dance, and painting lessons are relatively easy to find in many communities. Binder would largely have to teach himself this skill, which he began doing in his bedroom while a high school student. But for years that’s where his ventriloquism stayed, a private affair with few places to try it out in front of an audience.
What began as a religious practice in ancient Greece, where mostly women delivered oracles, or prophecies, via what was then seen as a mystical method became a tool of the huckster using it during seances and with a Quija board, eventually finding its way to carnivals and vaudeville in Europe and North America. And while ventriloquism became a popular radio entertainment, the illusion was lost on the faceless medium. But then, until television created the first superstars like Edgar Bergen, Shari Lewis, and Señor Wences. With that emergence into popular culture firmly in place by the time Binder was born, his trajectory to the stage nevertheless took a circuitous route. Identifying as trans masculine and non-binary, Binder began performing as a drag king, with the name Drag King ZacKey Lime, in Toronto in House of Kings, a show he produced. There began his journey into publicly performing as a ventriloquist as he’d often bring out his puppet sidekick, Lady Gomorrah.
“This huge puppet became a mascot of the show,” says Binder. “As I perform now, using comedy and ventriloquism, there’s still a lot of drag in the show.”
Binder used the pandemic, which shut performance venues in Toronto down, to shift towards acting, landing a gig in 2021 as Elliot Page’s stand-in on the TV show Umbrella Academy. Soon after, he left Toronto for Los Angeles, and in 2023 first hit the stage as a comedic ventriloquist performing at The Crow and the Hollywood Improv. And he’s been a hit ever since, garnering a legion of fans throughout the L.A. comedy circuit, hosting a monthly variety show at the Lyric Hyperion Theater and Café in the city’s Silver Lake neighborhood. But Binder is quick to point out that actually it’s Ticklemuff that steals the show.
“Ticklemuff is very sweet and very sensitive,” says Binder. “But Ticklemuff is also a little erratic, a bit blunt, very funny…I could go on and on.”
Binder and Ticklemuff, along with Ticklemuff’s girlfriend, Jill Goldstein (formerly known as Lady Gomorrah), found a niche and a way to connect to an audience by expressing vulnerability, building empathy with the audience, as well as being out about identity—always a challenge and a concern about reactions. Doing so in Los Angeles is one thing, but in mid-July Binder and Ticklemuff went to the Vent Haven International Ventriloquist Convention in Erlanger, Kentucky, across the Ohio River from Cincinnati, close to the Vent Haven Museum, the world’s only museum dedicated to ventriloquism. While the ventriloquist community is overwhelmingly straight and cisgender, and is strangely conservative, says Binder, most everyone tried to keep politics out of the event. But what to do when your very identity is highly politicized? Binder and Ticklemuff just presented their authentic selves and were well received. As for Family Week, and Provincetown in general, Binder is excited to visit the town for the first time. While he normally performs for adults, he notes the show is PG-13, with any innuendo and/or more adult-orientated materials being written so that they likely go over the heads of children, providing a chuckle to the grown-ups. But no matter what level you receive the show at, one thing remains universal: the transformation of a puppet into a real, living character.
“I know it sounds crazy, I know Ticklemuff is a puppet, I know Jill is a puppet,” says Binder. “But they are very real to me. And by the end of the show they feel very real to the audience, too.”
Ticklemuff’s Big Tour with Zack Binder is at Red Room, 258 Commercial St., Wednesday, July 29 and Thursday, July 30 at 7 p.m. Tickets ($32.50 children/$42.50 general/$52.50 VIP) are available at the box office and online at redroom.club.
