Two bits of good news about Ronnie Burkett's latest play Happy, which opened last month at CanStage's Berkeley Street Theatre in Toronto. First, the show was due to close last week but has extended its run until March 3 ... so snap up your tickets soon.

The second item is really exciting news for playwright and puppeteer Ronnie Burkett. The show is on its way to London in June. This Medicine Hat, Alta. artist has already been a star in New York and elsewhere in North America, but London's calling and he's thrilled. He's taking the show overseas himself. "So many people have said to me, 'Why don't you hire some young guy to perform the shows and just make money off the royalties?'" he told Reuters news agency. " I say: 'You don't get why I do this. I don't spend months and months building all these things and trying to produce it to give up the best part of the job, which is breathing with a bunch of strangers.' "

Happy, Burkett's follow-up to the incredible Street of Blood, previewed at the duMaurier World Stage last year and has played in other venues across North America.

Burkett is a Canadian puppet master without peer. He handcrafts his characters, creates a theatrical landscape for them to populate, writes a play for them to act in, and then infuses them with life. In short, in Ronnie Burkett's theatre, he is God.

And what an incredible shape shifter he is. While Street of Blood dealt with homophobia, vampires, and the question of whether or not mother love is toxic, Happy is all about a "happy-go lucky veteran veteran who wanders through episodes of grief in other people's lives." Burkett looks at the scope of sorrow in human existence in order to decide whether or not some people are just lucky by nature and aren't affected by sorrow. Or is more a matter that certain people wrestle with their demons, learn how to live with their layers of anguish and discover how to move on? They know how to be happy.

In Street Of Blood, the main narrative was the tension between a prairie mother and her vigilante, bomb building, gay son. A troupe of vampires lent some comic and occasionally horrific relief to the familial struggle. In Happy, Burkett utilizes a similar conceit. "Tandem to the storyline presented by the character of Happy is the "grief vaudeville" of Antoine Marionette, a campy, other-worldly master of ceremonies. Within this glittering silver realm -- "the gray area of life" -- arch presentations of sadness in song, pantomime and burlesque, mirror and parody the state of the central characters."

Lord love a duck. You'll probably need a few laughs after delving into the nature of sorrow. This is one show I won't be missing. It was a huge hit at the duMaurier World Stage. Mike Ross of The Edmonton Sun claims that "Ronnie Burkett pulls all the right strings" and The Village Voice trumpets that "Burkett is one of the world's geniuses...seeing his troupe every few years has just become a necessity of civilized theatregoing."

Get your tickets while you can. This could well be a sell-out show: