Interview with a
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 Origins of American Marionettes
Return to Marionettes in America Index
"...but far more important
is who it is that is holding the puppet. For it is he who knows how to let it move
and how to let it speak--and so it is he who counts most..."
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How did you first get involved with Marionettes? Well, it was a hobby…I was about nine and my dad gave me a set of commercial made marionettes for Christmas from a company up in Kansas City called Hazel’s Marionettes. They were sold in all the stores and so on. They were pretty good, they weren’t bad. And he gave me a set…my first set was little red riding hood and there was a clown. So the first thing we did was turn our garage into a theater. We didn’t have a car anyway so that was great. It was up in Wichita Falls and he built me a stage and I was hooked. Anything that had…well there wasn’t too much show business in Wichita Falls at that time…so what I saw was school assemblies and so on. I saw my first magic show at a school assembly and I just fell in love with it. I had to do that too. Then the marionettes and I ran across the same problem that you did, there wasn’t very much literature on it. So I just kind of had to improvise. The worst show I ever did in my life, the Public Library in Wichita Falls found out I did marionettes so they invited me to do a marionette show, and they had a wonderful little setup in the basement with wonderful little marionette setup. It was the worst show I ever did in my life and they said never come back. It was then that I realized that you have to rehearse this stuff. So from there on I just wore those puppets out. Then I worked, went on to college my major was English/Journalism with a minor in theater. I went into the service, the marine corp. I was stationed in San Diego and I met an old gentleman and his wife who ran a coin shop there. I just kind of ran into them and he had…they had done Punch and Judy…they were English. They had done Punch and Judy at Brighton Beach in England and I said I have got to do Punch and Judy. That was the first puppet show I ever saw was Punch and Judy at Bringling Brothers Circus. I fell in love with it. So he taught me to do Punch and Judy and sold me my first set of Punch and Judy puppets, and made some stipulations. I had to do it his way or he wouldn’t teach me, which was the old English traditional way. After I got out of the service I was working in television here in Dallas at channel four, writing. And Six Flags opened in ’61 and they said we understand that you do Punch and Judy. I said, yes I do. I was the only…probably one of three people who did Punch and Judy in the country. It wasn’t really politically correct. You know it was a very violent show. I said yes and they built me a nice puppet wagon and offered me a lot more money than I was making at the TV. station. So I just switched, from that day on I became a professional puppeteer. From then on I worked with Sid and Marty Croft in Los Angeles who did tremendous big shows. And then from that back to Six Flags where I produced major puppet shows for the entire chain. I had over…at one point in the ‘80’s early ‘80’s I had 160 puppeteer working for me. The last one of those was in ’93 at Magic Mountain California, then Warner Brothers bought it and it wasn’t any fun anymore. It became very corporate so I left and thought I’ll go back to Dallas and do a little puppet theater. When you were working with puppets were they mostly just for children
or for adults? Punch and Judy can have a lot of adult content. Unfortunately in this country you say puppets and people immediately relate it to children, whereas in Europe they do puppet opera. Puppetry is a more family oriented thing. There is a beautiful little marionette theater in Amsterdam that does puppet opera along with a dinner. It is extremely good. The only thing like that, that was successful, was in Chicago. It was a restaurant called "The Coos Home" [actual name of restaurant unclear] and it was a smorgasbord type restaurant. You went into the restaurant, and you had to have reservations this thing was booked up solid for six weeks in advance. You went in and you had dinner and then a guy in traditional dress came in ringing a bell which meant that it was time to go to the theater. And you filed into a theater and it was an exact replica of the Met but it was scaled down with forced perspective. It sat maybe a hundred but it looked huge. They did puppet opera. About forty five minute condensed version of puppet opera and it was just wonderful. I mean the puppets where small but they looked larger because of the perspective and in the end the puppeteers stood up and they were just giants. People would gasp. That lasted several years into the ‘80’s and then I think Howard Johnson bought it and they trashed the theater. They didn’t want it anymore. The puppets ended up in the Chicago Museum of Art. There was a puppet opera company up in New York or Connecticut that didn’t last but maybe three or four years. If you go to the puppet festivals you’ll see some incredible work for adults and some really moving shows. With the rise of SNL and Simpsons popularity I would think adults would like it and that it would be taken as seriously as a comedian in a night club? Sid and Marty Croft did a TV thing not too long ago, maybe 7 or 8 years ago. It was a political take-off parody. They used hand puppets and they were all…the setting was in Washington in a bar and all these politicians came into this bar. It was good. It was well written and good. There was just no interest in it, whereas in England the same thing, which is what they copied, is still running. I think it is too bad. How would you define marionettes? The thing about the different kinds of puppets is that they all have their place depending on what you want to do. Hand puppets lend themselves more to being human with the mouth action and so on. They are very expressive. If you want to get into wonderful body language and expression you do rod puppets because they just flow… you can make them do wonders. So you use that for drama. Marionettes you use for dance, anything with full body movement because everything else you can’t do that. You always have to be behind a wall or something. Marionettes are the oldest full theater. There use to be marionette theaters on every block in towns in Europe. That was the entertainment for the day. And it was so much cheaper than full theater…its just miniature theater is all it is. But then again puppets can express much more visually then a human can and you can make them do so much more. You can make them express fear just by carving it in the face and so on. I mean you can just over do everything. You can make them turn into birds, you can make them do so much that you can’t do with humans on stage. They become much more expressive than humans and it is definitely very visual. The worst thing in the world is a puppet show that is too wordy. Some of the literature talks about how puppeteers became very secretive about how they do everything much like magicians and so I was afraid that I would not be allowed to see how they work. Sid and Marty Croft when I first went to work for them…their attitude…here they were the biggest puppet producers in the country. They had television shows way before Henson. H. R. Puff and Stuff and all those shows. Sid Croft, we were sitting down one day, somebody came in with a problem and Sid answered it the guy left. And he says I hate puppeteers. Because of that very thing being secretive, "this is mine" and "I made this". It is like any other job. It takes practice. After talking about teaching and performance being incorporated into corporations. For quite a while I dealt with big corporations for I guess 10 years doing their sales meetings and their trade shows. I would incorporate puppetry into their trade shows or their sales meetings and magic. There was a time, my most success came from a combination of puppetry and magic. We were doing all of their trade shows. Honeywell, I did all of their trade shows all over the world for 5 years their computer division. What this was, was a little puppet character. He was a dragon but he was all made out of computer parts. Their whole theme was don’t let your computer become a monster. The way it started out, there was just a stand in their trade show area, and there was a clear plastic tube that was full of computer parts. We come out and put a box over the table, open up the top door, pour all the computer parts in, there was smoke and then they took the box off and their was this little dragon. He was terrible to people. He would say: Dragon: Who are you?
Finally they would get enough of this, he would incorporate the sales message and so on. They just took so much of him and he would become so insulting that you put the box back on him and open the bottom door. All of the parts would fall out into the tube again. He had vanished. We did this all over the world in so many different languages. But that is how we incorporated puppets. And it was always so well received, when your doing stuff like that you can convey the message so much easier. It becomes very visual.
Amanda Gross. |
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