A Beloved Los Angeles Puppet Theater Keeps the Show Rolling

In one early project for a St. Patrick’s Day show, while polishing some shoe buckles on a puppet, dust kept falling out. When he eventually opened the puppet, the whole thing collapsed into powder. Since then, the team has developed methods to rebuild those puppets by replacing their interiors with foam batting covered with muslin or car headliner. “We’re kind of learning as we go,” says Beltz.

Building New Work

Reopening the workshop has made something else possible. For the first time in 40 years, the theater is producing a new, full-length show called Choo Choo Revue, a cross-country train journey told through passing landscapes and the characters who inhabit them. “It’s what you see through the branches,” Beltz says.

The show includes more than 100 new puppets. On average, a single marionette can take up to 300 hours to complete. The process moves from concept design to technical drawings, then into sculpting, mold making, casting, body construction, and tailoring. From there, the puppet is strung, fitted with a controller, then tested and adjusted until it holds up in performance. The final stage is, as Beltz puts it, “figuring out how it actually works.”

The final version moves on automaton-like legs, with a flexible shaft inside that transfers the motion of its steps into the spinning propeller on its face. In the workshop, Beltz demonstrates one of the puppets in motion. It resembles a complicated push toy, the kind with a duck that waddles forward when guided by a handle. 

The last, and arguably most important step in the fabrication process, is stringing. Karina De La Cruz, a puppet builder and puppeteer whose uncle apprenticed under Bob Baker, is constantly thinking about stringing and control, and how early decisions in the build can limit or enable what a puppet can do later. 

She gestures toward a moose puppet with giant yellow antlers wrapped in yarn; the character knits a scarf during the performance. “When I was looking at illustrations of Aunt Ler, I was like, ‘How are you going to move those needles around?’” The solution was to build in a degree of looseness: the needles rest lightly in the hooves instead of being fixed in place, so that small, incidental shifts in the control bar register as a believable knitting motion.

De La Cruz takes Aunt Ler down from her hook in the workshop, sets her feet on the ground, and brings her to life. “You’re thinking a lot about gravity here,” she says, moving a bar on the controller. “While you raise that, it’s going to bring the wrists up. Once you let it go, it’s going to reset back down.” De La Cruz walks Aunt Ler across the workshop floor. Her round hips sway while the scarf “grows” stitch by stitch. “That took us eight hours to figure out.”

Still In Motion

Upstairs, in an office filled with records and the theater’s video archives, director Alex Evans points to tapes of Bob Baker’s earliest productions from the 1950s, alongside videos of new iterations year after year. “We’re surrounded by all of it,” Evans says, looking around the room. 

The theater, he explains, is a living thing. Its musical numbers change slightly and puppets return with updated costumes. He sees Choo Choo Revue as part of that evolution. Like a train following a familiar route, each production offers a slightly different view. What passes the window the first time isn’t quite the same the second or the third. 

This moving train tracks the changes the theater has undergone over the past six decades. Baker’s passing in 2014 left open the question of how it would continue. “There was no succession plan of what happens after Bob,” he says. “We were kind of waiting for the grown-ups to show up, and they never did.”

Jacqueline Huynh Young is a Vietnamese American artist and writer based in Los Angeles.