How an 8-year-old puppeteer went on to discovered town's longest operating kids's theater and created puppets that "freaked" out Elvis: "They have been so lifelike."
Fifty-nine years after it opened, the Bob Baker Marionette Theater, the oldest working kids’s theater in Los Angeles, is the topic of a definitive espresso desk e book: Enchanted Strings. It features a foreword by filmmaker and puppetry fan Jordan Peele, who praises the theater’s “superb intricate roster of puppets — the deepest I’ve ever seen.”
Stuffed with scores of pictures and sketches of set designs, marionettes, and puppets (together with longtime favourite Bobo the clown), Enchanted Strings: Bob Baker Marionette Theater is a story of how Baker acquired his begin as a younger boy — he carried out his first skilled present at age 8 at a celebration for a kid of director Mervyn LeRoy — and went on to discovered one among L.A.’s most beloved arts establishments, which skilled a curler coaster of economic ups and downs.
“Bob was a folksy entertainer. He began when he was 5 or 6 within the Twenties and ’30s. That’s when all the good puppeteers have been working in L.A., and he labored with all of them and so they influenced how his exhibits got here collectively,” says Randal J. Metz, the e book’s creator and inventive director of Oakland’s Storybook Puppet Theater.
Metz continues: “His mother and father supported him. His home had 4 garages, and through the years he took over every of them for various initiatives [as both workshops and theaters]. He labored proper out of his home till 1961 till he purchased [a] constructing, and in 1963 he opened the theater.”
The e book additionally particulars the various Hollywood movies and TV exhibits Baker labored on, together with creating and dealing with puppets for Bewitched, Star Trek, the Elvis Presley movie G.I. Blues, 1954’s A Star Is Born and even creating an alien for Steven Spielberg in Shut Encounters of the Third Sort. “The puppets for G.I. Blues,” says Metz, “have been so lifelike. When Elvis Presley was working with them, they freaked him out and he couldn’t deal with it and went to his trailer.”
Baker additionally had a long-lasting reference to Disney, advising on movies, creating puppet-filled home windows for Disneyland’s Major Road, advising on movies, and making a line of now extremely collectible licensed marionettes (presently promoting for about $100 to $3,000 on eBay).
One factor the e book doesn't handle is Baker’s personal life, although at one level it describes the connection the puppeteer had with Alton Wooden — the classically skilled pianist who co-founded the theater firm — as “a private and professional partnership.” Says Metz, “Alton gave up his profession being a live performance pianist to work the puppets and run the theater. He was actually the man who saved the cash issues going.” However Alex Evans, the present government director of Bob Baker Marionette Theater, says, “It will by no means go away [Bob’s] mouth that they have been something greater than finest buddies that labored collectively.”
Baker died in 2014, and 4 years later the theater was pressured to go away its longtime dwelling in Echo Park, the place along with exhibits, it had hosted a whole bunch of birthday events for L.A. children over the many years. (The theater had been co-designed by Oscar-nominated Planet of the Apes costume designer Morton Haack and Emmy-nominated manufacturing designer Serge Krizman, identified for the unique Batman TV sequence.)
In 2019, after turning into a nonprofit, Bob Baker Marionette Theater discovered a brand new, greater dwelling in Highland Park, contained in the historic Twenties York Theatre, and has been revitalized by a younger group of puppeteers decided to maintain its founder’s legacy alive. “We have been all like, ‘We care about this an excessive amount of to let it go,'” says Evans (who is also engaged on a documentary about Baker). Provides Metz, “They're truly doing it the best way Bob wished to do it and designing new numbers the best way Bob would do it. The brand new theater firm feels precisely the identical as the best way Bob ran it up till 2014, and it's all these youthful children now.”
Up subsequent on the theater is the traditional selection present It’s a Musical World (Feb. 5 to April 3). The nonprofit theater additionally has three ranges of membership, and supporters can “Undertake-a-Puppet” by donating to assist the care and upkeep of a puppet for one 12 months.
“Lots of people don’t understand puppetry is so magical,” notes Metz. “A superb puppeteer will make the marionette transfer in a manner that you'll neglect the puppeteer who's working it. Good puppetry turns into actual.”
A model of this story first appeared within the Jan. 19 subject of The Hollywood Reporter journal. Click on right here to subscribe.