Last Friday afternoon, as temperatures climbed into the 80s in the dusty California desert, fans rushed to claim a spot in front of a Coachella stage.
But the crowd wasn’t camping out for that night’s headliner, Sabrina Carpenter, or for the buzzy girl group Katseye. Attendees were patiently waiting to see Bob Baker Marionette Theater, home to some of Los Angeles’s most popular puppets.
Derek Moe, 31, was kicking off his first year at Coachella at the front of the crowd. Even with a stacked weekend of performances, he had a feeling that the puppet show would be “hard to top.” His partner, Talyssa Topacio, was also brimming with excitement. They had watched their first show at the puppet theater — a winter wonderland special — a few months earlier.
“I’ve always wanted to go, but I’d never just, like, done it,” Ms. Topacio, 28, said. “It was the most amazing thing I’ve ever seen in my life.”
As one of the largest and longest-running puppet theaters in the United States, the group is a beloved Los Angeles institution with 10 full-time staff members and 10 to 25 puppeteers, depending on the season.
Mary Fagot, 53, co-executive director of the theater, said that joining the Coachella lineup felt natural.
“We were like, Of course you’re reaching out to us,” Ms. Fagot said with a laugh. “Coachella needs us to bring the real and the connected and the joy and the fun and the sense of not taking yourself too seriously.”
Bob Baker, the puppeteer, whom the theater was named for, was born in Los Angeles in 1924. He saw his first puppet show at 6 and immediately threw himself into learning the art form. After years of studying puppetry, he teamed up with Alton Wood, a puppeteer and pianist, in the late 1940s to create a touring company that performed at schools and churches. By 1963, the duo had transformed a run-down movie scenery shop near Downtown Los Angeles into Bob Baker Marionette Theater.
Now, based in the Highland Park neighborhood of Los Angeles, the theater has a trove of roughly 3,000 handmade puppets and performs up to six shows every weekend. The theater’s traveling company, which takes a marionette-adorned van to schools and special events around California, will return to the desert again this Friday to perform during Coachella’s second weekend.
The theater has also hosted an annual Bob Baker Day every year since Mr. Baker’s death in 2014. In recent years, around 35,000 people have turned out for the free event at Los Angeles State Historic Park, near Chinatown. (Although the event typically falls during the first weekend of Coachella, in April, a rain forecast pushed this year’s Bob Baker Day to Sept. 20.)
The theater performs in the cabaret style, which means the puppeteer is visible to the audience. The group uses all kinds of creatures — among them, hand and rod puppets (think the Muppets) and shadow puppets. Its specialty is marionettes, which are controlled by strings or wires from above.
“You see the strings, you see how it’s made, yet you still kind of look at it and believe it’s a dog,” said Alex Evans, 38, the other co-executive director and the theater’s artistic director.
With an eager crowd gathered at the festival stage, Pink Cat, a Vegas-showgirl-style M.C., welcomed an assortment of clowns, fairies and instruments for a puppet revue. Babies rode on parents’ shoulders next to people in full clown outfits and makeup. Heavily tattooed millennials mingled with Gen Z-ers with neon dyed hair and Instagram-ready festival outfits.
“We opened up the pit for Bob Baker Marionette Theater,” Ms. Topacio said, referring to the way people mosh at hard-core shows.
Meg Hope, 33, and her husband, Geoff Williams, 42, were in the crowd with their children, Cassidy, 2, and Calliope, 1. The couple had traveled from Christchurch, New Zealand, to Coachella for 10 years, and their children started attending the festival last year.
“As soon as we saw Bob Baker was on there, we were like, What a perfect place for a first puppet show,” Ms. Hope said. “It’s so nice to see marionettes and puppets getting their own space. It’s a tough time to be niche.”
It was also a major moment for the theater, which has faced the prospect of closure several times over the past few decades.
The original theater, a cinder-block building near Downtown Los Angeles, faced foreclosure in 2008, and Mr. Baker sold it to developers in 2013, a year before his death. The group continued to perform in that space until late 2018, when it was finally evicted. It became a nonprofit theater and moved into the York Theater in Highland Park by the end of 2019.
Then Covid shut down performances, and the board began a campaign to ask the community for the $365,000 that it needed to keep the theater afloat for another year.
“We had it in about three weeks,” Ms. Fagot said. “And that was not private solicitation conversations with major donors. That was people showing up with $25 and $50.”
As vaccines rolled out, volunteers painted the murals and the proscenium that are seen there today, and the theater reopened for performances in July 2021.
This week, Bob Baker Marionette Theater started a campaign to raise $7 million to purchase and restore the York Theater, which has become a neighborhood staple. The group opened the campaign to the public after raising $4.5 million from arts foundations, and it hopes to raise the rest so the location can become “a forever home,” Ms. Fagot said.
In recent years, the group has received requests to make puppets for all kinds of special events — including a Kendrick Lamar ventriloquist dummy for Mr. Lamar’s Big Steppers tour. The theater also gets plenty of inquiries to host weddings, performances and, occasionally, funerals.
“We get so many crazy phone calls,” Mr. Evans said, “like, ‘Are you guys interested in this project?’ or ‘Could you do a show here?’ And the answer’s never no.”
Daisy Hernandez, 29, started working at Bob Baker Marionette Theater as a spotlight operator around 2014 and quickly began to train with puppets. Though the Coachella performance wasn’t too different from what the theater usually does at home, the occasion offered a reminder that the troupe was in a better place these days.
“I think that’s the only thing that really changed: We’re now stable,” Ms. Hernandez said. “But the one thing that never changed from beginning to end was just everyone’s commitment and love for puppetry and the passion to keep the theater alive.”
At Coachella, she’s puppeteering many characters, including a drum, Frankenstein’s monster and a little elf who performs Ben Platt’s cover of Addison Rae’s “Diet Pepsi.”
More than 100 puppets appeared in the group’s first Coachella set, which included nods to plenty of the buzzy artists who were playing at the festival this year. Succulent plant puppets danced to “Amargura” by Karol G, and alien puppets performed a cover of “Soda Pop,” from the movie “KPop Demon Hunters.”
“Allow me to introduce Geese!” Pink Cat said between musical numbers, referring to the popular rock band. When several goose-shaped puppets waddled onto the stage, the crowd roared with laughter.
“When we were at the old space struggling, we would do shows for five people and still make it, like, the best show ever,” Ms. Hernandez said after the theater’s first Coachella performance. “And now here we are performing for millions of people, streaming and live. It was a surreal moment.”
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