“Pupaphobia” is a thing. And it’s not fear of picking up after your dog.
It’s fear of puppets.
In Francis Ford Coppola’s 1974 masterpiece The Godfather Part II, the baddest gangsta on Mulberry Street, Don Fanucci, passes a puppet show on the street during the festival of San Gennaro. He watches for a moment, then declares, “This is too violent for me” (around 4:08 on the clip).
Dolls, puppets and marionettes frequently star as serial killers in noir novellas and B-movies, yet people who love puppets generally say they’re not creepy, 2022’s film Nutcracker Massacre notwithstanding. This is the case with Kevin Beltz, Head of Fabrication and Technical Director for Bob Baker Marionette Theatre, as he puts finishing touches on the company’s upcoming production of “The Bob Baker Nutcracker” at The Sierra Madre Playhouse. The production opens November 30, with no fewer than 50 performances through January 5, 2025.
Beltz, who first joined the Bob Baker crew in 2016 as a volunteer, insists, “I’ve spent many a night at the studio, surrounded by 2,400 marionettes and puppets, and it wasn’t creepy at all. I’ve spent the last eight years repairing many of them, so I’ve become accustomed to their presence. But maybe when you hear about puppets making mischief, it’s because there’s some unfinished business malingering, kind of like with a poltergeist. Our puppets have a rich life onstage, and they are put to work with a purpose. It might be different if they were just locked up in a case and nobody ever talked to them.”
This is, incidentally, a little-known part of the backstory of “The Nutcracker.” Before the arrival of the mustachioed chomper, the young protagonist complains that one of her dolls has suddenly begun misbehaving, throwing herself down, smearing her face and soiling her clothes. This sidebar portends the mayhem that is to come.
Maybe his eight years in Geppetto’s workshop, hand-carving Douglas fir puppet heads, replacing 40-year-old foam puppet bodies with sturdier balsa, and crafting new appendages from wood and plastic resin dough pressed into molds, have earned Beltz the mysterious and mute acceptance of the rod-puppets and marionettes which form the Bob Baker legacy.
Company founder Bob Baker produced the group’s first version of “The Nutcracker” in 1969 using hand-and-rod puppets, which have now been replaced by larger marionettes. Bob Breen has created a jaunty new set design for this production, inspired by mid-century wallpaper designs offset by sparkling chandeliers.
When we arrived at the Sierra Madre Playhouse, Beltz was literally walking among the clouds. He explains that Clara, in one of her smaller incarnations, travels via these fluffy conveyances.
“We had to re-envision Bob’s original production into this new setting, with a proscenium,” says Beltz, who describes his skills as ranging from wood-carving and being able to restore joinery to replacing spent electronics and fixing a clown’s light-up nose.
“This production creates a portrait view of the stage,” he says. “In a strange way, I feel like this production is more about the staging of the puppets than the choreography of the performers.”
But wait. Sorry, puppets are still scary. Consider the word “puppet” itself. Being an armchair entomologist as well as an occasional etymologist, it’s worth noting that the word “puppet” shares its origin with pupa, pupate, as in the twitching, translucent larva of a beetle, butterfly, moth or fly. These crepuscular creatures form themselves in the Shadow of the Collective Unconscious, only engaging with the human sphere when the spotlight hits them. There’s no escaping their weaving, dance-y, grub-like, fetal creepiness: when we interact with puppets, we are witnesses to the animation of something morphing from waxen half-life to an even weirder, blinking, eye-popping, head-swiveling pretend-life, an imitation of our own.
Experts in the field say that puppets began as dolls with no moving parts. In classical India, China, Egypt, Greece, Persia, and Rome, small figurines or dolls representing ancestors and deities occupied every home. Even our familiar word “pantry” arises from penates, Roman keepers of the household food supply. Kitchen gods in every culture kept pots from boiling over and far worse.
But historically, neither dolls nor puppets were toys.
The uncanny otherness of puppets may not always be perceived as entirely benign. At many a quaint little seaside town in Britain, Punch pummeled his wife Judy with a literal slapstick before feeding their baby into a meat grinder. The final act: Punch is carried off by the Devil himself. To this day, Punch delivers his lines – notably, “O-h-h-h-h, what a pity!” and “That’s the way to do it!”– in a shrill, nasal stage voice filtered through an under-the-tongue device known as a swazzle, similar to the appliance used in many birdcalls. The swazzle-reed gives the voice a surreal quality and originates in India, where Rajasthani puppeteers refer to it as “the voice of the serpent” while some sources say it’s “the voice of the dead.” These voice-modifying devices are used in puppetry around the world to create otherworldly vibes.
In Indonesia, according to puppetry scholar and master puppeteer Roman Paska, an expert in Sicilian rod marionette pupi similar to those in our Godfather clip, puppeteers enjoy priestly status and are thought to spiritually possess their puppets during the performance. With this in mind, it’s considered bad luck for puppeteers not to finish a show, and when a puppeteer dies, the puppets are buried with the performer.
In time, jointed limbs made dolls into automatons. The word “marionette” references the Blessed Virgin Mother because early puppets with moving parts were used in religious plays. All of this underscores the cathartic nature of a puppet show and its mysterious allure.
Even in today’s high-tech omniverse, puppets continue to delight children and terrify some of the rest of us. Beltz says, “The audience projects emotions onto the puppet. The puppet is literally brought to life by the audience.” Psychologists call this a transitional object. Some of those projected emotions qualify as forbidden impulses, and so the audience becomes complicit in a shadowy intrigue. In this way, perhaps the puppeteer is not a manipulator but a liberator.
And “The Nutcracker” continues to come under scrutiny from post-Freudians as being a bit less than wholesome for our little darlings. We chatted with the irrepressible Leigh Purtill on the topic, a Glendale resident and founder of the Leigh Purtill Ballet Company, since her company’s improvisation on “The Nutcracker,” called Cracked, gives the tale a Celtic spin and her characteristically twisted twist. (Note: “Cracked” will not be performed this year.)
Here we must mention that “Drosselmeyer” literally means to choke or throttle, relating to the word for throat. This knowledge seems more disturbing in light of the storyline, where the Clara character is constantly dismissed as a fibber by her parents, even as she attempts to explain a nocturnal assault by unseen forces. Clara is not literally choked, but she is silenced by denial.
A quick CSI recap: Clara has been gifted a nutcracker by her godfather, the love-bombing, crafty and clever Drosselmeyer. The nutcracker’s jaw has been broken by Clara’s brother as the result of stuffing oversized nuts between its jaws, and the parents agree to let the girl sleep beside the injured gift to comfort him. In that hazy state, the nutcracker only comes to semi-life, half-human, half-mechanical, while Clara sleeps.
At some point in some very trippy late-night proceedings as she lingers beside der Tannenbaum, the girl faints and falls against the glass pane of the toy cabinet, cuts herself, and awakens bloodied and mysteriously bandaged. Her nonchalantly absent parents brush off her admittedly sketchy explanation, which features violent rodents that scamper out from under the furniture and their seven-headed Mouse King, each head topped with a golden crown.
Purtill says, “Oh yes, The Nutcracker is creepy. First of all, the tale upon which it’s based is actually the framing story of the 1816 novella by E.T.A. Hoffmann. Hoffmann was known for writing Gothic horror. As with so many fairy tales, in the end, a young girl is married off to a grown man. Ew.
What we find most disturbing in the typical Nutcracker ballet is the relationship between Drosselmeyer and young Clara. Because she is portrayed by a young dancer and he by a much older man, there is often the implication of a predatory relationship, one that is characterized by lavish gifts and partnered lifts that are very mature for a child. Sometimes, Drosselmeyer is there in the nighttime scene, watching her as she sleeps.
Drosselmeyer is often portrayed as a magical inventor, but he’s giving a doll that he knows to be ‘alive’ to a child. He also seems to take a special interest in the young girl, who, depending on the choreography, can be seen as charming or creepy. I think the implication can be minimized if more adults supervised the interaction, but the parent characters tend to wander off or just stand aside and watch proudly.
For my company’s version of the story, our Drosselmeyer was a woman and was portrayed in a more lighthearted way– think Dick Van Dyke in ‘Chitty-Chitty Bang Bang.’ We also turned the maid into the main character, so we had an adult dancing with other adults. And we avoided a lot of the second act issues by spiriting our maid to the Land of the Fae.”
Beltz allows, “There is an almost psychedelic aspect to the storytelling. At times, it feels like a fever dream.”
And it gets better. Some music historians believe that Tchaikovsky may have been lit AF while composing “The Nutcracker,” which premiered in 1892, more than six decades after the first performance of “Symphonie Fantastique” by Berlioz, which depicts opium visions, not to mention murder, unrequited love, suicidal ideations and other Romantic notions.
A nutcracker isn’t just any old toy or puppet: it’s an implement that resembles a torture device. The earliest known nutcrackers date from 300-400 BCE and were typically a pair of iron or bronze jaws on handles lined with ferocious teeth. Other early examples resemble particularly fierce-looking pliers. Witty Greek and Roman forms were made to resemble pairs of firm feminine thighs.
By the 13th century CE, levers were introduced, giving the task a new Archimedean spin. Wooden nutcrackers from France and England date back to the 15th and 16th centuries CE, with the Prussian Swiss and Austrian genre familiar to us today emerging in the 18th and 19th centuries.
Some art historians maintain that the fierceness of nutcrackers is amuletic and that nutcrackers were placed in the home to fend off evil spirits and bad karma. Political upheaval in Germany, in particular, contributed to the swashbuckling military identity of many traditional nutcrackers, who, to this day, often present themselves in full-dress martial garb. These forces coalesce to make the nutcracker the quintessential piece of folk art, with its anecdotal origins perfectly matched to the intensity of the machine’s function, hardware that could break a bone as easily as pop open a holiday treat.
In spite of it all, productions of “The Nutcracker” continue to proliferate, notably Debbie Allen Dance Academy’s The Hot Chocolate Nutcracker, promised to be non-scary, which successfully challenges every stereotype surrounding not only this time-honored theatrical chestnut itself but ballet in general, starting with the color of the toe-shoes.
In most current versions, Hoffman’s seven-headed Mouse King has been replaced by a Rat King with only one head. This detail and many others reference the considerably sweetened version of the story adapted by Alexandre Dumas in 1845. In Hoffmann’s gruesome original, mice gnaw off the nose of a royal baby, a tidbit perhaps too on-the-nose for a piece ostensibly dedicated to the Czar himself. That’s long gone from the Dumas version, along with the beheadings (including the seven-header of the Mouse King) and other nastier stuff. Less blood, more marzipan.
It’s likely, however, that the mere glimpse of the Nutcracker with its gnashing jaws, wild eyes and ostentatious uniform will elicit squeals of terrified delight from young audiences because, as with all enduring children’s entertainment, challenge, adventure, a taste of fear and a splash of danger are essential to offset the saccharine overload.
“Everything bad really happens in the first part of the play,” says Beltz. “The conflict is over fast, then the rest is really just a huge party.”
DEETS
- Bob Baker’s Nutcracker
- Saturday, November 30 through Sunday, January 5
- Sierra Madre Playhouse
- 87 West Sierra Madre Boulevard, Sierra Madre
- Box office: 626-355-4318
- Tickets : $25
Punch & Judy shows always fascinated me: why on earth were they performed for an audience of kids? As much as I enjoy the sanitized versions of fairy tales, I think we miss the moral lessons they were teaching.
Punch is derived from the black-masked Pulcinella, from the comedia dell’arte, as you know. His character embodied human personality at its most infantile. Not “evil” per se, but no developed filter. The character arises from even earlier Roman Atellan farce — giving English Punch his humped-back and huge beak nose. He plays a fool who always prevails. My view is that under Regina Victoria’s iron hand, English ppl loved Punch and Judy as a release-valve. Sort of like otherwise perfectly nice Spaniards enjoying a bullfight.