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BOOKS STEVE ABRAMS Profiles of 121 California Puppeteers


A Century of California Puppetry: How the West Was Strung


Randal J. Metz and Kevin Menegus, Foreword by Tony Urbano


Charlemagne Press 2020, 360 pages, $35.00


fter the engaging foreword by Tony Urbano, author Randal Metz gives a clear summary of the book: “We discovered more than 200 respected puppet professionals who merited mentioning. That number has been reduced to…a more manageable 121, through a stringent set of criteria. And at the end of each chapter we have added a section we call ‘Outstanding Ovations,’ where we’ve highlighted another 47 puppeteers whose accomplishments we feel need to be recognized in a shorter format…There are many more names that we missed.”


A


Providing 121 full-page puppeteer career summaries, paired with 121 black-and-white photos is an immense and valuable contribution to the history of puppetry. I can’t find any other volume that brings together such a large number of puppeteer biographies. The photos gathered by Kevin Menegus show puppeteers as well as puppets. The book emphasizes puppeteers, so perhaps a more apt title would be A Century of California Puppeteers. The bios are grouped by decade, preceded by two or three pages introducing events of each decade. There are also profiles of 11 different California puppet theaters.


The leading artists in the field who were influential as mentors or employers include Tony Urbano, Lewis Mahlmann, Bob Baker, Lettie Connell Schubert, Sid and Marty Krofft, the Jim Henson Company, the Disney Studio, and the historical contribution of the Yale Puppeteers/Turnabout Theatre.


The book is particularly valuable for attention paid to less famous puppeteers, some of whom had relatively brief careers:


The book is particularly valuable for attention paid to less famous puppeteers, some of whom had relatively brief careers: for example, Benjamin Blake, whose gorgeous puppets had international attention before he disappeared from puppetry, or John Gilkerson, a victim of the HIV epidemic.


for example, Benjamin Blake, whose gorgeous puppets had international attention before he disappeared from puppetry, or John Gilkerson, a victim of the HIV epidemic. Names that were new to me include Bruce Sedley, a TV puppeteer, and Blake Maxam, who directed Oakland’s Vagabond Puppet Theater for many years. The bios are easy to read, with gentle touches of humor, and most of the rough edges of competition and controversy are sanded smooth.


Any book that attempts comprehensive coverage of a topic will inevitably make some mistakes. And no matter how much researchers strive for historical objectivity, our quirks and preferences reveal themselves in subtle ways. Sometimes finding a simple fact, such as a puppeteer’s birth date and death date, can be a frustrating and inconclusive search. And who is a California puppeteer? As noted in the book, Frank Paris and Olga Stevens both retired to sunny California after careers in other


places. Historians will disagree about who should be on, or off, a supposedly comprehensive list. Without the perspective of history, it is especially difficult to choose which contemporary artists merit a place on the page. I would like to have seen some other names included, but the value of this book is the information presented about 168 puppeteers.


About the publication


Publisher Luman Coad had made an immense contribution to chronicling the art of puppetry. Charlemagne Press has published or reprinted more than 20 books that profile the work of specific puppeteers.


Those who received an early version of A Century of California Puppetry noticed some unfortunate technical glitches. Batches of pages were out of order. There were also issues with the index, all to the great frustration of publisher Coad, who is working to correct the problems in subsequent printings. There is also a hardcover version in the works as well as an eBook version. Luman Coad writes, “Anybody who has a faulty copy, whether ordered through Amazon or the Charlemagne Press website, can receive a corrected copy but they have to remove the front cover and title page of the faulty copy and return those two pages to me with their snail mail address.” The address for returns is Charlemagne Press, 4348 Coastview Drive, Garden Bay, BC, V0N 1S1 Canada.


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