Welcome To Staffa Corner

Greg Staffa 0:00

You're listening to the Staffa Corner Podcast, a Staffatarian look at entertainment and life. With your host, Greg Staffa. My guest this episode is Puppeteer, designer, and builder Arlee Chadwick. She brings characters to life from workshop to stage. Arlie, thank you for joining us today.

Arlee Chadwick 0:39

Sincerely, thank you for having

Dance Dreams And Touring Characters

Arlee Chadwick 0:41

me.

Greg Staffa 0:41

So tell us a little bit about yourself. What was your upbringing like?

Arlee Chadwick 0:44

I am from Boulder, Colorado. I grew up taking dance class, and that led me into a tap teacher who, for some reason, he was in Colorado. His name is Gene Gebauer, and he had danced on Broadway for 25 years. And he kind of formed my dreams of moving to New York City and being on Broadway. And uh so when I finished college, I moved to New York City and I started auditioning everywhere. And the first real professional job I got was with a show called My Little Pony Live. And it was a big costume character show. There was one dancer in each each of the each of the ponies. They were made by a company called VStar, which is also the company that premiered Sesame Street Live. And uh this this original tour of My Little Pony Live, they were designed after the Warthog in uh Lion King. And so what it is is you would have a backpack that had the butt of the horse behind you, and then your legs would be the pony's front legs, and then the head was kind of like one of those Chinese dragon puppet heads, so it had blinking eyes and a moving mouth, and it came up over, kind of down below your hips, and those were the ponies, and that was a year-long tour, and and I didn't identify as a puppeteer at that time because it was like a dance job, but looking back on it, that was that was a full puppetry job. And then uh I went on to work with Sesame Street Live for several years because it was the same company. My Little Pony Live was just kind of a one-off, it lasted for three years, I believe. And then I did five different tours of Sesame Street Live. Uh, I'm a medium height, and that means that I would play all the characters that are in the medium height range, which includes Grover and Burt and Ernie and Rosita and um Grunjetta and uh yeah. Oh, and I even I even had a track where I played Mr. Noodle. Then I got a foot injury, unfortunately, and I left uh the tour and came back to New York City, and you know, when you don't know what you're gonna do with your life, uh you go to a fortune teller, right? This is not advice though. And I I was so worried about what was gonna happen with my foot. I had I had uh I had ruined the uh sesamoid bones on the bottom of my foot, which is the bottom of the balls of your feet. And I asked the fortune teller if I would ever dance again. And the fortune teller puts out all the cards and he says, Yes, but you'll have new legs. And I was like, What does that mean? And I was really worried, not that I totally believe in fortune telling, but I was really worried about what that was. And then a few weeks later, I saw an audition for the Swedish Cottage Marionette Theater. So I just went, I had no experience in Marionettes at all. And I went to the audition and it was a train wreck of an experience. I didn't know what I was doing at all. But I do think, and they did end up hiring me, and I and and I have worked there now for 16 years. I think they hired me because I have the words Sesame Street on my resume, but it doesn't mean that I was working for Sesame Street the show, you know, it was a licensed arena dance show. But anyway.

Learning Marionettes And Finding Mentors

Arlee Chadwick 4:56

So with Marionettes, I uh I then went to there's this wonderful puppet, you know, I started learning how to build, and I was in different other puppet projects around New York City, and there's an amazing festival called the O'Neill Puppetry Festival, and it's in it's in Connecticut, and it is also a place where they develop new works. They also have a musical theater festival like Avenue Q was developed at this festival, at this um residency. Anyway, so I was at the O'Neill Puppetry Festival. I went for two two years and I met Philip Huber there. He was one of the teachers, and I did the Marionette track under him. And if you don't know Philip Huber, he is, in my humble opinion, the greatest marionette puppeteer that has ever been or will ever be. He's amazing. And uh he did uh the puppets for being John Malkovich, and he did the puppets for uh Disney's Return to Oz. He built uh China doll, and he's also been in lots of stage shows. Then 10 years later, from that time at the O'Neill, he still remembered me, and he had got an offer to do Boop, which is a musical that was 10 years in development to go to Broadway, and it was a show about Betty Boop, and Betty Boop has uh a dog named Pudgy. And so uh Jerry was the choreographer, and so it was like this big show, and it was so exciting. He asked me and another puppeteer uh named Eric Wright to be his understudies. And yeah, this this puppet, this pudgy puppet, now Philip made several of them. Uh it has 27 strings, it has it's four string, it's four string toggles for the ears, uh, there's uh a nose string, there is a a mouth opening string, and then there is a tongue out string. There are two different ways to wag the tail, and of course, all through four leg strings. So it's a pretty pretty complex puppet, but it it uh he he's an amazing builder and you know it's kind of like working a Stradivarius, so uh yeah, so I covered Philip Huber, the the the best Marionette puppeteer in existence, in my opinion, on Broadway. And and it was just such an amazing experience. And the show ran for four months, and then it closed, and that was it. And I I have been in other other like off-Broadway shows

Building Famous Storybook Puppets

Arlee Chadwick 7:54

as well. Like uh I did a lot of building with different renditions of Very Hungry Caterpillar with Rockefeller Productions. I was both a builder and a performer in that, and that that show took me all all over the world, even into China, and so uh it's it's 75 puppets, all based off of stories of Eric Carl, and mostly puppets that are that are built out of polyfoam and L200 foam, which is kind of like a um a yoga mat style of foam. And working on that show was one of the exciting slash terrifying things is you are building sometimes characters for the first time for published characters, like the intellectual property licenses are are owned by by people, and you have to create uh you have to like create it so that it looks exactly like it appears in the book, but sometimes the the picture in the book doesn't reflect what it is in real life. Like we we encountered that there's a uh one of the puppets in Hungry Caterpillars, we do the story, brown bear, brown bear, what do you see? And for the Eric Carl fans, you'll know that there is a green frog. Now, the original illustration, the green frog, has both eyes on the same side of the face. So you have to reimagine like what it would look like in puppet form, but also still look look like what what the vibes are of of the illustration. So that was uh a really interesting experience trying to match that that vibe with with puppet design to the the author's original illustrations. So that was that was a really great experience. I I was with them for 10 years. We performed off Broadway, we did a tour of that, and then we also took it to China twice, and it was just it was a great experience because people love Hungry Caterpillar. I mean, if you ever want to feel like a rock star in front of little kids, bring bring out a hungry caterpillar. I was also in uh on a tour with a show developed by John Tartaglia. John Tartaglia currently owns uh or currently is in charge, Henson has has put him in charge of all Fraggles. That's his current job, but he was originally uh he played, he got a Tony nomination for playing Rod in Avenue Q on Broadway. He had developed this show called Imagine Ocean, and it is about these fish that are friends and and then they they find true friendship in the end, and it's uh entirely a blacklight show. And with blacklight puppetry, it uh you you are in all blacks with a hood over over your head, and you are running around in the dark, so it has to be really uh really carefully choreographed so nobody runs into each other. And and that show was a real hit, also. John Tartaglia also wrote a show called Reusable the Musical, and he sold it to the Bronx Zoo and and put all original music to it, and uh it was one of my favorite things I've ever been in, even though it is just performing at at the zoo, and it was about all it was about different animal characters who deal with uh how who are dealing with plastic in their environment and how we humans can keep plastic out of their environments by um refusing to take extra plastic or recycling plastic or reusing plastic so that it doesn't get thrown away. So, yeah, and I played an elephant in that and a vulture, and those were uh hand hand and uh hand and rod puppets, and the elephant was a big costume uh style puppet, and they were made by James Voigtal, who's an amazing builder in in New Jersey. I don't know, those that's those are some of the highlights that I can think of.

Why Puppets Hit The Heart

Greg Staffa 12:39

What is it about? I mean, we live in a day and age where technology we want everything to look real. We, you know, the CGI and all the technology we want, you know, dinosaurs that look real, we want, but yet there's something about puppetry that kind of reduces us to our childhood, and we're able to believe that a dog from boop is you know a living, breathing thing, even though we all know that it's a puppet. Why is there such a disconnect in striving to go one way but yet embracing something like puppetry even as adults?

Arlee Chadwick 13:15

That brings to mind I I don't remember who said it to me, but like computer graphics look real, but puppets feel real. There's uh there's your guess is as good as mine, but there's there's something about having the human movement or the the human breath in in a puppet or an object that makes it read as alive better than some of what computer graphics can do right now.

Greg Staffa 13:44

And is there a particular for I mean, because you went through the list of things that you've done from wearing costumes for like My Little Pony and stuff like that to doing the blacklight stuff. Is there a particular medium of puppetry that you enjoy more than the other? Or is it just the art of puppetry that you love?

Arlee Chadwick 14:02

Well, I think uh I think as puppeteers, you you you can't be too picky when it comes to jobs. But well, I will tell you, I am a huge fan of rubber monsters, and this April I got to be in an independent movie called Flapjacks. Uh Flapjacks with a with X, J-A-X, and it's it was by uh a director called Rocco Sevenbergen. But the the goal of this movie was to have all practical effects, uh big rubber monsters, and it was about a guy who ran a fast food restaurant called Flapjacks, and then his apartment turns in to the inside of his mother's womb. Yes, and I got to play a umbilical cord monster, and it was so cool. I came on to set, you know, uh I just found this this j this gig on backstage and I I applied. I was like, I was a dog on Broadway, can I be your umbilical cord monster? And they hired me, and it was so cool. And so the umbilical cord monster was well, essentially it was a l like a garden hose, kinda, and it was all painted up to be all gross and disgusting. And it was my job to figure out how to string it. And the deal is it was supposed to come into this disgusting looking apartment, and and it was supposed to fly up to the to the main actor. And uh, so I brought a bunch of string and there were grips there that said they would help puppeteer, and I rigged string points along this umbilical cord, and one of the one of the grips put a uh support pole up over the sound stage, so we were able to rig uh lines up through the top and up over to the side, and then so four four four people were puppeteering it, and then I was puppeteering the head, pulling it towards the camera, and I gotta tell you, it was a fabulously gross-looking umbilical cord monster. It was a great time. So, if I were to say anything that was like the the funnest, like like hit my fancy of being like a 1980s horror movie fan from like being a child, it would be uh a chance to get to puppeteer a a big rubber monster like that. That was that was really neat.

Greg Staffa 16:40

I don't know how to react to the last two minutes of what I just heard. So I'm gonna uh just agree. Uh but umbilical cord monster, yeah, that is something that wasn't on my bucket list of things that I thought you might do, so uh I just will cross that out. I was thinking cute little puppets and stuff like that, but yeah, we'll go with umbilical cord monster.

Arlee Chadwick 17:06

Yeah. That that is out or it's coming out, or it uh premiered at a film festival in Montreal this year, and it just finished up at the film festival that's in Austin, Texas. So I I don't really know how that works, but I hope someone someone buys it so that it can be released to to everyone because because it's it's really an awesome umbilical cord monster. I cannot recommend it enough.

Greg Staffa 17:35

Uh as you're talking, I did pull up the teaser for what I believe is what you're talking about. Yeah. And it is um, I do have to say it looks unique. Of course, I have the volume down, but uh there does appear to be some practical effect monsters that pull their skin off, and I'm not sure what I'm looking at, but um maybe I'll put a link to that uh in your your little blurb.

Arlee Chadwick 18:05

Sure, that'd be great. Is there something?

Greg Staffa 18:08

I mean, we always, you know, when we think of puppetry, we always think of like Avenue Q or the Muppets or something like that. Is there any puppet that you've done that you've always kind of wished got more of the the mainstream, maybe not as big as like a Kermit, but got more mainstream love or attention, or you thought this character is really that I'm puppeteering really is something special.

Arlee Chadwick 18:30

Oh gosh, I mean all the time. I mean, I wish Boop had run for t for 10 or 20 years. Anything that I wish had got more attention.

Audience Driven Show And Trick Strings

Arlee Chadwick 18:41

Well, I currently have made uh a Marionette show that I am trying to get into a bigger realm. It's uh it's a show called Imagination Strings, Art, Puppets, and Participation. What it involves is like process art, and the audience chooses what puppets I bring out, and on the one of the things is we paint the backdrop for the stage as part of the show. The whole idea is the audience is is driving what what the what the puppets do on stage, and it has trick marionettes in it, and and also some some glove puppets of all made out of recycled materials. And anyway, this is my first time being like a producer trying to find venues to help me put it on. I I have a date at the tank in New York City on um January 30th to to put it on. This will be the second showing of it. So I guess if you're asking if there's any puppets that I I wish would have a longer life, it would be yes, the the the puppet show that that is that is my business, that I want to be successful. That is one that I would like to see have a longer life. So if anybody is looking to buy or produce a puppet show, get let me know because it can happen.

Greg Staffa 20:17

There you go. Now you mentioned the term uh I believe it was trick marionette, and that was the term I just learned researching you, and one of the examples I saw was a marionette puppet that can blow up a balloon. Can you tell us a little bit more about what you mean by the trick marionette that you mentioned?

Arlee Chadwick 20:36

Uh trick marionettes, uh I believe they date back to long, long ago in the Czech Republic, or what is now the Czech Republic, um, where there were traveling puppeteers, and the reason puppeteers existed in that time was it was more expensive to hire multiple actors. It was easier to have one puppeteer with a bunch of puppets telling stories for a living, as opposed to, you know, like um a little theater troupe with multiple people. So that's that's how like the one puppeteer show got started. And then out of this tradition, they would have shows that ended, like they'd do shows, and then they would have an ending with trick marionettes. And one of the famous trick marionettes in the Czech Republic is called a stomper, and it's basically two big blocks of wood. One one block of wood has the head on it, one block of wood has the feet on it, and they extend and s and smash down, you know, tall and short, and tall and short, and they make these huge clapping sounds uh because it's the wood clapping together, and this is the stomper, and it's a great finale. Um, because it's it's loud and and and bizarre and yeah, so that's the tradition there. And then there are some other trick marionettes that developed in this era. Like another one is face like a face flip. So uh two faces on one head and it rotates, or two two heads on the same body and they they flip flip over, so you have one character, and then you flip it over and suddenly it's it's a new character. But I believe a trick marionette refers to any marionette that's specially stringed strung to do um visual effect. And like the traditional ones, there's a lot of circus-based ones, which are the ones you can see in imagination strings. I have a juggler, a tight rope walker, a weightlifter, a gymnast. So yeah. Trick marions trigger marions are are uh are very cool. It it takes a a lot of engineering to be sure that you have the stringing right, because the string has to the strings have to be the exact right length in relationship to each other. It's like a lot of physics, and I don't do any math, so for me it's trial and error. Yeah. Oh, uh a famous trick marionette is a breakaway skeleton, like a skeleton that breaks apart. If you've ever seen that.

Greg Staffa 23:23

Would uh Kermit riding a bike in the Muppet movie, would that be considered or is that more Hollywood magic?

Arlee Chadwick 23:30

No, though that was a marionette that uh that was that was a guy on a crane. Uh uh puppeteering from up above. Yeah, that was a marionette.

Greg Staffa 23:39

So that'd be a trick marionette.

Arlee Chadwick 23:41

I wouldn't call that a trick marionette because there were no special specialty strings. It was just they they had the strings, the bicycle like weighted on on to the the strings, and they were just moving the the um the bike.

Craft, Wear And Trade Secrets

Greg Staffa 23:58

Now you've mentioned you've done a lot of work internationally. What is it about puppets that has kind of a universal language to them?

Arlee Chadwick 24:06

Oh gosh. I don't know. Uh I do think well, I have only traveled I've only been in shows internationally because I was in a show that had an like an intellectual property that is famous in other places, like Hungry Caterpillar is very famous in China and and Sesame Street is famous all over the world. So though those were the reasons th those were like the business reasons that I got to travel with a show. But you bring up a good point that uh puppetry, especially if uh if it's all visual and no language, it has it has the ability to reach all audiences. Yeah, that is true.

Greg Staffa 25:00

And when you're doing puppetry, is that a is it a physically demanding thing? Is that something that is you know therapeutic for you? What is the kind of the work ethic or the work that goes into handling some of these marionettes?

Arlee Chadwick 25:16

Well, it depends on the show and the design of the puppet. Um about how you how you have to keep your body um show ready all the time. But I will say a well-designed puppet is is not is not gonna break your body apart. Like Pudgy only weighs four pounds, which is incredible. But I've also I've also puppeteered things that weigh as much of as a brick. And you know, sometimes you you don't have uh you don't have control over what puppets are in the show that you're in, and and you gotta you gotta make it work, you gotta make it come alive whether whether it works or not.

Greg Staffa 26:09

Has there been, I mean, you've been doing this for some years now, has there been a lot of technological advancement in puppetry? I mean, could someone from you know 100 years ago that was involved in puppetry come today and be able to figure out relatively easy how to, you know, the mechanics of it? Are they pretty much the same, or have you seen a lot of growth and things that you're able to do?

Arlee Chadwick 26:32

Well, yes and no. Yes, there's been an advancement, as in there is less poisonous substances that people are building puppets out of. All the old puppeteers, uh, marionette puppeteers, they talk about this this amazing material called celastic. And it's basically like a a skin that you can wrap around and it makes something hard and hollow and it gives you cancer. So that is not available anymore, and and that's a good thing. But when it comes to like puppet design, I think some well, when it comes to puppet design, like for instance, uh the Henson shop, they their designs are trade secrets. So like when they have uh a puppet that can't be used anymore, they shred it. They put it in um like a wood shredder, uh paper shredder, and shred it up so that nobody can like get the patterns and recreate it.

Greg Staffa 27:35

Um morbid thinking about you know Kermit going through the shredder and I know.

Arlee Chadwick 27:41

And and over at V for Sesame Street Live, because there was a a similar agreement with the the children's television workshop, uh they had to destroy the the Sesame Street Live costumes when when they were too too far worn out to to be on stage. And and that company used to have a huge bonfire at the at the CEO's um ranch and burn all the all the unusable costumes in a bonfire. Now, when it comes to like marionette design, I do think uh marionettes, at least in the United States, like like I I worry for marionettes because uh availability to like how to build them is is fading and the the books are are going out of print and and it's harder to find. And I I feel like some design elements might be lost. But in addition to that, guarding your design your puppet design secrets have always been uh part of puppet making. In fact, the Puppeteers of America started in the 1940s to mirror the magicians of America's guild because uh puppeteers wanted a similar organization where you could safely like trade building secrets with each other that wouldn't get out to the audiences.

Greg Staffa 29:18

Is that part of the problem? I mean, you mentioned on one hand that puppetry is kind of fading away from people's you know lexicon, but at the same time, you're talking about keeping secrets. Does one kind of hurt the other?

Arlee Chadwick 29:32

Or yeah, I mean, yeah, there's both in the puppetry community. There's builders who are who are trying to keep their building what their breakthroughs a secret, and then there's also people who are actively trying to share with everyone. Yeah, I get both sides of it. Because when you put in years of trial and error to figure out like the exact way to build something so that it moves right, it it sometimes doesn't sometimes you don't want to wanna just give it up to to somebody. You wanna you wanna you wanna you know keep it and celebrate it in your in in your building? You know, I get both sides of it.

Greg Staffa 30:15

Now when you're performing in front of an audience, do you feel like it's a performance? Do you feel like it's more mechanical that you're you're working mechanics that you know there isn't necessarily performance that you're doing, it's just the mechanics of what you're doing create a performance, or do you feel kind of enveloped in that character as you perform it?

Arlee Chadwick 30:37

Uh yes, both, depending on how much rehearsals a project gets. But I forg I forget who said this to me, but uh one Marionette puppeteer told me of this phenomenon of of he said it was feeling down the strings. Like he he really felt like he his emotions were like running down the strings and he was reacting in live time with emotionally with the puppet. And and I I felt that before on on stage, you know, especially when you feel really confident with a puppet that you're working with. So yeah, yeah.

YouTube Teaching And What’s Next

Greg Staffa 31:18

And tell us a little bit about Puppets by Arlie.

Arlee Chadwick 31:22

Oh, Puppets by Arlie is my YouTube channel that I have been and you know what? Philip Huber is worried about this too. Worried at it at some point marionettes are gonna disappear from the United States totally. I'm worried about that. You never see them. So I wanted to make a place where people could start learning how to build marionettes with accessible materials. And and yeah, it's it's it's been cool. It's it's really taken off. My most successful video is how to build a marionette out of cardboard and string and tape. And there are like a hundred hundreds of people that watch it every day. And the most beautiful thing is I have had people from all over the world like email me pictures of what they've made. It's it's it's it's quite lovely. The reach. I had no idea it would it would uh bring so many puppets about. YouTube is a really cool thing in that sense. But yeah, so and then it's also a YouTube channel that I that I put my my work on, and and yeah. So go check it out. If you got nothing else going on, go see Puppets by Arlie. Go try to build some things.

Greg Staffa 32:44

I'll I'll put a link in your blurb here for people to check it out. YouTube is amazing. I had someone from IL ILM on Industrial Light Magic, and he started a YouTube channel thinking that other cr other, you know, uh you know, miniature model makers would, you know, learn from him. And he was amazed by just the fans of that had nothing to do with the industry, were watching his videos and wanting to learn and stuff like that, and then sending him things that they had created. And he was amazed that there's this thirst out there by people that have nothing to do with puppetry or nothing to do with model making, that just are fascinated by creators' videos and want to learn from them, and then send him his work, and he was surprised, like you had mentioned, that just so many people were you know interested and passionate about the things that you were passionate about.

Arlee Chadwick 33:44

That's cool, that's cool, yeah.

Greg Staffa 33:46

So, what's on the horizon for you as far as things we can see you in other than you know umbilical cord monsters?

Arlee Chadwick 33:54

Well, I I I want everyone to know I am available to be hired as a puppeteer at any time. If anyone has a puppet emergency, I can come help. You can find me at you can just email me at puppetsbyarly at gmail.com. All your puppet emergencies. But what what is on the horizon? Well, I'm gonna I I have a few more dates of my imagination strings, and I hope to build that into like a children's show that can that can tour on on a scale of some of the other shows that I've been on. So I guess that's it. The the show that I've that I've built, I hope to see that grow. That's hopefully on the horizon. And anything else.

Greg Staffa 34:49

Basically, what I'm also hearing you say is we need a Team America sequel.

Arlee Chadwick 34:54

Uh yes. Yes, yes, I would love that.

Greg Staffa 34:58

Well, I appreciate you coming on. I love hearing about your work, and I love hearing the passion behind your voice and what you do. It's something that kind of we we simplify or think it's for children, but you know, like there's avenue cues and stuff like that that are for adults, and I think adults are embracing puppetry and that kind of stuff. I think humor can be translated into many mediums, and you know, puppetry is is one of those. And so you can have things like Avenue Q or Team America for for adults, it's not just you know Sesame Street or or the Muppets, it's for all ages, and so I appreciate you coming on and sharing a little bit about your passion and also links to your work so other people can get a look and maybe find their own passion in your work. But Arlie, thank you so much for coming on.

Arlee Chadwick 35:49

Oh, thank you. This has been a pure joy.