Mary Thornton, hard at work (as always) earlier this week at Famous PEOPLE Players (image source: The National Post)

I began my career as a professional puppeteer with Famous PEOPLE Players (FPP) a really acclaimed black light theatre company that’s toured around the world and performed on Broadway. I spent almost four years there in the late `90s and it was a really remarkable formative experience for me. It’s safe to say that not a single day goes by that I don’t make use of something that I learned while I was working there and the name of the woman who I learned a lot of that from is Mary Thornton.

Mary is the mother of FPP’s founder Diane Dupuy. Her life story is pretty incredible. She was born in Canada, but was classically trained in dressmaking, tailoring, and ceramics in Italy before returning to Canada, getting married, starting a family and opening a popular dressmaking shop in Hamilton (near Toronto), Ontario. She later became Wardrobe Mistress to the Hamilton Opera Company and when it was discovered at age 44 that she had a tremendous singing voice she studied Opera in New York before returning to the HOC to sing in operas like La Boheme, Carmen and Madame Butterfly.

That would be enough for most people, but Mary was just getting started.

When Mary’s daughter Diane founded the Famous PEOPLE Players in 1973, Mary devoted herself to the company full time and she’s been the head of the company’s Visual Effects Department (FPP’s puppet and prop shop) ever since. I have no idea how many puppets, props and costumes she actually designed and made over the years, but it numbers well in to the thousands; FPP’s puppet shop is easily one of the most prolific in the world. Mary’s work has been on Broadway, at Radio City Music Hall and graced stages around the world from Toronto to Tokyo and back again.

By the time I worked at FPP Mary was in her 80s and she was almost always the first person to arrive in the morning and the last to leave at night. According to yesterday’s National Post, it sounds like nothing has changed:

But sitting around is not for Mary Thornton. Neither is retirement. Not at 65. Not at 75, and not on Thursday, at 95-years-old, just a day shy of her 96th birthday on Friday.

We are sitting — although that is not often the case with Ms. Thornton — in her office at Famous People Players supper theatre, where you can find the nonagenarian six days and some 60 hours a week, one of Canada’s oldest working taxpayers.

You can read the full article here.

I have many fond memories of Mary, many of which involve the times when I would hang around the company’s puppet shop late at night after work. Mary would inevitably set me to work, folding napkins for the company’s restaurant or ironing laundry (I never got very good at ironing, but I can still fold one helluva napkin). I think my favourite memories of her though are the times when she would suddenly emerge from the wings on stage mid-rehearsal to chastise the cast for not handling props correctly, or tell one of us what we were doing wrong with a puppet. This was often to the annoyance of whoever was conducting rehearsal, but it really didn’t matter; in the end Mary is almost always right. To this day I have a long list of “Mary-isms” about building and performing puppets that I use all the time.

Mary is one of a kind and they’re not exaggerating when they call her a Canadian National Treasure. I have much better appreciation of art and performance because of her and she has been a huge influence on my work. There are dozens (if not hundreds) more people who have passed through the doors of FPP over the years who will tell you the same thing. I consider myself very lucky to have had the chance to learn from her about life, puppetry, ironing and even the proper (Italian) way to eat spaghetti.

I have no idea if you’ll ever see this or not, but Happy Birthday Mary.

If you want to learn more about Mary and Famous PEOPLE Players I highly recommend picking up one of Diane Dupuy’s books, Daring To Dream and Throw Your Heart Over The Fence, which detail a lot of the company’s history. Both of them may now be out of print, but you can often find used copies online or order directly from FPP).

I stumbled across this online while doing some research earlier this month; it’s an excerpt from a CBC interview with Jim Henson taped on the set of Fraggle Rock in 1983. In it Jim discusses his family, working in television and mentions the then-yet-to-be-released Muppets Take Manhattan and Labyrinth, which Jim describes as “his next fantasy movie.”

I don’t usually write posts about live/local puppetry here, but the next month or so is such great time to see some great puppetry in Toronto that I couldn’t resist. Not only is Ronnie Burkett (who chats about his new show in the video above) debuting Penny Plain at Toronto’s Factory Theatre, but an original production of Avenue Q just opened, the Famous PEOPLE Players are prepping a new show called Funkytown for a run at their dinner theatre in the city’s West End and the Toronto production of WarHorse begins an extended run on February 10th.

Come visit Toronto, we’d love to have you!

Tough Pigs recently sat down for an exclusive interview with Bonnie Erickson. If you don’t already know Bonnie’s name, you should; she headed the Muppet Workshop for many years during the Muppet Show era (she is credited as as the designer and builder of Miss Piggy, the Muppet Newsman, Statler and Waldorf among many, many other famous characters) and is currently the Executive Director of the Jim Henson Legacy.

Here are links to all four parts of the interview:

• Interview with Bonnie Erickson, part one
• Interview with Bonnie Erickson, part two
• Interview with Bonnie Erickson, part three
• Interview with Bonnie Erickson, part four

It’s a great interview and a must-read for Muppet fans and anyone els curious about what it was like to work in the Muppet workshop in the heyday of the `70s and `80s.

Back in 2005 The British Film Institute hosted a special tribute to the series that included a panel discussion with several members of the Spitting Image creative team, including co-creator Peter Fluck, voice artist Steve Nallon and puppeteer Louise Gold. The BFI has a partial transcript of their discussion (sadly, the first part of it appears to have been lost), which provides some fascinating insights in to the making of the series. You can also read a review of the BFI event with some additional information here.

Sorry for the lack of recent updates, I’ve been preoccupied with a big project that’s been several years in the making (you’ll be hearing about it here very soon). To help make up for it I wanted to share something that I think will be really fascinating to anyone who has a serious interest in puppetry.

Several months ago I had the privilege of attending a great event in New York called Warhorse: The Puppeteers Speak. Hosted by The New School, it was a panel discussion about contemporary puppetry with Handspring Puppet Theatre co-founders Basil Jones and Adrian Kohler, South African poet, author and scholar Yvette Christiansë and American puppeteer Dan Hurlin.

The discussion touches on a number of concepts and theories, including:

• The importance of breath in puppetry.
• Part of puppetry’s appeal stems from the fact that on either a conscious or sub-conscious level, humans believe in Animism.
• The distance between humans and puppets makes puppets better mirrors of ourselves than actors do.
• Puppetry is a deeply meditative state that requires the puppeteer to submit to their puppet.

All in all, it’s one of the most interesting discussions about puppetry that I’ve ever witnessed. Special thanks to the Vera List Center at the New School for making this available online in its entirety!

Tough Pigs posted another great interview last week, this time with writer David Misch who worked on The Muppets Take Manhattan and Jim Henson’s little-known Inner Tube pilot. In the interview David recounts his time with the Muppets as well as collaborating with Frank Oz on the famous “lost” ending of Little Shop of Horrors. As is always the case with Tough Pigs’ interviews, it’s a great read so be sure to check it out.

The latest installment of the Henson.com Podcast is out and features a great interview with frequent Henson puppeteer Victor Yerrid. Victor chats with Henson.com Podcast host Grant Baciocco about how he began his career as a Sesame Street intern and became a puppeteer and some of the great projects that he’s worked on over the years. Click here to listen to the full interview; there’s also additional material that didn’t make the final cut available on Henson.com.

If you’d like to see some of Victor’s puppetry, check out past posts on PuppetVision about just some of his prolific work.

This three part  installment of Steve Johnson’s Rubber Rules series on YouTube (see previous post) offer a behind-the-scenes glimpse at the creation of one of the most iconic puppet characters of the 1980s – Slimer. One of the things I love about Slimer – and one of the reasons was so effective in Ghostbusters – is because he’s an example of a very well designed character that was executed in a very simple, straightforward way.

I’m always bothered by animatronic puppets that are fully cable controlled or performed remotely by servos. Even the most brilliantly designed creatures tend to move in a stiff, unnatural or mechanical way when they don’t have a performer or a puppeteer’s hand inside them unless they are performed and filmed very carefully.

Steve points out in these videos that if Slimer was done today he’d either be a fully animatronic character requiring expensive mechanisms and a larger team of puppeteers, or  (more likely) he’d be a CG effect. While Slimer might not be quite up to the standards of the FX industry today, he’s a great example of how effective a simple, well designed puppet can be.

*Note: I’ve embedded all three parts of this above as a YouTube playlist. You can find the original videos on YouTube – part one, part two and part three.

Via Lost in Schlock.

This is a brief interview with British puppeteer Toby Philpott telling an anecdote about working on Who Framed Roger Rabbit. It’s interesting to listen to a puppeteer discuss working on a film like Roger Rabbit, which is one of the those movies that people don’t realize involved a lot of puppetry (puppeteers were used to perform on-set stunts and gags that helped integrate Roger Rabbit’s live animated characters with its live action).

Toby worked on an incredible series of high-profile movies that were shot in England in the 1980s, including The Dark Crystal, Return of the Jedi (he was part of the team that performed Jabba The Hutt) and Little Shop of Horrors before leaving the film business about twenty years ago. Dark Crystal fan site The Book of Habidabad has a great interview with Toby where he discusses his career in film and working alongside greats like George Lucas, Frank Oz and Jim Henson.