We love other cities, lots, and we never seek to stir it up with them. But when the topic is the Bob Baker Marionette Theater, we tend to grab a spoon and start stirring, fast. Because it just happens that the Bob Baker Marionette Theater is the nation's oldest ongoing puppet theater, and when you have that feather in your civic crown, you gotta crow and brag and talk it up.
The downtown-close theater continues its 51st season with a special discount offer beginning on Saturday, June 25. "Magic Strings" is the production on now; following that will be the annual Halloween Hoop-De-Do in October, and the Holiday Spectacular starting in mid-November.
(Puppets *and* discounted prices? Those are two items from our own personal Official Favorite Things file. Yours, too?)
And if you're sitting there thinking, "look. Don't pull one on me. I've seen every puppet production number in the book," well. Please think again. New stagings and songs are being incorporated all the time. Keeping it fresh and all that.
We sometimes wonder if the charming Mr. Baker could have known that his theater would still be going strong a half century after starting it. But it is a fact that regardless of what technology delivers to us, kids and grown-ups alike like to watch cute things on strings cavort and shimmy. They did 51 years ago, they do today, and if we could pop by the year 2867, people in shiny spacesuits will be watching cute things on strings cavort and shimmy. Fact.
