Oakland puppet theater is nation’s longest-running

Follow the yellow brick road at Children’s Fairyland, step across the Merrie Meadow and past Alice’s Reading Room, and you wind up at the Storybook Puppet Theater, the nation’s longest-running puppet theater, which this weekend is celebrating 60 years of entertaining children with fairy tales from all over the world.

Puppetry as an art form extends far back in human history, but in the United States no one’s been doing it longer than Storybook. Its alumni have gone on to lead troupes across North America and brought puppets to the silver screens of Hollywood and television, including Tony Urbano (the “Men in Black” franchise) and Frank Oz (“Star Wars” films, “The Muppet Show”).

“There’s a lot of interest in puppetry right now,” Storybook Director Randal Metz says, pointing out Basil Twist, an avant-garde puppeteer who received a MacArthur genius grant last fall, and the Academy Award-nominated “Anomalisa” to name two recent examples.

Fairyland, founded in 1950, is credited with inspiring Walt Disney to open a bigger park in Anaheim.

Its concept has been copied elsewhere, including at San Jose’s Happy Hollow, Fresno’s Storyland and Playland and Sacramento’s Fairytale Town.

Fairyland is based on children’s literature, Metz said.

Its attractions include a pirate ship straight out of “Peter Pan,” Rapunzel’s castle, Pinocchio and Geppetto’s workshop, a maze inspired by “Alice in Wonderland” and more.

But this weekend, it is all about the puppets.

The current Storybook production, former longtime director Lewis Mahlmann’s “Urashima,” is based on a Japanese story of a boy fisherman thought lost at sea, with a surprising ending.

It has its final stagings this weekend, at 11 a.m. and 4 p.m. Saturday and 11 a.m., 2 p.m. and 4 p.m. Sunday. But that’s just the tip of the iceberg.

In a break from the usual, Fairyland will be open only to adults Saturday after dark for “Forbidden Puppet Cabaret,” 12 pieces that make up a vaudeville-style succession of 10-minute performances. There will be alcohol served that night, too.

Which is not to say the rest of the weekend is only for kids. Metz points out Mahlmann’s principle, still followed, that the puppet productions have to appeal to audiences “from 1 to 100.”

“We never talk down to the audience,” he said. Younger viewers respond to the visuals and movement, older kids the stories, and the style and elegance kicks in for adults.

The 2 p.m. Saturday performance of “Urashima” will be pre-empted by a guest performance of “The Boy Who Cried Wolf” by Art Grueneberger of the Puppet Theatre Company.

The Vagabond Puppets, a traveling puppet theater that Oakland’s Parks and Recreation Department has largely mothballed for the past decade, brushes off the dust for a Marx Brothers-style “3 Little Pigs” at noon Saturday. Activities at the arts and crafts center begin at noon, culminating at 1:30 p.m. with a make-a-puppet event led by the San Francisco Puppet Guild.

Saturday at 3:30 p.m., Emeryville’s Fratello Marionettes bring “Mother Goose Land” to the stage; on Sunday at that time, Rhonda Kaye the Puppet Lady presents “Magic, Mayhem & Marionettes.”

On both Saturday and Sunday at 12:30 and 3 p.m., a Storybook tradition surfaces in the folk tales from Syria at the Children’s Theater stage: “Once in Aleppo,” which features merchants, musicians, potter and princesses.

Mahlmann, who died in 2014, “traveled the majority of the world in his lifetime,” Metz said.

“That’s his legacy. Fairyland has always stressed literacy for kids, but Lewis always stressed doing the cultural tales” such as operas and ballets, Metz said.

Metz has been part of the Storybook story through many of its 60 years.

At age 10, he set his sights on becoming a puppeteer and knocked on the stage door, seeking to buy Mahlmann’s “Treasure Island” puppets for $1 each.

It took him decades to acquire them, long after he had apprenticed at Fairyland and Storybook and risen through the ranks.

Mahlmann finally presented him with those puppets when Metz took a sabbatical from Fairyland, a couple of years after he began a 20-year run working full time as artistic director in 1978.

Storybook’s next production, the never-before-seen “Tricks and Treats” opens next week. If a youngster comes knocking at the stage door, just as he did so many years ago, Metz will answer — and he has his eye out for who will someday carry on the tradition.

Contact Mark Hedin at 510-293-2452, 408-759-2132 or mhedin@bayareanewsgroup.com.