On opening night of his all-new, all-glamorous, all-marionette Les Petites Follies, Ralph Kipniss, wearing a frilly tuxedo shirt and black tie, is moving through the crowd and shaking hands. He wants to personally greet the nearly 50 guests who have come to the Puppet Parlor, his theater in a Montrose storefront. He’s a showman, after all, and just like Florenz Ziegfeld he’s no slouch on opening night. Les Petites Follies are modeled on the Ziegfeld Follies, but include acts from the Folies Bergeres and vaudeville. Kipniss has also taken routines from other sources–Liberace, The Addams Family. The Puppet Parlor usually hosts fairy-tale marionette plays for kids, but this, Kipniss says, is an adults-only show. The program advertises “many production numbers, lavish costumes, nostalgia,” and “girls, girls, girls!” “I am warning you,” Kipniss says to an audience member, “it’s a bit risque, very risque.”
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Colorful hand puppets and marionettes sit on shelves in the theater’s lobby. The walls are bright red and lined with posters for various kids’ shows (The Wizard of Oz, Beauty and the Beast, Hansel and Gretel) as well as pictures from the all-marionette operas that Kipniss has put on, including Tosca and Pagliacci. Guarding the entrance to the theater are turban-wearing statues with jet-black skin holding electric candles. Gilt-framed paintings of opera sets hang on opposite walls in the theater: one from La traviata, the other from The Barber of Seville. The stage, ringed by a bright blue scrim, has standard dimensions for a puppet theater: the performance space is ten feet wide, four and a half feet high, and 12 feet deep. The four puppeteers who work the follies stand eight feet from the floor on specially constructed scaffolding.
Ralph Kipniss comes from a family of artists. His mother was an opera singer, his father a concert violinist. He claims relations with actresses Stella Adler and Sylvia Sidney. His cousin Alice, he says, played the Yiddish theater with Paul Muni. Through puppeteering he’s carrying on his family’s theatrical heritage. “I think to operate a puppet is a very special gift. To almost cause reality on the stage is a very special gift. Not a god complex, but a very special gift. A puppet is not an extension of me….A good puppeteer should be able to put life right into his puppet. It’s just like any character you do, you’re that character.”
“Thank you, thank you,” Kipniss says. “It was such hard work. There are 75 marionettes in the show, you know.”
