For 63 years,  Los Angeles’s Bob Baker Marionette Theater has been captivating children and adults alike with its original puppet shows. My sister-in-law lives nearby, so I noticed it a few years ago when we drove past. She told us it was very fun and well worth a trip—but I didn’t think of it as a potential art story until a publicist pitched me on the theater’s recent revival, and its collection of 3,000 puppets, all handcrafted in house.

Founded by puppeteers Bob Baker and Alton Wood, the theater recently opened its first new production in 45 years, Choo Choo Revue! A team of 70 artists and collaborators brought the sold-out show to life, designing the sets, choreographing each number, and, perhaps most crucially, building over 100 new puppets. The train-themed performance features 90 yards of fringe and 232 gallons of paint—not to mention the hundreds of yards of monofilament operating all of the marionettes. The total cost was some $300,000, half of which went toward the puppets and set design.

I had to see the production for myself (and not just because I have a two-and-a-half-year-old son who loves trains). I am thrilled to report that it was a delightful experience from start to finish. A man in a pin-striped jacket and straw hat was playing a real pipe organ as the audience filtered in, and the afternoon ended with a puppet meet-and-greet and ice cream for everyone.

In between, the marionettes performed musical numbers set to classic recordings, many from the 1940s or ‘50s, drawn from Baker’s vintage record collection. What surprised me was the physicality of the show: the hard-working team of puppeteers, clad all in red, moving like a whirlwind across the stage, keeping the cast of puppets in a constant state of animation.

“You’ll never see a puppet held by a puppeteer that’s not in motion,” Mary Fagot, the theater’s co-executive director, told me. “But the craft and care, the design and conceptualizing that goes into every one of them, we think is on the level of any sculpture that you can imagine.”

“It’s kinetic sculpture,” agreed Alex Evans, her co-executive director and the theater’s artistic director.

A Historic Institution

A Hollywood native, Baker was born in 1924, and was a devoted puppeteer from childhood. The theater that bore his name crafted puppets for numerous films and television shows, such as Close Encounters of the Third Kind, in addition to staging its own original productions. In recognition of the theater’s cultural importance, the city named it an official Los Angeles Historic-Cultural Monument in 2009.

But the threat of foreclosure forced Baker to sell the theater’s original Echo Park home in 2013, one year before his death. The new owners served eviction papers in 2018, just as the theater incorporated as a nonprofit. The COVID pandemic hit just four months after moving to Highland Park, into a former movie theater that had most recently been a church.

The forced closure that followed necessitated an emergency fundraising campaign—but the speed with which the theater met its $365,000 goal (four weeks, instead of the expected year) demonstrated the depth of community support Bob Baker enjoyed. The struggling organization didn’t realize it at the time, but this was something of a turning point for the theater’s fortunes.

“There’s a number in one of our shows that’s called ‘One Brick at a Time,’ and we often mention that, because if you had looked at the totality of the challenge in front of us from the standpoint of just having lost our building and then COVID came along, you would be too overwhelmed,” said Fagot, who joined the board in 2018 and took on the co-director position in 2023. Evans has been on staff since 2007. He signed on as an unpaid intern during a semester studying in Los Angeles, and never left.

“We used to do shows where there were like, two people in the audience,” Evans recalled.

Now, the theater’s supporters include John C. Reilly, who recently served as the MC for its third-ever annual fundraiser. (Choo Choo Revue! features a particularly slouchy-looking Bigfoot marionette performing “Mr. Cellophane,” Reilly’s scene-stealing number in the 2002 film adaptation of the musical Chicago.) Donors to the theater’s new capital campaign, “In L.A. to Stay,” include actors Jack Black and Brie Larson and the Annenberg Foundation. It has raised $4.5 million toward the $5 million needed to purchase Bob Baker’s current home, with an added goal of $2.5 million for additional renovations.

Already, the theater has restored the building’s vintage marquee, commissioning local custom sign shop Signmakers to create a new neon sign featuring the theater’s mascot, Toot, blowing his trumpet. In April, the theater’s puppets even played Southern California’s popular Coachella music festival.

“We’re carrying forward traditions and history and making those not just things of the past, but a living and breathing thing,” Evans said.

“We’re not like, putting a snow globe over Bob Baker Marionette Theater to preserve it as it is—and that was also never Bob’s practice,” Fagot agreed.

Come on Ride the Train

The idea for the theater’s first new production in decades wasn’t originally to do a show about trains. Before his death, Baker had helped develop a new show called Arabian Nights, and it almost debuted before lockdown in 2020. After reopening, Evans and Fagot decided to forge ahead with something entirely new instead—an open-ended train conceit that allowed for all manner of different puppet characters, from a seaside pelican (whose beak hilariously hides a singing fish) to tiny pine trees skiing down a mountain.

“Trains became the perfect vehicle to expand the imagination, because the show is just about empowering people to imagine what’s outside their window,” Evans said.

The railroads also had outsized role in the history of the West—a history that continues in L.A. with the recent opening of a new subway line, promoted by a suggestive “Ride the D” marketing campaign.

Before Walt Disney opened Disneyland in Anaheim, he actually operated a rideable miniature railroad, the Carolwood Pacific Railroad, in his L.A. backyard. Today, trains feature prominently in Disney parks around the world, and Carolwood’s original barn is part of the Los Angeles Live Steamers Railroad Museum in Griffith Park. (Our L.A. visit with our train-loving son actually included several other local train-themed attractions.)

Disney also sort of played a role in the creation of Choo Choo Revue! Among the artists who joined Bob Baker puppeteers in concept development sessions were the animator Alex Topete, who is credited with designing Ursula’s tentacles in The Little Mermaid (1989), and Chloe Rice, a Disney photographer. Also in the room was the theater’s first artist-in-residence, Hannah Huntley, a recipient of a Mohn LAND grant from the Los Angeles Nomadic Division. In addition to creating a site-specific installation for Bob Baker, Huntley also helped out in the workshop, sharing her expertise in 3D printing, which has since become part of the puppet-making arsenal.

“There were just all sorts of kind of people and perspectives around the table,” Evans said. “We must have done like, a thousand sketches of different ideas, of the train going through different landscapes.”

The theater’s newest stars, created under the guidance of head of puppet fabrication Kevin Beltz, include a knitting moose, a cheerfully tooting train whistle, and a patch of singing mushrooms, to name just a few. And then there’s Al-A-Board, a friendly conductor with a clock for a face who invites the audience along for the ride. (The clock’s hands, adorably, form his oversized mustache.)

For a generation of children increasingly used to on-screen entertainment, this handcrafted, analog art seems especially captivating. My son, typically limited to just an hour or two of Thomas the Tank Engine each week, was so swept away by the experience of Choo Choo Revue! that he got angry when it ended without the actual physical train ride the plot (as much as there was one) had promised.

Choo Choo Revue! closes at the end of the month—but the show is joining the regular rotation of Bob Baker productions, and will be back again in January. Winter programming will also include a series of STEAM workshops (pun intended) for children, developed by Steph Muscat, formerly of the Exploratorium museum in San Francisco.

“We’ve had a lot of feedback that people couldn’t get tickets because it was selling out,” Fagot said. “Oftentimes people are away over the summer, and they just missed the train, so to speak!”

“Our hope,” Evans added, “is that we’ll do Choo Choo Revue! for the next 50 years, but every year we do it, we can add a different stop, add some more characters!”

“Choo Choo Revue!” runs at the Bob Baker Marionette Theater, 4949 York Boulevard, Los Angeles, California, May 16–August 30, 2026.