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Tammy Faye Bakker and RuPaul were right: Everybody loves puppets. Combining playtime with creativity, puppets make children and adults alike feel as if the possibilities are endless to experience this art form. The Muppets (where are my Kermit stans?!) and Sesame Street (Elmo’s cult following among toddlers has only grown over the years) are mainstays in youth entertainment. But unless you’re rewatching episodes of Fraggle Rock with your children, there aren’t many ways as an adult to experience entertainment that features puppets.
Or that’s what you might have thought until now. Puppeteers for Fears is an Ashland-based theater troupe that combines puppets, rock ’n’ roll and musicals, throwing in horror, sci-fi and R-rated content. Founded and headed by Josh Gross, PFF helps fill the void of puppet-based entertainment for adults. He’s brought the troupe to sold-out shows at Meow Wolf and the Hollywood Fringe Festival. Gross says his audiences have been elated to find a show that combines their love of live music with mature plots and, of course, puppets.
He tells WW that some spectators admit that although they want to go see live music, they just don’t have the bandwidth to stand and get jostled around the entire time anymore, so they enjoy being able to sit down, chill out, and take in the show.
“It’s a constant joy to be able to make DIY theater on the rock club circuit a thing,” he says. “I think theater proper can be a bit hoity-toity and exclusionary, and part of the larger goal of Puppeteers for Fears has been to make theater for audiences that didn’t yet know they like theater. That matters a lot to me since I grew up in Ashland around the legendary Oregon Shakespeare Festival, but not relating to it in any way.”
PFF is touring a new piece called Robopocalypse: The Musical!, which stops at Alberta Abbey for a run July 10–19. To give audiences the gist, Gross says to “imagine the Muppets doing Rocky Horror and you’ll get the general vibe.” But this year, it’s more like Kermie and the gang meets Tron. Gross and his team will fuse musical comedy with dystopian cyberpunk enthusiasm. Expect to hear analog synthesizers and other instruments that evoke the sounds of the 1980s to set the futuristic tone for the scores. This year, 13 songs are performed by a cast of nine and a live band.
“The fact that we are getting to play on stages that host legendary acts that we look up to, feels really gratifying,” he says. “This tour, we are playing on stages that Prince and Bowie once played. Recently, a venue in L.A. was the next stop for Pussy Riot after they played Portland. And so on. It confirms to me the idea that there is an untapped audience for theater, which is why bands like Green Day, NoFX and more are doing stage musicals now.”
Puppets are traditionally made out of “foam, foam, foam and more foam,” Gross says, but since this show is about killer robots and malevolent artificial intelligence, PFF lead puppeteer Alyssa Marie Mathews uses an amalgamation of discarded tech to create the Junk Bots, Robopocalypse’s Greek chorus. Along with other quirky and unexpected materials to create talking toasters and self-driving cars, lights give depth, range and sympathetic motion to this cast of puppets.
“The medium is the message, so it’s important that the puppets are an active character, moving and alive,” Gross says. “No one likes a ‘dead puppet’ onstage. For this show, the construction and aesthetics are more rigid than with felt puppets, so it requires care to ensure they still embody the puppets with the transhumanist energy and motion that makes them come alive.”
PFF showcases are substantial with weighty storytelling. This is elevated puppetry that keeps to its lo-fi roots while reaching for the innovative and experimental. The concept of this year’s show is very of this moment—how deeply AI has enmeshed itself in the collective sphere in just five years. Robopocalypse contends with the “internet of things and how we cannot put technology back into the bottle, so to speak,” Gross says.
This year marks the company’s ninth season performing, and its seventh tour, which will visit 30 Western cities this summer. While PFF would be putting on this show regardless, Robopocalypse received financial assistance from the Oregon Community Foundation’s Creative Heights grant, which Gross says came as a great relief for the company.
“We were able to replace equipment that was sorely in need of updating, and it helps with the cost of such ambitious production,” he says. “This is our seventh tour, and it’s the first time we have ever had this kind of grant funding. This just makes it a lot more comfortable, and less bootstrapping. We can bring the show to some smaller rural markets in Oregon that are often overlooked by touring acts, which we love to do.”
PFF’s inspirations go deeper than what’s typical for puppetry. The company has adapted H.P. Lovecraft’s immortal dread god Cthulhu, while Cabaret at the End of the World was its initial showcase after a pandemic-imposed hiatus. None of these involved singing about the letter or number of the day. While children are welcome to attend with chaperones, these performances aren’t geared for them. The subject matter in PFF shows is for adult audiences and has its fair share of blue comedy alongside its own original, rock-inspired tracks.
“That live, communal experience is something that is becoming rarer and more essential in the internet age,” Gross says. “It is a constant adventure, though. It’s a big team to take on the road, and by tour’s end, there’s nowhere I’d rather be or anyone else I’d rather be there with than schlepping our gang of goofballs across the country to wiggle dolls at them.”
SEE IT: Robopocalypse: The Musical! at Alberta Abbey, 126 NE Alberta St., albertaabbey.org. 8 pm Thursday–Saturday, July 10-19. $17.86–$49.48.
