Children's Fairyland is throwing open its gates for a two-day celebration of puppetry this weekend, marking 70 years since its Storybook Puppet Theater first opened on the shores of Lake Merritt. Puppet Fair Weekend runs this Saturday and Sunday at the Oakland park's address on 699 Bellevue Ave., with organizers billing it as a can't-miss gathering for anyone who loves marionettes, hand puppets, and the people who bring them to life.
The weekend brings together some of the biggest names in American puppetry, including a performance lineup from Los Angeles's Bob Baker Marionette Theater, a company created by a puppeteer who worked with Disney, Steven Spielberg and Star Trek, according to The Mercury News. The Los Angeles troupe is recognized as a historic-cultural landmark in its home city, and organizers have described the whole event as a magical weekend for audiences of every age.
Tickets run $20 for adults and $18 for attendees 17 and under, and the event includes something rarely offered to the public: backstage access to the Storybook Puppet Theater itself, the same stage that has run continuously since 1956 and is recognized as the nation's oldest continuously operating puppet theater. The theater will run from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. on Saturday, per the paper's report.
A 57-Year Puppeteer Leads the Celebration
At the center of the festivities is Randal Metz, Children's Fairyland's puppet theater director, who started puppeteering at age 10 and has now spent 57 years working the strings and rods behind the curtain. Metz succeeded longtime master puppeteer Lewis Mahlmann, who directed the Oakland theater for 39 years from 1967 until his 2006 retirement and personally entrusted his original puppets and story scripts to Metz, according to the San Francisco Bay Times.
That continuity of leadership matters at a theater with a genuinely staggering archive: more than 150 original puppet productions have been staged there, built with handcrafted puppets constructed on-site and presented across nearly 50,000 performances since it opened, per the Children's Fairyland Blog. The theater has long punched above its weight in terms of cultural influence — Muppet performer and film director Frank Oz apprenticed as a teenage puppeteer on that very stage after it opened in 1956, years before he went on to voice Miss Piggy, Fozzie Bear, Cookie Monster and Yoda.
Southern and Northern California Puppet Traditions Collide
Beyond the Bob Baker company's marionettes, the weekend features Fratello Marionettes performing “Jack and the Beanstalk” and Vallejo's Magical Moonshine Theatre staging “Puppylocks and the Three Bears.” Fratello, founded in 1989 by puppeteer Kevin Menegus, reportedly spent a year designing, carving and costuming the original marionettes used in its productions, according to Under The Puppet. Magical Moonshine Theatre, founded in 1979 by Michael and Valerie Nelson, has won three UNIMA-USA Citations of Excellence — the highest national honor in American puppetry — and has performed across more than 15 countries in eight languages, per Puppet Showplace Theater.
Local craft traditions get their moment too, as the San Francisco Bay Area Puppeteers Guild will lead arts and crafts demonstrations throughout the weekend. The guild, founded in 1954 at the Oakland Public Library after librarian Inga Strehlow gathered local puppet enthusiasts together, was officially chartered in 1961 and remains one of the oldest regional puppet guilds in the country, according to the San Francisco Bay Area Puppeteers Guild.
A Park Built on Storybook Magic
Children's Fairyland itself opened on September 2, 1950, as the first storybook theme park in the country, drawing 15,000 visitors on opening day and serving as a primary source of inspiration for Walt Disney before he built Disneyland in 1955, according to SFGATE. The 10-acre park along Lake Merritt now welcomes more than 220,000 visitors a year and runs a “Fairyland for All” program offering $5 admission for low-income families holding CalFresh or WIC cards, an initiative expanded under park CEO Kymberly Miller, per The Oaklandside.
This puppet-focused milestone follows Fairyland's 75th anniversary birthday bash last year, which included the park's first fully bilingual puppet show. Now, with Puppet Fair Weekend, the park is turning the spotlight specifically onto the Storybook Puppet Theater's seven decades of continuous performances, drawing in nationally celebrated marionette companies to share the stage with the puppeteers who have kept the Oakland tradition running since 1956.
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