Toby Olie

Toby Olie is a British puppeteer, puppet designer, and director who is best known for doing numerous theatre productions with numerous companies. Some of the live shows he did include The Wolves in the Walls, Animal Farm, Don Quixote, Goodnight Mister Tom, and many more. Toby has also puppeteered on a few television series, most notably Mongrels as one of the additional puppeteers. Olie got to meet some of the Muppet performers throughout his career whether on TV or stage like Warrick Brownlow-Pike, Iestyn Evans, Sarah Wright, and Daisy Beattie, to name a few. He mostly made the puppets for the shows mentioned above, but his well known shows include War Horse (as co-developer and performer), The Elephantom (as co-director), and Spirited Away. It's a pity he never performed on any Muppet or Creature Shop production whenever they were filming in the UK. Some of the companies Toby Olie worked at include Little Angel Theatre, Gyre & Gimble (co-founder), Royal Opera House, and even the Walt Disney Theatrical. He is still designing, directing, and teaching puppetry for many organizations today, he even co-founded an online resource called Puppetry in Motion. The online resource is created to inspire and nurture a passion for puppetry to those who have discovered that art form, no matter the area they are in. Toby has entertained people all over the world with the puppets he makes, performs, and directs within the productions. Perhaps Olie could influence other puppeteers to be like him such as Amanda Glass or Susan Beattie, you never know. In the meantime, he's going to keep on working with puppets in the theatre including ones that are upcoming as stated on his website. Let's just hope some performer from the Muppets will inform him of them. Toby Olie, you've done wonderful working on all of those theatre productions around the world and you still are. Keep up the great work so that you will go down in history. And who knows, maybe you'll be a role model for any kids in the audience. Until then, always keep yourself busy Toby. You sure are one of the British puppet masters Olie!

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Bob Stutt

Image
Bob Stutt is a Canadian puppeteer and writer whose Henson work started on Fraggle Rock. On Fraggle Rock, he served as a principal supporting puppeteer, performing episodic/background roles, and even filled in as regular characters (to pre-recorded tracks). For Sesame Street, Bob worked on the Canadian co-production, Sesame Park where he replaced Tim Gosley as Basil as well as the first Sesame Street film Follow That Bird. Stutt even assisted the Muppets within A Muppet Family Christmas and The Jim Henson Hour. Why didn't he show off his writing talents to Jim Henson? Outside of Muppets, his best known show was Under the Umbrella Tree as a writer and performer of Iggy Iguana and others. Other shows Bob Stutt puppeteered on included The Big Comfy Couch (also wrote), Today's Special, and Caillou, just to name a few. His writing credits were seen on Wimzie's House, Eric's World, Groundling Marsh, and Radical Sheep projects (ex. Ruffus the Dog). He is somewhat of an expert
Read more

Amanda Glass

Image
Amanda Glass is a British puppeteer and costume maker who puppeteered on season 1 of Sooty (2011) as well as part of the third season. She also puppeteered on the Sooty video Sooty: The Big Day Out as well as making many of the puppets' costumes on the series. Besides doing Sooty, Amanda was also an additional puppeteer on Mongrels for three episodes. I personally think Glass should have puppeteered on a project by either the Muppets or the Henson Company (mostly in the Creature Shop). It's currently unknown what the performer looks like since the picture above either has her on camera or under one of the puppets. On both Sooty and Mongrels, other puppeteers she performed with include Iestyn Evans, Yvonne Stone, Simon Buckley, and Toby Olie, to name a few. Maybe someday Amanda Glass will have her chance to meet one of the Muppet performers in the UK or maybe she will learn about the Henson Company online. Nobody really knows whatever happened to her after 2018 when she did seas
Read more

Cas Willing

Image
Cas Willing is a British designer and puppeteer who has worked on several early Creature Shop projects as mostly a designer but occasional puppeteer. She designed creatures on The Dark Crystal, Dreamchild (also cable control puppeteer), Labyrinth, and The Storyteller. For Dreamchild, Cas also performed with numerous others with the cable controls like Sadie Corre, Melissa Whitmire, Mike Quinn, and William Todd-Jones, to name a few. It's currently unknown what happened to Willing after The Storyteller series ended. She doesn't even have a self portrait of herself, as the picture above placed her in the back left of the other fellow Henson designers. Her only known outside project was on Return to Oz as one of the fabric designers of the mechanical characters, at least that's what IMDb says. Despite that, Cas Willing still got to work under the direction of Jim Henson when in the shop and even helped make puppets for the series Brian Henson was on. If she's still alive to
Read more