All About Muppets

Dean Bareham is a Canadian puppeteer, voice actor, puppet builder, and clown who is best known for his work as artistic director for the theatre company Green Fools. He was an additional puppeteer on Fraggle Rock: Back to the Rock alongside many other performers such as Ali DeRegt, Jamie Konchak, Brendan James Boyd, and Andrew G. Cooper. It must have been very exciting for Dean to work on a reboot of such an iconic series, and to assist the main performers, all of which are legendary. Bareham also puppeteered on the show Joe Pickett and lent his voice to English dubs of anime such as Mobile Fighter G Gundam. Some of his other collaborations, according to his bio, include being a clown with Cirque du Soleil at Toronto's Luminato Festival and designing/building puppets and creatures for many zoos and aquariums all across North America. That's amazing for someone like him to have numerous contributions over the years in his career, which of course took him around the world. Dean B...

Jamie Konchak is a Canadian puppeteer, performer, educator, and creator known for a two-decade career in performing for screen and stage. She served as one of the additional puppeteers on Fraggle Rock: Back to the Rock performing alongside Geneviève Paré, Ellis Lalonde, Ali DeRegt, and Reese Scott, to name a few. It must have been very exciting for Jamie to perform on a reboot of the classic Fraggle Rock series, and with numerous legendary Muppet performers as well. In addition, Konchak also works frequently at Ghost River Theatre as both a collaborator and "Artist in Residence", doing lots of performance skills like puppetry for example. Some of the shows within the company she performed on include Giant, Reverie, Something to do With Death, and Frontier. Besides performing and puppetry, she also educates performers and college students at the University of Calgary and also Six Degrees Music & Sound. Jamie Konchak is pretty active in the theatres across the Calgary area ...

Ilysia J. Pierce is a singer, actress, and performer who has performed for Jewish audiences for many years in her career. She started out originating the role of Miss Oops=A=Daisy on The Huggabug Club, voicing and being in-suit as the character. I wonder how Ilysia managed to do her voice from wearing a mascot-like costume constructed by the company KCL Productions. Pierce also performed theatrically in shows such as Janina, Beauty and the Beast, Irena Sendler, Fiddler on the Roof, and many others. She is also the cantor of the Beverly Hills Temple of the Arts, leading Jewish holiday services since joining in 1999. She isn't considered a puppeteer, but technically on The Huggabug Club, they had full-bodied costumes that sort of worked like puppets as well as occasional puppet shows. At least Ilysia J. Pierce did interact with puppets on that show, sort of. In or out of the temple, she displays her vocal talents to CDs and other local venues such as the Walt Disney Concert Hall, the...

Susan French was an actress (stage/television/film) and puppeteer who was best known for her many roles in films and such. She started out performing in theater and was one of the few performers to be involved with World War II, even starting a theatre group during that time. Susan's well-known films include Jaws 2, Somewhere in Time, House, Flatliners, and Young and Younger, to name a few. French also appeared in episodes of many television shows including Bare Essence, Cagney & Lacey, Quantum Leap, Star Trek: The Next Generation, and many others. Apparently during the 1960s, she also ran a puppet theater as well as publishing a book about doing puppetry called Presenting Marionettes, which shows that she indeed did puppetry in her career. Based on her appearances on-screen, she was a perfect fit to play elderly characters within some of the television shows and feature films she did over the years. Such a shame Susan French didn't puppeteer after the World War II era, she...

Richard Robinson is a British puppeteer, actor, writer, and festival director who is known for founding the Brighton Science Festival, the biggest science festival in the UK. As a puppeteer, he built and performed puppets for many shows like Spitting Image, The Riddlers, Dizzy Heights, Puddle Lane. The only series Richard performed on where he didn't build the puppets was on the 1994 revival of Rainbow, where he played Bungle. Prior to becoming a puppeteer, Robinson was a busker until the mid-1990s when he was exposed to science and became a science busker with science cabaret acts. I don't think anyone on Earth has ever combined science with cabaret performances. In addition to puppetry, he also wrote nearly twenty books on science with his best-known ones being The Science Magic books and Why the Toast Always Lands Butter-Side Down. It seems that Richard Robinson is more focused on science than entertainment since founding and directing the Brighton Science Festival from 2005...

Glenn Williams is a Canadian puppeteer, actor, voice actor, and ventriloquist who is best known for being one of the puppeteers of Dr. Colosso on The Thundermans. For over 50 years, he's done many entertainment styles since the age of 7 when he showcased his ventriloquism on Pete's Place. Now an adult, Glenn has puppeteered on numerous productions, besides Thundermans, such as Tomorrowland, Animal Control, X Files, and Critters: A New Binge, to name a few. As for on-screen acting, Williams appeared in numerous television shows and films such as Millennium, Hostage Negotiator, The Christmas Train, and A Series of Unfortunate Events. Other puppeteers he got to work with in his career include Jeny Cassady, probably the only Muppet puppeteer to ever work with him, so far at least. It's a shame he didn't puppeteer on Fraggle Rock: Back to the Rock, he would've been perfect as one of the additional performers. Glenn Williams still got to become another one of the greatest...

Eugene Lambert was an Irish puppeteer and actor as well as the father of puppeteers Miriam and Paula Lambert. He was the owner of Lambert Puppet Theatre and was well-known for performing co-star O'Brien in the shows Wanderly Wagon and Murphy and Friends. In addition to those programs, Eugene was also a ventriloquist, performing vaudeville acts with two of his puppet characters; Finnegan and Judge. Lambert seems to have brought a lot of humor among the Ireland citizens during the 1960s. With his family, they created The Lambert Puppet Theatre in 1972 upon inspiration from visiting The Harlequin Puppet Theatre and an International Puppet Festival in Prague. His company was also best-known for creating the puppet character Bosco which his daughters Miriam then Paula performed. Throughout his job, Eugene Lambert went on tours with his character Finnegan, starting out in the UK and Ireland during the early years before branching out into the US, Japan, and Australia in later years. It...