It started with the noblest of intentions. Actor Shaun Michael McNamara had been in Los Angeles for a few years, working primarily at Disneyland and Universal Studios, when he decided to create an original puppet show designed to make Shakespeare more accessible for young audiences.
“I’d been doing a lot of puppetry work — everything from Donkey from Shrek to Chucky from Child’s Play,” says McNamara, a self-described ’80s kid, who grew up in the Phoenix area. “Amongst my other jobs, I also worked at a children’s theater. So I started thinking about merging the two together — using puppets to get kids more interested in Shakespeare.”
McNamara convinced his wife to use their savings to build puppets and rent a small theater. The show was called Hamlet Has No Legs and featured an all-puppet cast and what McNamara describes as “improvised madness.”
“Opening night arrives, and remember, I’m thinking this is going to be really serious and dramatic,” he says. “We were going to revolutionize Hamlet and puppetry, and people were going to take puppets seriously. So I get out there in front of a sold-out crowd, and I do the first line of the show, and all of a sudden I hear this crash. Someone backstage had accidentally knocked over the one expensive prop that we had, and I heard it just shatter on the floor. Of course, I’d been working nonstop with no sleep for days, and so with a character on my hand, I just looked straight out to the audience and said: ‘Son of a bitch.’ And that was it — they just lost it. I basically did 20 minutes on the absurdity of the situation, how ridiculous we must look, and it was lightning in a bottle. They went crazy, and I thought: ‘Oh wow, they don’t want serious puppets — they want anarchy.’”
Over the past 15 years, All Puppet Players has maintained that energy. Now based in Phoenix, the company produces adults-only puppet shows that blend “pop culture, profanity and pure theatrical chaos.” Past seasons have included titles like Jurassic Puppets, Waiting for Henson, A Fistful of Puppets and A Parody Puppet Princess Bride. But it was 2015’s Fifty Shades of Felt that really helped secure the company’s brand.
“The serious actor in me was still trying to figure things out,” McNamara says. “After Hamlet, we did this really heartfelt and moving Frankenstein. Then we took a hard right turn into Fifty Shades of Felt, and that’s when the core audience reveals itself. This was before Fifty Shades of Grey had taken off, with the movie and everything. It was just some silly online book that we were reading as a lark. Someone suggested we do it as a play, and I’m thinking, ‘This is so bad, so poorly written, nobody will even know what this is.’ Then [author E.L. James] sells the book, and we were literally the first adaptation of Fifty Shades, which is pretty cool. That’s the show where we leaned into the adults-only format. Turns out, if you put a puppet on your hand, you can get away with almost anything.”
Beyond all the R-rated escapades, however, McNamara also leans into his love of nostalgia and pop culture.
“I’m a total nostalgia nerd, and also really fascinated by the whole Marvel multiverse thing,” he says. “So I started thinking about ways to smash things together, just to mess with audience expectations and score some good nostalgia highs. With I Know What You Did Last Breakfast Club, we basically took the John Hughes canon and smashed it with some ’90s slasher films — like Scream meets The Breakfast Club and Pretty in Pink. It’s been such fun, and has opened the door to a lot of creative possibilities.”
One of those is Die Hard: A Christmas Carol, which arrives at TPAC’s Johnson Theater Nov. 18. Premiering in 2017, the show started as a one-off parody but went on to become All Puppet Players’ longest-running hit and a true fan favorite. McNamara describes the piece as “pure felt frenzy,” complete with “Dickensian ghosts, trigger-happy terrorists and curse-filled carols.”
“Early on, I realized that every theater needs a Christmas show in order to keep the doors open,” he says. “But I also knew that I didn’t want to do A Christmas Carol — it’s just been done so much, in so many ways. And everyone is like: ‘Come on, you have to do it! That’s the show!’ And I thought: ‘Fine, I’m going to do a Christmas Carol that’s so completely twisted, they’ll never ask me to do it again.’ Right about that same time, I saw an article that was debating whether or not Die Hard is a Christmas movie, and that’s how it all started. It’s crazy fun, it’s outrageous, and it sells out every year.”
McNamara says audiences can expect all their favorite movie highlights in puppet form — from John McClane saving the hostages (while being visited by three ghosts) to Hans Gruber falling off a cardboard Nakatomi Plaza in slow motion.
“It’s a rabid fan base anyway, but the holidays definitely amp things up,” he says. “We get a lot of office parties, ugly Christmas sweaters, and we even have a white elephant gift exchange. But the real magic that keeps me going is watching the audience kick back and have fun. These adults come in looking all tired and stressed. And suddenly they’re watching these puppets doing all these ridiculous things, and there’s a shift. It’s like turning the clock back a little bit. They’re like kids again, just laughing and enjoying.
“It’s just a wild, raucous party where adults watch puppets scream the F-word. And to me, there’s nothing better in the world.”
