March 21 is World Puppetry Day and that seemed like the perfect time to realize my long standing ambition to get the full skinny on a pair of impressive folks I met about a year ago at Marxfest 2024: Craig Marin and Olga Felgemacher of the puppetry company Flexitoon. They gave a charming presentation at Marxfest, the meat of which was their own puppet version of The Cocoanuts which Craig had first cooked up over 50 years earlier (you can see it here). During our interactions, they mentioned some of the legendary people they had worked with over the years, so I wanted to get the full story. They gave it to me this past weekend in their Upper West Side apartment. I can’t remember the last time I had such a delightful afternoon!
Craig’s dad was Paul Marin, who worked in vaudeville and Minsky’s burlesque as “The Chatterbox Cartoonist”. He’d been inspired to draw as a boy upon seeing a Fleischer cartoon with Koko the Klown. Paul was a quick sketch artist. He’d take suggestions of names and numbers from audience members and narrate stories as he drew them. (Later he would tell bedtime stories to Craig using the same technique). When Paul got to a town he would go to the nearest newspaper printing press and barter show passes in exchange for the newsprint that he could use to draw on his act. Sometimes for a gimmick he drew on women’s backs. He appeared on bills with the likes of Phil Silvers, Sid Stone, and The Three Stooges. During World War Two he toured with the U.S.O., and this is when he met Craig’s mother, who became his assistant in the act, “The Blonde Georgian Model” (she was from Georgia). They toured together for five years. Craig still has their vaudeville trunks!
After Craig was born (New Year’s Eve, 1951), his folks decided to settle down and take something more steady. His father got a job at Macy’s. One of his annual tasks was to do the make-up for the clowns in the annual Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, and Craig got to tag along, and even help out, on occasion. When he was three years old, Craig saw Paul Winchell on TV and decided right then and there he wanted to be a puppeteer. In time his parents decided they needed to give him the talk, cautioning him that their own experience in show business taught him that it was a tough grind, so he might want to line up something to fall back on. “Okay,” he said, “I’ll be a drummer”. But he stayed a puppeteer. When he was fourteen, puppets in hand (on hand?) he stopped by the local New York tv studio where Chuck McCann’s kids show went out live. McCann beckoned him into the show to watch the production and even put him on camera at the end of the show. They were to become friends throughout the years that followed. Later, he and another friend had a regular segment playing Laurel and Hardy on The Joe Franklin Show.
For a time in his later teens Craig turned away from puppetry and set his sights on the legit theatre. For a couple of years he was a stage manager and tech guy at off-off Broadway theatres. But then one day he was listening to records with buddies, high on cannabis, and decided to break out his puppets again for a lark. He never put them away again. For a number of years he and some friends crisscrossed the country playing colleges and community centers with his psychedelic rock driven troupe The Marko Puppet Theatre. It was a seclection of scenes from one of those vintage productions that Craig and Olga presented at Marxfest. Craig devised entire sophisticated musical scripts for those early productions, and wrote songs that the puppeteers played (they were also musicians). One of the highlights of this period was performing for The Grateful Dead and friends at Jerry Garcia’s birthday party.
After the Marko Company broke up, Craig got a gig performing in a show that puppeteer Bil Baird was devising for Busch Gardens in Florida. This was 1977. And not long after that he met and fell in love one of the stars of Baird’s Barrow Street theatre, Olga Felgemacher.
Olga’s from Cleveland, where she used to put on shows for neighborhood kids outside her family’s candy store. Her first love was ballet, and as a child she was involved with the Children’s Theatre at Cleveland Playhouse. She also recalls seeing Cleveland’s local kid’s host of the day on TV, Gene Carroll. She also recalls liking Beanie and Cecil, and Foodini the Great (more on them in subsequent posts).
Later, Olga went to Northwestern, majoring in theatre. There, she won an award for her portrayal of the title character in Anna Christie. But she was also interested in costumes, lights, and the whole theatrical process, which served her well when she later became a puppeteer. For a year she performed with the Niccolo Marionettes, Nick Coppola’s touring company which he operated 1962-80, before founding his current company Puppetworks. (He and the company are still with us; their theatre is in my old neighborhood in Brooklyn).
Olga then beat out hundreds of other aspirants for a place in Bil Baird’s company (Baird was well known from television — read about him here). Olga was rated high both because of her acting ability and her aptitude at manipulating the puppets (she was a trained dancer, remember). And she has a wonderfully ethereal voice that was perfect for characters in fairy tales — a “toy” voice, Baird called it. Olga was the star of the company, playing all the lead characters, from 1969 until it finally folded in 1976. See a wonderful presentation about their professional collaboration that was given at the Salmagundi Club a few years ago here. And still more about it on the Flexitoon Blog.
Unsurprisingly, Jim Henson was a fan of the Baird company, and also a fan of Olga’s. He’d periodically ask her to come work for him on Sesame Street. After the Baird company folded she took him up on it, working as a puppeteer on the show from 1978 through 1979, and also working on The Muppet Movie at the same time. She played various minor characters, and also doubled (subbing for the primary puppeteer when two of his characters are in a scene together. Hence, for example, Miss Piggy can talk to Fozzy Bear). Muppet Wiki has a post on her here. In the end she decided she preferred live performance, and the greater focus you can have when you’re not part of a big machine.
But Craig and Olga as a team continued to work in TV. Here are some of their projects as Flexitoon.
In 1979 they joined the cast of Pinwheel, just as it was going national to become the first show ever on the brand new cable network Nickelodeon. Check it out here.
In 1980 and 1981 they worked with Martin Short and Robin Duke on a puppet version of the Mel Lazarus comic strip Miss Peach for Canadian television.
In 1982 they married and had a son!
In 1987 they were half the cast of the Showtime childrens’ show Kids-TV, based on characters from Weekly Reader.
In 1988 Craig took over Jim Martin as the principal puppeteer/host on the American version of the DJ Kat Show on WNYW TV in New York. It was shot in the very same studio that in which he had seen Chuck McCann do his kids show all those years ago. You can see a snippet here.
They then went on to a regular gig on Shining Time Station from 1989 to 1993, with specials into 1995. They were the puppeteers who performed the Juke Box Band segments.
After this, plenty of live performance, commercial work (including the top rate Tide “talking stain” ad which aired during the Superbowl), and even some retrospective exhibitions of their puppets at a gallery in Greenwich Connecticut and at the Salmagundi Club.
Come to mention it, there pad is a bit of a museum too. Here are some of the treasures on view:
For more posts like this, check out the Puppetry and Ventriloquism section of Travalanche.
And for more on vaudeville and show business history, consult No Applause, Just Throw Money: The Book That Made Vaudeville Famous, and please stay tuned for my upcoming Electric Vaudeville: A Century of Radio and TV Variety.