Rebecca Crocker has spent the last two months neck-deep in puppet-making.
Alongside a team of four Ferrum College students, she has designed and built more than 30 woodland creatures for a stage production of “Emmet Otter’s Jug-Band Christmas,” now playing at that college’s theater through Dec. 17.
The show is based on a 1979 Jim Henson television special and an earlier book by Russell Hoban inspired by “The Gift of the Magi,” the O. Henry short story.
The story focuses on Emmet and Ma Otter, who live in Frogtown Hollow and struggle to make ends meet. When Christmastime comes, they each determine to enter a talent show to win a prize but must sacrifice something the other values in order to do so.
In September, Ferrum College was notified that it would receive the rights to perform the show.
Why does “Emmet Otter” belong in Franklin County?
“Because we see it as reflecting our values and reflecting our culture,” said director Emily Blankenship-Tucker, an assistant professor of theater arts at Ferrum and the college’s director of Appalachian music.
Crocker is also an assistant professor of theater arts and musical theater at Ferrum. She and her students began working on “Emmet Otter” in October and haven’t stopped since, though the semester ended in late November.
It was a race to the end. And the students didn’t even do the work as part of a class requirement — they were there because they wanted to be part of the show.
“It’s been really fun. I’m super excited. And I think that this show is going to be crazy amazing,” Scout Lynch said.
“It’s really exciting, especially as the vision comes more into focus and we kind of understand how things are fitting together. It’s been really cool,” Gage Shelton said.
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A year ago, when it seemed that Ferrum might have the opportunity to put on a holiday stage production, Blankenship-Tucker knew what it needed to be: Emmet and Ma were going to come to Franklin County.
Blakenship-Tucker had a long-held fondness for Emmet and his Ma. When she was 8 or 9 years old and living in Potter County, Pennsylvania, her aunt sent her a VHS copy of Jim Henson’s “Emmet Otter’s Jug-Band Christmas.”
“It became sort of a favorite,” Blakenship-Tucker said.
More than that, she is now certain that Emmet and Ma would have lived in Franklin County. The fictitious characters would fit right into the region’s culture, she explained.
“Musically especially, this is really the place where [the show] is intended to be,” Blankenship-Tucker said, pointing to Ferrum College’s Jack Tale Players’ washtub band and the college’s accomplished bluegrass band. The college is also situated on the Crooked Road and located in the Blue Ridge Mountains.
The theater department just had to figure out how to bring Emmet and Ma to Franklin County.
Emmet and Ma haven’t traveled very much. The playbook was still undergoing edits, even late into this past fall, according to Blankenship-Tucker and Crocker.
“Emmet Otter’s Jug-Band Christmas” has only been performed a handful of times in three other places in the world. Ever.
Connecticut: 2008 and 2009
New York: 2015 and 2021
Chicago: November 2023
And now Ferrum: December 2023
Blankenship-Tucker and Crocker received the green light to stage the show in September. That didn’t leave much time to hold auditions, design the show, make the costumes, build the set and — oh — create the puppets.
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Crocker was up for the task. She received her Bachelor of Fine Arts in theater arts at Ferrum in 2002. Since returning to work in the theater department in 2018, she had tried to slip a puppet into every play.
“Sometimes I’m successful in my bids to add puppets and sometimes I’m not. To be able to say, ‘Hey, we’re going to do a whole show and we’re going to have this many puppets’ is a huge opportunity,” she said.
Crocker fell in love with Jim Henson and his Muppets as a child. First, it was “Sesame Street,” then “Fraggle Rock.”
“I have always been a huge fan of Jim Henson. … I have, like, every pop figure … all of them are Jim Henson characters. Some might call it a problem, but I don’t,” Crocker said, laughing.
She’s also always been a creator.
“I’ve always kind of been making things,” she said, telling of a time when her best friend and fellow drama teacher called her for help making a dragon head. It was for a “Shrek the Musical” production, so the head had to be pretty big, Crocker recalled.
“I used my husband’s bicycle helmet because we don’t even have a bike. I sat in the floor and created this thing from paper and wire,” she said.
As she was crafting, Crocker was watching “Jim Henson’s Creature Shop Challenge” on the Sci-Fi Network, she said.
“I binge-watched the whole thing … and I was like, obviously this is what I’m supposed to be doing. That was 10 years ago,” Crocker said.
Now, she’s taken on her biggest challenge yet.
Crocker is quick to point out that while these puppets were inspired by Henson’s original “Emmet Otter” television show, as well as by the illustrations in Hoban’s book, she hasn’t been trying to recreate Henson’s work.
“We’re not going to copy Jim Henson, we are not the Jim Henson Company, right?” Crocker said.
Instead, the show’s puppets have developed from the crew’s own style and experience, with a little help from another professional puppeteer.
“My vision for the show is just to tell the story in the most honest way we possibly can and make it as authentic to us and true to us as we can,” Crocker said.
Each of the puppets goes through a number of steps before it is ready to take the stage.
“There’s just lots of really beautiful, creative work happening where people start with a basic idea, but then [have to figure out] how do we make it do what we need it to do?” Blakenship-Tucker said.
Crocker and her team have designed many of the show’s puppets with inspiration from Adam Kreutinger, a professional puppeteer who provides links to puppet-making patterns on his personal website. She plans to give credit to Kreutinger for his inspiration in the production’s playbill.
Many of Kreutinger’s puppets resemble monsters, which wouldn’t necessarily translate to Frogtown Hollow’s resident forest critters. To work around that, Crocker and her team identified patterns that could be modified to work for the production’s needs.
For example, Crocker said she adjusted an Elmo-like puppet pattern to modify the way the mouth opened in order to make a river otter puppet. She also made the mouth smaller and changed the fur color. By making adjustments such as these, she and her team were able to create most of the puppets using Kreutinger’s established patterns.
Crocker admits that a lot of these design decisions are in her head or based on decisions that were already made in the book and in the movie.
“I know the pattern that I’m supposed to use and I just go at it with some scissors and fur flies and then there he is,” she said.
The types of puppets in the show vary. There are hand puppets, and marionette puppets. There’s a snake puppet that wraps around its puppeteer. There’s a fish puppet that’s carried in a bucket and two puppets who slip down a slide. There are puppets the size of kindergarteners and puppets the size of dolls. There are sock puppets and puppets in boats and puppets in trees. There’s even a puppet who plays a banjo.
The puppets are made using a mix of materials, some purchased new, some sourced from Goodwill. Some are found objects, like hard plastic lids from around the studio. Crocker said she has used a lot of sherpa, a lot of fur, and a lot of half-inch or 1-inch foam for various projects.
As the team begins to build a puppet, the body is constructed from urethane foam that is cut, draped and then glued together using rubber cement.
The team must plan the access hole and the workings of the mouth and any other necessary mechanics. Puppeteers and crew members work together to figure out how to make these woodland creatures play instruments, dance, eat apples and chat with one another.
A lot of these mechanics come together through trial and error, Shelton said as he worked to piece together a marionette stage for four 8-inch-tall treehouse puppets.
“It’s just going over and over again and seeing what we can fix, what we can improve, and how to make it better, which has been a lot of fun. It’s a little chaotic,” he said.
Once the foam bodies and mechanics are squared away, the crew designs the clothing.
Melissa, a tap-dancing rabbit, wears a dress that came from Rose’s. Other puppets wear clothing fashioned from repurposed thrift-store finds, carefully stitched to fit tiny bodies.
Each puppet was also designed according to its character’s personality. They were careful about the appearance of the fur and how each character would wear their hair, for example.
Blankenship-Tucker told about walking into the puppet studio one day, prior to the opening of the show. She observed a group of students working on a set of treehouse characters. The puppets didn’t yet have their eyes or any clothing, and they were very similar to each other, in Blankenship-Tucker’s opinion. But the students could tell the puppets apart.
“All the little details. They’re just so precious with them. They’re just really being thoughtful about it,” she said.
No detail went untouched. The crew even took care to create every puppet’s nose and eyes using an epoxy resin casting process. They covered the hard plastic orbs with iridescent fabric that shines under the theater lights, Crocker said.
Each person spent countless hours in the puppet studio cutting, gluing and stitching the puppets together. On a recent visit, the long narrow room was filled with piles of half-inch foam, cast-off remnants of fur, bits of flannel and boxes of notions. Folding tables were covered with creative debris. And, out of this third-floor work space, nearly three dozen Muppet-like creatures came to life.
“I don’t know that any [of our] puppets have ever been designed by just one person,” Crocker said.
This show doesn’t have strict lines between cast, puppeteer and crew. A person might control a puppet one moment and pop on a mask to become a human character the next. Or wrap a puppet around them to become another sort of puppeteer in the scene after that.
That’s also where set builders come in handy.
The stage has been transformed into a puppeteer’s playground. A wide, snow-covered tunnel extends from the edge of the stage into the theater’s front row.
Puppeteers will crawl through that tunnel, controlling Ma and Emmet Otter shadow puppets as they float along in their tiny green jon boat. Large trees feature hollows perfect for hiding cast and puppets, and set pieces are built to accommodate the crossover that occurs between both.
There are 29 cast members in the production, 6 puppeteers, and another 10 members of the company. Out of those, 12 members are from the greater community and are not otherwise affiliated with Ferrum College.
“We’re not just grownups playing shows for kids, or kids doing something for grownups, but we’re really all doing something together and creating this together and playing for each other so that the show is really for everyone. That’s really special about what we do,” Blakenship-Tucker said.
“Everyone working together has just been really, really magical,” said Lynch.
“I hope that this show serves as a reminder of the spirit of togetherness and the true meaning of the season,” Blankenship-Tucker said.
“Emmet Otter’s Jug-Band Christmas” is showing through Dec. 17 at Ferrum College’s Sale Theatre. Tickets for a meal and the show are $30 for adults, $15 for those under 12, or $10 and $5 respectively for the show only. For more information and to purchase tickets, visit this link.
