The longest-running puppet theater in America lives in a 1920s movie house in Highland Park. Bob Baker and Alton Wood founded the Bob Baker Marionette Theater in 1963 in a converted scenic shop at 1345 West 1st Street on the edge of downtown Los Angeles, and for 55 years the cinder-block building hosted the same magic: red-clad puppeteers working hand-crafted marionettes inches from children seated in a circle on the floor, through original shows running from Tchaikovsky's Nutcracker to musical tours of Los Angeles history. Baker, a prolific Hollywood prop and creature maker with some 3,000 handmade puppets to his name, kept prices low and courted the neighbourhood; the city named the theater a Historic-Cultural Monument in 2009, and over a million children have seen a show. Redevelopment forced the move the monument status could not prevent: Baker sold the building in 2013 to make ends meet, died in 2014 at ninety, and his puppeteers ran the theater on a shoestring until eviction loomed. A newly formed nonprofit found the answer at 4949 York Boulevard in Highland Park - the 1923 York Theatre, a former silent movie house that had served as a church, barbershop and organ showroom - and the reborn theater officially opened there on 29 November 2019, a year to the day after the original closed and 56 years to the day after it first opened. The 10,000-square-foot space was transformed using Baker's own original renderings from the 1950s and 60s into "The Place Where Imagination Dwells," with the classic floor-seating circle intact, a party room for the birthday trade, and the collection of thousands of marionettes rotating through shows. A children's playground with a rattlesnake slide waits across the street; the ice cream still comes after the finale. The nonprofit's programming has widened with the new home - evening shows for the nostalgia crowd, gallery displays of puppets spanning eight decades, travelling performances across the city and collaborations that put Baker's creations alongside contemporary artists - while the core remains the daytime show cycle that generations of Angelenos remember. The company's archive of Baker's Hollywood work, from studio props to television specials, makes the theater a living museum of a craft that never went out of style, only out of sight.

Type: Theater / Concert Hall

Address: 4949 York Blvd, Los Angeles, CA, United States, 90042

Website: https://www.bobbakermarionettetheater.com

Opening Date: 29/11/1963