Strings of magic: Lansing area man creates puppets for 'James and the Giant Peach' at Riverwalk Theatre

Correction: The puppet in "Little Shop of Horrors" is Audrey II. Its name was incorrect in an earlier version of the story.

Puppets have a way of creeping into a person’s heart and taking up residence, especially if one’s childhood was peppered with “The Muppets” and “Fraggle Rock.”

Adam Carlson was one of those people for whom puppets made up a fond part of his youth. But they weren’t something he thought much about as an adult until theater changed things.

Now his life and home are filled with puppets of all varieties as he finds new and innovative ways to create them.

His creations will populate the stage of Riverwalk Theatre in “James and the Giant Peach” from Thursday through Sunday and May 23-26.

The seeds of Carlson’s flowering as a puppet maker were planted in 2008 when Riverwalk was producing “Little Shop of Horrors.” He was tapped to be the puppeteer for Audrey II, the man-eating plant. Even so, he didn’t think he would go on to make puppets.

Then his wife began directing “A Wrinkle in Time” at Over the Ledge Theater in Grand Ledge in 2014.

“She decided she needed a couple of puppets,” Carlson said. “We had a young child at home and I couldn’t really work on the show, but I could build puppets because I could do that at home.”

It started with a set of wings and a puppet for Aunt Beast, a tentacled creature in the story who helps nurse an injured Meg back to health. Aunt Beast was successfully terrifying.

“My young daughter at the time sounded absolutely horrified when she saw it and the cast was also kind of terrified about it, which was fun,” Carlson said.

Then he and a friend approached the artistic director of Over the Ledges, Joe Dickson, and asked him if he would produce the musical “Avenue Q” if they made the puppets for it.

“His response was, 'well, if you build the puppets, we’ll do ‘Avenue Q,’ because it’s expensive to rent them and it would be way cheaper to build them,” Carlson said.

His friend got distracted with the birth of a child, but Carlson undertook the task of learning puppet making. He built ones for his daughter, son, niece and nephew. It gave him the skill he needed to do the more complicated puppets that the musical required. He was just getting underway with designing and building those ones when the pandemic hit and Over the Ledges lost their venue.

Meanwhile, Carlson found his puppet skills in demand elsewhere. Tom Ferris had begun work on “The Revolutionists” for Riverwalk in 2022.

When Carlson learned the show needed a puppet, he volunteered to make it. He showed Ferris samples of the puppets he had built.

“I brought the head of Aunt Beast,” Carlson said. “When he saw it, he said, I want something like this. I built a giant head that was four feet tall and a pair of hands to go with it for that show.”

Ferris then asked him to create a frog for “Frog and Toad are Friends.”

When Linda Widener began getting ready to direct “James and the Giant Peach” last summer, Ferris recommended she use Carlson to create the puppets. This has been his biggest undertaking so far.

For the past eight to 10 months, Carlson has been designing and experimenting with how to create the creatures needed for the story.

“These puppets are a lot different than any other puppets I’ve built,” Carlson said. “There are lots of mechanisms in them to make them move and things like that. It’s been a lot of fun, but it’s also a lot of work.”

The puppets include five bugs — a centipede, a ladybug, a worm, a grasshopper and a spider. He’s made two versions of each of them, one that moves and one that doesn’t. Then he created a life-sized rhinoceros that takes two people inside of it to operate it and four seagulls. He also built four shark heads but they ended up being cut because they didn’t work the way they were needed and he didn’t have time to redesign them.

He’s worked with the 29 members of the cast to show them how each puppet functions.

“Some of them, especially the centipede, are pretty complicated,” Carlson said. “The centipede has got the most movement. I’ve helped them to see not only how to operate the puppets, but to help them figure out where they need to be standing on stage so that the audience will be able to see the puppet.”

Carlson spends a lot of time watching videos online and experimenting with what works and doesn’t. He gave the example of the life-size rhino and figuring out what materials to use to create it.

“(Widener) said she wanted it to be life-size. I knew it had to be big enough to put people in it, but light enough to have them run across stage in it,” Carlson said. “It could get to be 50 pounds because it’s so huge. That’s too much weight. I came up with the idea of making the rhino out of boning like you would put in a dress and screen from a screen door. I want to say the whole thing weighs maybe five to ten pounds, but it’s huge and it works.”

Having puppets allows for several dramatic effects in the production. In the Roald Dahl story, the bugs start small and then, when James drops some magic green crystals on the ground near a barren peach tree, grow to huge proportions.

“They’re using puppets for the first version, as opposed to having somebody smaller in a costume,” Carlson said. “It’ll just be more magical. Because they’re puppets, as opposed to just a prop, they move in ways that will be more interesting for the audience.”

While Carlson still hopes to do “Avenue Q,” his next gig will be for Riverwalk again — his sister is directing “First Date” and needs a puppet.

This article originally appeared on Lansing State Journal: Adam Carlson creates puppets for Riverwalk's James and the Giant Peach