A show called “The Sex Lives of Puppets” is enough to attract attention, and I would have attributed the full house at the Victory Gardens Biograph Theatre on Monday to judicious marketing had I not heard reports of sold-out houses throughout the Chicago International Puppet Festival, a January festival that has quietly become one of the more significant events on this city’s cultural calendar. It now draws an international collection of puppeteers and their followers during a month when Chicago needs visitors the most.
Puppet lovers are all huddled at the Allerton Hotel on the Magnificent Mile and traipsing off to watch shows all over the city, at venues from the Studebaker Theater to the Chopin to the Biograph. I was so pleased to see the underutilized Biograph packed with people again that I had to restrain myself from trying to find the switch to light up the historic marquee, absurdly left dark as frigid folks shuffled their way into this great Chicago venue, out of the cold and ready for some flashy puppet naughtiness.
Many of the festival’s attractions are short runs. Take, for example, Manual Cinema’s “The 4th Witch,” already over and out after one night only. Blair Thomas, the festival’s artistic director, remarked before that show that one can watch puppets (he uses the term broadly) all over the world without ever seeing an aesthetic quite like the Manual Cinema aesthetic. He’s right, of course.
Like many arts-loving Chicagoans, I’m well aware of the skills and artistry of this Chicago-based group that spends most of its time touring. But for us longtime fans, “The 4th Witch” (a riff on “Macbeth,” not unlike how “Wicked” is a riff on “The Wizard of Oz”) still represented a whole new level of accomplishment. I don’t mean that necessarily in terms of emotional appeal (I prefer some of their other work in that regard), but in terms of how many hundreds of images this incredible company produces in a show, and how dramatically and gorgeously these vistas are sequenced.
Before catching this piece, I’d always thought of Manual Cinema as a group with a hand-made aesthetic, its visuals forming over time, some working better than others. “The 4th Witch” is at a whole new technical level. It doesn’t feel any less organic, but the music, ideas and above all the images all come in a great rush, far more beautifully formed than I’ve ever felt with their prior shows. Alas, although this piece has been seen elsewhere, this solo night was the one hometown outing to date. I hereby request that this company correct that problem, and that we don’t have to wait for a festival to see it again.
For now, witches have given way to cavorting puppets showing off their sex lives. Blind Summit is a famously witty British theater company, led for more than 25 years by artistic director Mark Down, a famed and much-loved teacher of his craft as well as a performer who becomes at one with his tools, so to speak.
Blind Summit also knows how to sell puppetry in a small-scale touring realm often dominated by comedy. In the U.K., they’re often compared to the iconic 1980s TV show “Spitting Image,” which mercilessly lampooned political figures by created puppet sculptures wickedly emphasizing their least-flattering features. Blind Summit’s newest show put me in mind of the British TV show “Gogglebox,” a fly-on-the-wall celebration of the blather of ordinary, opinionated Brits.
“The Sex Lives of Puppets” (which, by the way, features mostly puppets of a certain age, not nubile marionettes offering vicarious thrills) is a piece based on interviews, or so the company claims, with a variety of characters who are managing to press on with their sex lives, notwithstanding a variety of setbacks from age to inhibition and from bodily limitations to loneliness. (Puppets get lonely, don’t ya know, and they are not all flexible like Kermit.) You watch them talk about their sex lives and, to some degree, do their things with their human helpers and, well, it’s all great and even poignant fun on a cold night.
The festival’s multiple venues are rocking through Sunday with several other shows. The puppets are having sex at the Biograph through Saturday.
The 8th Chicago International Puppet Theater Festival continues through Feb. 1 at various venues; schedules and tickets at ChicagoPuppetFest.org
Chris Jones is a Tribune critic.
cjones5@chicagotribune.com
https://www.chicagotribune.com/2026/01/27/review-sex-lives-puppets/
