Brian Zelznick Does Doll Face as Toy Theatre!

Our newest virtual offering is a charming, zany, 10-minute toy theater show directed by Brian Selznick, writer and illustrator of “The Invention of Hugo Cabaret” and “The Houdini Box,” and the illustrator of the 20th anniversary “Harry Potter” box set. The show is based on the 1994 children’s picture book written by Pam Conrad and illustrated by Selznick.

At the time, the book was a sweet story about a doll who throws herself a party with her friend’s knife, fork, spoon, and plate. 

“Twenty-five years later,” says Selznick, “my friend Jacqui Russell asked me if I would help to turn ‘Doll Face Has a Party!’ into a puppet show.

She thought that children might especially enjoy it during this time of quarantine because Doll Face never leaves her home, throws a party because she is bored and makes friends with the items around her house.”

Creative Team:
Directed by Brian Selznick
Based on the Book, "Doll Face Has a Party!"
Text by Pam Conrad / Pictures by Brian Selznick
Produced by Jacqueline Russell
Designed, Built, and Puppeteered by Will Bishop & Grace Needlman
Narrated by James Lecesne
Music by Tuba Skinny
Additional Music by Robin Rapuzzi
Sound Design by Kevin O’Donnell

Popovy Sisters: Dolls by Hand

Focus on Toy Theatre: DAVID'S VOICE (film)

David Worobec is a classically trained vocalist who performs musical theater on miniature stages. Not content to play merely one character, he sings and performs every part with the help of an ensemble of action figures he’s carefully cast in each role. Through a series of intimate performances and conversations with David, his mother and others close to him, there emerges a portrait of an artist searching for his place in life.

I've posted about David before. Even other films about him. But this film is my favorite, because it's the most intimate, sharing with us a bit more 'behind the scenes'.  What an amazing performer!

Enchanted Dolls

I love making dolls because it allows me to work with several mediums at once. Making dolls is a creative process that combines the disciplines of industrial design, sculpting, ceramics, painting, engineering, drawing, engraving, jewelry making and textiles. It generates a whole that is greater and richer than the sum of each comprising medium put together. 

- Marina Bychkova

Life-Size Dolls/Puppets Wander About London

The incredibly realistic 4' 7” high living dolls were played by two models who spent over three hours
being transformed by a top team of stylists, costume designers, make-up artists, and dressers.
[Photo Credit:  Tim Anderson/Taylor Herring]

A publicity stunt for a decidedly unique theme park ride - part of the world’s first psychological theme park - utilized life-sized dolls that resembled string-less, multi-jointed marionette puppets.

They wandered around London in December, in anticipation of the opening of the new ride some time this spring.

[Photo Credit:  Tim Anderson/Taylor Herring]

Feature: Little Theatre of Dolls

I've discovered an exciting duo of performers, named Raisa Veikkola and Frida Alvinzi.  I love how they are willing to use old-style ideas and make them really pop!!

Take a look at the still shots below, followed by two videos, to get a taste of what they have done so far...

The Holy Dress is a creation story that draws on ancient cosmic origination myths. From a universal egg a thought was born that evolves into Eve and Adam.

This story of creation happens inside of a dress and both puppeteers are stuck inside. They work as the dual forces: the night and day, dark and light,good and evil manipulate the elements of creation.

In beautifully crafted sceneries the audience gets to experience magical realities and stories acted by exquisite hand made puppets that all have been created by The Little Theatre of Dolls.

- Dolly of London

The Story Machine is a magical technicolor love story about a girl and a boy trapped inside a television with nothing but objects of desire. Using puppets and live action, The Little Theatre of Dolls has created a surreal world made out of recycled materials and charity shop treasures - and in this world anything is possible. The Story Machine is also a satire of our world of consumer-driven greed.

The puppeteers shown as the mystical masters of the universe seem to know the secrets of the story they tell, using the machine as the tool of creation. The piece shows the confusion in being human and over the collective consciousness of memories. The machine wants to transform the characters into what they desire; to transform it's victims and to make them transcend between worlds and to constantly capture their imagination.

- Dolly of London

The Story Machine from Raisa Veikkola & Frida Alvinzi on Vimeo.


The Holy Dress from Rainstar Boutique on Vimeo.

Featured: One Man Show

A recent article featured the amazing David Lewis Worobec
[Click to Enlarge & Read]

Pollock's Toy Museum & Eddy Fawdry

Awhile back a profile was done of the museum, by none other than Professor Ronald Hutton, which is lovely indeed for those of us halfway around the world who may never get to visit there in person. It is, in a limited sense, a virtual tour. Enjoy this clip from the program that featured the Pollock's Toy Museum...



Reviews:

Eddy Fawdry (and his wee dog Haggis) preside over this strange secret world of vintage toys, which he inherited from his grandparents and they from the Hoxton-based Pollock family, which made famous toy theaters. In room after creaky room, history stares back at you with doll’s eyes: puppets, Gollywogs, the 1921 forerunner to G.I. Joe (Swiss Action Man), doll’s houses, mechanical cast-iron banks, 1950s rocket toys, a board game based on the Falkland Islands invasion that was banned for being in poor taste. Stories are everywhere and the kitsch factor is through the roof, which brings us to the quirky, spirited building, which has been left leaning and unrestored since its erection in the 1780s (but received a new roof after the Luftwaffe blew off the original one). The ground-floor shop stocks unusual, hard-to-find toys that don’t cost much, including handmade items and cardboard theaters—the original inspiration for this one-of-a-kind time warp.

- Jason Cochran (Frommer's)

Pollock's Toy Museum: A Magical Mystery Tour

Do not be fooled, this beautiful house and its neighbour have more to pose than this dancing jester. If you approach, do so with caution. The sheer unimaginable excellence of this rare collection of exhibited, ingenious and engaging articles, lost in time, is undoubtedly a worthy and untamed match for J.K.Rowling’s ‘Diagon Alley’.

Take a magical mystery tour with Eddy Fawdry, of Pollock's Toy Museum¹ - a place like no other, in the world...

¹ - Children lured by the colourful shop window of Pollocks Toy Museum to explore inside, whether at 44 Monmouth Street, in Covent Garden, central London, or, after 1969, at 1 Scala Street, were likely to meet the museum's founder, Marguerite Fawdry, and to be drawn by her, with a delicious sense of complicity, into the arcane world of Victorian melodramas performed with cardboard figures three inches high.

If they visited with any regularity they might find themselves put to work in the basement collating sets of plays from packets of printed sheets unopened since the 1890s, with a paper bag of special treasures to take home at the end of the day. This eccentric private museum with its associated shop selling model theatres and unusual toys has been an enduring feature of the West End since the 1950s. It was a pioneering venture in conservation, taste and way of life.

She was born Marguerite Desnieres in 1912, the daughter of a Breton father killed two years later in defence of his country and an English mother, and was educated at the Lycee in South Kensington, west London, and at the University of Lille. In 1935 she joined the theatre studio of Michel St Denis but worked in journalism before the Second World War took her into the French Section of the BBC and the Press Office of General de Gaulle.

In 1942 she married Kenneth Fawdry, a schoolmaster, whom she had first met on a train from Florence to Rome. They shared radical politics, unconventional attitudes and a strong sense of missionary purpose. Their son John was born during the war and in 1951 Marguerite left the BBC, which Kenneth had by then joined, to write scripts for language-teaching broadcasts. It was into this fertile seedbed of education, parenthood and the stage that the germ of toy theatre fell almost by accident in 1952.

Benjamin Pollock of Hoxton, whose name is commemorated in the museum, died in 1937. In 1944 his stock of copperplates and lithographic prints for traditional English toy theatre, dating back to the 1830s, was acquired from his daughters by Alan Keen, a bookseller who revived the business with more flair than the post-war austerity years could support.

Click above to see inside Pollock's Toy Museum...

The Fawdrys, enthusiasts for many kind of popular arts including the naive paintings of Mr Bucket of Battersea, had been among his customers, but Marguerite was dismayed to discover that the business had gone into receivership in 1954, when she wanted some of the wire slides (twopence each) for pushing the tiny figures on to the stage. The accountant whom she traced gave a provocative response, "I believe there are hundreds of thousands in the warehouse, madam, but there's no one who could look them out for you. Of course, you could, I suppose, buy the whole lot if you wanted them."

This is what she did, with help from Kenneth's father, and started business from the attic in Monmouth Street, encouraged by other visionaries such as George Speaight, author of Juvenile Drama (1946), and the photographer Edwin Smith, and enlisting the first generation of helpers for whom, down the years, shared enthusiasm substituted for earnings.

The museum began as a complementary attraction, gradually filling all floors of the house with a shop on the ground floor and the stock divided between the Dickensian basement and the Fawdrys' house at Wrotham, in Kent. Marguerite's friend Jacques Brunius, Surrealist and film-maker, lent and ultimately bequeathed his collection of optical toys. The museum displays were cunningly devised by the toymaker Yootha Rose and the display style was (and remains) a tightly packed cabinet of curiosities with strongly coloured backgrounds.

Marguerite Fawdry had an excellent eye and a lifelong curiosity about other cultures, reflected in the museum and the shop which was stocked with finds from the Fawdrys' long summer holidays in Italy, Yugoslavia and elsewhere.

Almost equal to the discovery of the Pollock stock was the chance find of a barn in the Dolomites full of wooden Dutch dolls packed in brown paper parcels for dispatch to a vanished pre-1914 toy market. Pollocks bought the lot and some of the dolls found themselves dressed in Pearly costume by a genuine Pearly Queen. There were toy-theatre sheets from Copenhagen, Epinal and Barcelona, American cast-iron automata banks and Japanese paper carp.

In the 1960s shopkeeping became a performing art and Marguerite Fawdry excelled in it. In George Speaight's words, "the shop became a mecca for parents in search of unusual toys and decorations; boutique owners in swinging Britain of the Sixties flocked to Monmouth Street in search of `with-it' stock for their shelves".

Fawdry's cosmopolitan outlook inspired her to produce brightly coloured reprints of simplified Victorian plays in multi-language European editions and in New York she and Kenneth, an equally compelling figure, did impromptu demonstrations for the buyers at Maceys and Bloomingdales. Pollocks catalogues were designed with witty graphics.

Having begun the fashionable revival of the Covent Garden area, Pollocks moved north to Fitzrovia. Marguerite was able to buy two adjacent houses on the corner of Whitfield Street and Scala Street for a larger museum, now a charitable trust, held exhibitions, including one on Chinese toys, on which she wrote one of her several entertaining and scholarly books. In 1980 Pollocks opened a shop in the newly refurbished Covent Garden Market, now devolved to its manager Peter Baldwin.

In his retirement, Kenneth Fawdry helped the business to flourish. His death in 1986 was a blow but Marguerite continued to run Scala Street with John Fawdry despite declining health, remarking recently, by way of explaining its business philosophy, that "no one in their right mind would have reprinted The Siege of Troy", the grandiose romantic play reissued in 1985.

Marguerite Desnieres, museum curator, writer, entrepreneur: born Bexleyheath, Kent 14 May 1912; married 1942 Kenneth Fawdry (died 1986; one son); died London 15 September 1995.

[Marguerite Fawdry Obituary, The Independent]

The Burke Dollhouse

6' wide x 5' tall.  Fully functioning electrical lighting, 
and running water in the kitchen and bathroom...

Recently, a very special dollhouse was donated to the Minneapolis Institute of Art (MIA).

It's special because of its size and complexity.  The rooms were outfitted over many years, and no attention to detail was spared.

One can look into each corner of a room, and discover something new upon every viewing.  The house is truly a work of miniature art.





The dollhouse was donated by Mary Livingston [Griggs] Burke, who passed away in 2012. It was built in the early 20th century, and had been added to over the decades by the original owner and her daughter. The family foundation donated the dollhouse to the MIA in 2013.

Ms. Burke, a distinguished art collector,  made known her intention to donate her Japanese art collection upon her death to the MIA.  The dollhouse may have been a fortunate after thought that the MIA inherited along with it.

Michelle Mausi, the author of
Tales of the Tchotcke Family 

One of the staff at the MIA began taking snapshots of the rooms as well as the miniature figurine characters that inhabit them, captioning each image with a fictional narrative.

The figurines became the Tchotcke family.  They had individual names, back stories, and narratives for their particular scenes.

You'll want to check the stories out here and here.

Chomick & Meder

Interview with the great Chomick and Meder!

See photos of the exhibition mentioned (ongoing through June 8th) here...

A Visit to Pollock's Toy Shop

The theatre on the counter is described by staff as "...German with scenery by Scholz"

"We don't like minimal at Pollock's"

So writes the toy shop on their Facebook page today.  The above photograph was taken this week showing their updated lobby and some of the many fun toys, books, and theatres they sell.

I laughed at that, because it's so true!  But it's also why their shop is so magical.  Although I have never had the privilege to visit yet, I know it would delight me no end.  I like to think of it as the best toy shop in the world...

Dollmaker Extraordinaire

The two Alices on their Wonderland toy theatre stage...

Rebeca Cano makes amazing dolls, yes, but she makes much more than dolls.  She makes an entire world for her dolls down to the smallest, most exquisite detail.  It is truly a joy to behold.

"...she came upon a low curtain she
has not noticed before..."

Before she began making dolls, Rebeca had never sewn.  Hard to believe when you see the incredible miniature clothing and other textiles she creates.  She is mostly self-taught, which I greatly admire.  Inspiration can be a powerful motivator.

Right now, she has a sale on, of a toy theatre tableaux featuring her favorite story character, Alice in Wonderland.  It is an ongoing project of hers...

The project is designed to be exhibited in a museum of contemporary art, as yet undefined.  All my dolls have their origins in a tale that I believe; I like to give soul to my dolls, and that is why I started in this world.

You can read more about Rebeca here and see more of your dolls here...

Toy Shop Virtual Tour

A Man & His Dolls

My friend Vanesa shared this trailer with me recently. As she says, "This looks like an extraordinary film about dolls and a man's relationship with them..."

A Nazi scrutinizes Captain Hogancamp...

After viewing the trailer, viewing still shots taken by Mark (the man behind all this), and reading about the story behind the film, I couldn't agree more. An amazing use of the imagination and creativity for self-healing.