About Crabgrass Puppets

CRABGRASS PUPPET THEATRE is an award-winning touring puppet theatre founded in 1982 by Jamie Keithline and Bonny Hall. Jamie and Bonny met in 1979, while performing in Laughingstock!, a puppet-and-actor production at the University of Connecticut in which Bonny played Jamie's father. They have been working together ever since!

Bonny Hall started a puppet troupe while in high school in Greensboro, N.C., and liked it so much that she decided to make it her profession. She made her way to the University of Connecticut, the only university in the country to offer Bachelors and Masters degrees in puppetry. While at UConn, she ran into Jamie Keithline. Jamie was studying acting, but he fell in with the wrong crowd and wound up becoming a puppeteer. Following graduation, Bonny and Jamie toured the East Coast with Bart Roccoberton and the Pandemonium Puppet Company.

In 1982, Bonny and Jamie decided to take a break from the snow and moved to California, where they formed their own company. Their first show, What a Clever Idea! had giant puppets that grew to eight feet tall, and was selected to perform at the 1983 Pacific Southwest Puppetry Festival. Subsequent shows have featured a variety of innovative and unusual puppets both large and small, including a seven-foot crocodile (Follow That Rabbit!), a smoke-breathing dragon (A Renaissance Miracle), and an animated garbage heap (Crabgrass Uprising!). A break-dancing Rap-o-saurus was the star of Dinosaur Dimension, which was commissioned by the Lawrence Hall of Science at the University of California and was selected to perform at the 1987 Pacific Southwest Puppetry Festival. While in California, Jamie and Bonny gave thousands of performances in schools, libraries, museums, and arts festivals. They also created an authentic Elizabethan puppet show for the Northern California Renaissance Faire, which included the stories of "Adam and Eve" (complete with fig leaves) and "St. George and the Dragon." In 1989, Jamie and Bonny returned to the East Coast. They now live in Halifax, Vermont, a tiny town in the hills near Brattleboro.

Since their return to the East Coast, Crabgrass Puppet Theatre has created The Save-the-Earth Circus, The Reluctant Dragon (performed at the 1992 Northeast Mid-Atlantic Puppetry Festival), Mr. Punch's Christmas Carol (performed at the 1995 Puppeteers of America National Festival), Just So Stories (performed at the 1996 Northeast/Mid-Atlantic Puppetry Festival and the 1997 Puppeteers of America National Festival), The Frog Prince plus The Princess and The Pea (performed at the 1998 Northeast/Mid-Atlantic Puppetry Festival), Anansi, Spiderman of Africa!, performed at the 2000 Northeast/Mid-Atlantic Puppetry Festival and at the 2001 Puppeteers of America National Festival, Jabberwocky, performed at the 2002 Northeast-Mid-Atlantic Puppetry Festival and the 2002 Great Lakes Puppet Festival, The Bremen Town Musicians, performed at the 2004 Northeast-Mid-Atlantic Puppetry Festival and the 2004 Southeast Puppetry Festival, and The Last Dragon on Earth, a modern fairy tale about dragons, knights, princes, automobiles and jazz music. Crabgrass is currently hard at work on their newest show, The Day It Snowed Tortillas, based on a delightful folktale from Mexico.

Crabgrass Puppet Theatre has twice been awarded the prestigious Citation of Excellence from the American Center of the Union Internationale de la Marionette (UNIMA-USA), the highest honor in American puppetry, in 2001 and again in 2005.

Crabgrass Puppet Theatre's performing venues have included the World Trade Center, the Tribeca Performing Arts Center, the Philadelphia Museum, Paper Mill Playhouse, the North Carolina Museum, the New York State Museum, the Smithsonian Institution, the California Academy of Sciences, the Detroit Institute for the Arts, and hundreds of schools, museums, and theaters across the country. Crabgrass Puppet Theatre performs more than 200 shows each year, reaching over 100,000 people throughout the US.

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