Custom Built Shows

Peter and Debbie of Parasol Puppets have been designing, building and performing original puppet shows tailored to the specific needs of their clients for over twenty years. They have created puppets for community theatre groups, built and manipulated puppets for several local access TV programs and created a show about endangered animals for the Honolulu Zoo (which Debbie performed every Saturday for 3 years).

Our most frequent client for custom-built shows is the Honolulu Academy of Arts, the largest fine arts museum in Hawaii. They first approached us in 1992 to create a show based on an artist, John Webber, who was featured in one of their touring exhibits. We had a marvelous time researching the history of this artist, who sailed with Captain Cook when he discovered the Hawaiian Islands, and enjoyed creating and performing a puppet show that illustrated several of his works.

We have since built and performed 15 other shows for them, primarily for the Christmas season. The staff of the Education Department selects a theme for the Christmas gallery tours and we create a show around this theme. The theme is usually inspired by a work of art in the Academy’s extensive Medieval and Renaissance collection. Every year we eagerly await the assigned theme so we can start researching and writing the script.

The theme for 2005 was CHRISTMAS AROUND THE WORLD. We researched countless folk tales and selected “The Littlest Camel” from Syria and “The Christmas Flower” from Mexico as our inspiration. The show ended with all of the characters from the stories arriving at the stable on Christmas morning for a Nativity tableau. Thirty-eight puppets in a twenty minute show which we performed 108 times during the month of December 2005.