“Avenue Q” is no more, the Bil Baird Marionette Theater died decades ago, but there is plenty of puppetry in New York, as I detail in my article for TDF Stages, 5 Theatres You Need to Know: Puppet Theaters in New York City.

Below are photographs from some recent productions at  those  five — Swedish Cottage Marionette Theater in Central Park and Puppetworks in Park Slope, both for children; and three puppet festivals in avant-garde venues: St. Ann’s Warehouse’s Labapalooza, La MaMa Puppet Festival, and HERE’s Dream Music Puppetry.

It needs be said that New York is a center of the puppetry arts and I could easily feature another five, such as Dixon Place’s Puppet Blok  and Shadowbox Theater. The New Victory Theater and Lincoln Center Kids often present puppet productions. And then there are the puppets that pop up as co-stars to human actors, including on  Broadway — certainly The Lion King, also Frozen., Beetlejuice,  and, the biggest of them all, King Kong.  To keep up on puppets, sign up for the Jim Henson Foundation’s Puppet Happenings email list .

Check out some of my past puppet pieces.

Swedish Cottage Marionette Theater’s “Puss in Boots”

Puppetmobile’s “Bessie’s Big Shot”

Labapalooza “To What Death Has Touched”

Labapalooza’s “Shoot Don’t Talk”

Labapalooza’s “Eva’s Heart”

Labapalooza’s “Babushka”

La Mama Puppet Festival’s Tian Wen: Heavenly Questions for Modern Times

La Mama Puppet Festival’s “Exodus”

La Mama Puppet Festival’s “Don Quixote Takes New York”

La Mama Festival: Food for the Gods

La Mama’s Federico Restrepo with his first-ever puppet, Loca 7

puppets in storage at the La MaMa archives

“Ashes,” a haunting work of theatre that told the real-life story of an arsonist, was peopled with dozens of characters — all but the narrator are puppets. In one of many astounding moments of magic, the narrator’s father (a puppet) who is dying smokes a cigarette, and exhales the smoke, which then curls up into the air and magically forms the text: “The last thing I did to my father was lie to him.”

Here Dream Music Puppet’s Ashes

Here Dream Music Puppetry’s Chimpanzee

HERE Dream Music Puppetry: Basil Twist’s Symphonie Fantastique