In 2019, the Bob Baker Puppet Theater needed a lifeline. Forced to abandon its home outside downtown for more than 55 years, the beloved company with its thousands of hand-made puppets (a sassy black cat in heels, a fish out of water that can't help but move) finally found a new location in a Highland Park theater.
Signing a 10-year lease was a sigh of relief for the company, the result of a long search that included more than 80 venues and ensured its fun, whimsical shows remained a multi-generational Southern California tradition. But annual rent increases, as well as the impending termination of the contract, continued to be a cause of stress for the nonprofit.
The Bob Baker Puppet Theater can exhale once again.
The bold black cat puppet in a performance at the Bob Baker Marionette Theatre.
(Chloe Rice / Bob Baker Puppet Theater)
The theater's executive team said it has reached an agreement to purchase its current location at the corner of York Boulevard and North Avenue 50, which had previously been a movie theater and a Korean church. Once completed, the $5 million acquisition will ensure the theater has a permanent home, a place where skateboarding clowns and leek-haired onions can continue to frolic and dance for decades to come.
“This is monumental for us,” says Alex Evans, the theater's co-executive director. “They've spent decades fighting to survive. Now we're in this moment where it's not a struggle. It's a flourishing moment where our future is set forever.”
Bob Baker's home in Highland Park was originally built as the York Theater in 1925 and hosted movies and vaudeville performances during that era. It recently housed the First Congregational Church of Pyong Kang. Over the years it has also been a barbershop and home to an organ sales and repair shop.
The purchase comes at a time of celebration for the company. While its annual Bob Baker Day Festival at Los Angeles State Historic Park had to be postponed from April 12 to the fall due to a rainy forecast (the historic, fragile puppets can't be exposed to water), the company still brought its show on the road to the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival. Its adults-only May fundraising event, the Puppet Prom, which typically raises more than $30,000, is nearly sold out, and the theater, which also hosts movie screenings and concerts (with puppets, of course), continues to pack a sellout crowd, in part because of its location in a walkable neighborhood with young families.
And in the coming weeks the theater will launch its first new show in 40 years, “Choo Choo Revue.”
“Now is the time,” says Evans, who notes that while they have built new puppets and modified existing shows, this is the first proper new production since “Hooray LA!” 1981. “We have the personnel to implement it. We have a sustainable business to be able to make what will be about half a million dollars of production to put on a new show.”
By making public its intention to secure the York Boulevard theater, the company is kicking off a new round of fundraising. Bob Baker over the last year has raised $4.5 million of the $5 million purchase price. It is seeking $500,000 to close the gap, as well as an additional $2 million for what it describes as critical renovations, such as repairing the building's roof and bathrooms.
Some of the eccentric canine puppets.
(Chloe Rice / Bob Baker Puppet Theater)
Mary Fagot, co-CEO of Bob Baker, says the theater has provided a $500,000 loan to ensure the deal closes. However, Bob Baker does not want to start his new era with debt.
“We think it's an achievable gap,” Fagot says, pointing to the community fundraising the theater has had to implement to stay afloat during the COVID-19 pandemic. During the days of the closure, for example, the company was able to raise $365,000 in 365 days.
The rent increase, the co-CEOs say, was a key factor in the decision to approach the building's owners about purchasing the space. This year, Bob Baker will pay about half a million in rent, an amount, Evans says, that is twice the theater's budget when it was in its previous space near downtown Los Angeles. That, along with the looming expiration of the lease in a couple of years, acted as a sort of deadline to come up with a proposal that might appeal to the owners of their buildings.
“We started having conversations in 2023 with the building owners, and they evolved into a real possibility,” Fagot says. “Then we began the hard work of talking to our biggest fans to get them to support us.”
Bob Baker, founded in 1963 by the eponymous puppeteer, now attracts more than 145,000 spectators a year, including some 20,000 students through school field trips. Funding for the purchase of the building was obtained, in part, through donations from the Perenchio Foundation, the Kohl Family Foundation, the Ahmanson Foundation, the late Wallis Annenberg, and celebrity donors such as Jack Black and Tanya Haden.
A sidewalk performance in front of the Bob Baker Puppet Theater featuring ladybug puppets.
(Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Times)
“I am proud to have played a small role in helping to safeguard such a beloved institution that has enriched Los Angeles for decades,” says Brian Mikail of Capstone Equities, which leases the space to the company. The hope in signing the lease, Mikail says, was that one day Bob Baker could buy the place.
The agreement, says Fagot, is beneficial for both parties.
“I think we were the ideal owners for this space,” Fagot says. “If it were for any other purpose, it would need a giant transformation, and for us, it's exactly what we need.”
“Choo Choo Revue” will premiere on May 16 and will feature more than 100 new hand-made puppets. Look for, for example, a conductor with a clock face, dancing luggage, and a band of cicadas, among many other oddities. Expect, perhaps, a crescent moon in pajamas to be a new favorite. Or maybe the public will fall in love with singing mushrooms.
“The show invites audiences to take a train ride, where the show looks out the train window and sees flights of imagination,” Evans says. “They're daydreams outside a window. Windmills racing. They're strange, fantastical abstractions of what's possible. The hope is that at the end of the show people will feel inspired to be more creative and look at the world more beautifully.”
There is also a clear hunger for the kind of whimsical, family-friendly entertainment that theater offers. Gross revenue surpassed $3.1 million in 2025, up from $699,211 in 2018, according to its most recent annual report. Fagot says the COVID pandemic has only increased demand for the “special kind of magic” that Bob Baker creates.
“People needed community,” he says. “They just need joy. They need inspiration and creativity and they want to do it together, and that's what we do.”
