Almighty Opp Puppet Shows Draw Crowds to Los Angeles Corner

The artist known as Jeffrey's Human Persona has remained anonymous for nearly 25 years, as long as he has performed guerrilla-style musical puppet shows titled “almighty Opp” on a corner in Koreatown on the last Saturday of every month. He only missed three shows in the first 19 years of what he calls his “services.” However, the COVID-19 pandemic forced him to come online in 2020 and a family tragedy kept him away from the corner for a few more years.

In December he returned live in front of the used car dealership at Western and Elmwood for the first time since the pandemic-induced shutdown, drawing a crowd of several hundred devoted fans. In February he hosted his first ticketed event called “Secret Somewhere Services,” which attracted about 50 guests who paid $100 each for the pop-up show at a private residence in the San Fernando Valley, where Willie Nelson's youngest son, Micah, performed as an opening act with his art rock project Particle Kid.

“I missed funerals, I missed Christmas, I missed my friends' birthdays. I never took a vacation,” Jeffrey says of his devotion to his monthly performances during a recent phone interview after his late January show, which also attracted a large, excitable crowd of fans. “I treated it like a knife in my heart.”

“Almighty Opp” is really about Jeffrey's heart. Services are held on a specially designed black stage populated with a variety of custom-made puppets. These creations are not from Mister Rogers' fantasy neighborhood. At a recent show, the ringleader wore a red dirndl with gray knee-high socks and black ankle boots. His angular head topped with a green felt crown; his mouth full of teeth was a sinister cut and grimacing; his eyes blackened with what looks like charcoal. Other puppets cavorted around him: a chubby, clownish, snowman-like creature spitting water at the crowd; a tall, lanky clown who uses a miniature bomb; a strange puppet made from adhesive bandages; a disheveled, discarded doll tied to strings.

One of the main puppets used in the street show “almighty Opp”. The puppets sing songs written by the show's creator, an artist who calls himself Jeffrey's Human Persona.

(Carlin Stiehl / for The Times)

Music is the focal point of each service, with Jeffrey playing guitar and keyboards behind the curtain, singing in a wavering voice reminiscent of Jeff Mangum about the themes, ideas and feelings that have occupied his mind at various stages of his life. To date, “almighty Opp” has released 33 albums on Bandcamp of service songs over the years with titles including “Every Day's the Worst Day,” “Misbegotten Human Beings,” and “Bubble Burster.”

“Pretending we had a choice, as long as we said we had it, but now it's a lot worse than it seems five years later,” sings a puppet that looks like a strange Humpty Dumpty with a huge egg head on a red pants body during the January show. “Supporting someone else's dreams because your good character is being used.”

“Almighty Opp” employs a variety of handcrafted and richly detailed puppets. The show's creator once worked as an assistant to sculptor Chris Burden.

(Carlin Stiehl / for The Times)

A common refrain, sung in unison by almost everyone gathered on the gum-stained sidewalk, is: “It's okay to not be okay.”

Jeffrey loves the spontaneous possibilities of the street corner and what he calls the “stumble” nature of the services, but the primary audience is a returning one. The nearly 200 people gathered this January afternoon, shortly after nine p.m., stand on stools and chairs in the back and on the sidewalk, leaning on their elbows, in the front. They shout, sing and sing. They turn and hug or shake hands as Jeffrey encourages them to meet their neighbors at different points in the show.

Lars Adams attends a show by the “almighty Opp” on the last Saturday in January. During the show the crowd is encouraged to turn and greet their neighbors.

(Carlin Stiehl / for The Times)

“Even though I'm acting, I don't really consider myself an artist,” Jeffrey says. He is also not a busker, although his shows are free community events. And although there are puppets, he doesn't call the “almighty Opp” a puppet show. He is, he says, “an obsessive doer.” The audience “just comes with me, the journey of life, of how I feel at that moment. It's like a Catholic Church service, where the sermon changes, but the structure remains the same.”

Unlike a church service, the shows are loud and a little relaxed. A bus whizzes by, a homeless man shouts as he passes by with a shopping cart. Jeffrey's wife, known as Shambles, operates the puppets from behind the curtain, while carrying their five-year-old daughter, known as Crumbo, in a sling. Two other attendees, named DingDing and Cylo, can also be seen behind the black curtain, their faces hidden in knitted clown masks or protected by makeup. Jeffrey appears before the crowd toward the end of the show, wearing a white mask and red hoodie, and asks audience members to give testimonies. People stand up and talk about how the show has changed them over the years.

That's what happened with Micah Nelson. It came when Jeffrey used to hold mirrors in front of people's faces and make them look at themselves while the crowd watched. The sessions were uncomfortably long. Nelson later contacted Jeffrey to tell him that he was covering some of his songs and that his experience with the mirror had a profound effect on him.

When Nelson introduced Jeffrey at the recent “Secret Somewhere” show, the things he said about Jeffrey made the artist blush. Life, Jeffrey said, has a funny way of coming full circle.

Jeffrey's Human Persona, who created the “almighty Opp” in the early aughts, asks audience members gathered on a corner in Koreatown to give testimonials about the show, which he calls a “service.”

(Carlin Stiehl / for The Times)

Jeffrey moved to Los Angeles from Pittsburgh in 1995 when he was 19 years old. His father bought him the plane ticket after Jeffrey found himself in a bored rut with friends and got into all the wrong trouble. I wanted to work in the film industry; He thought Los Angeles would be like Jim Morrison's fever dream in the '70s, but he didn't find it all that inspiring. The movie business, where he worked creating fantastical art and other inventions, was not a creative paradise, but rather a soul-sucking void.

“I'm tired of making other people's puppets,” he told a friend one day, and the “almighty Opp” was born.

“If you just show up to get a paycheck, what are you really doing?” Jeffrey asked during our interview. “I'd rather be a failure and believe in it.”

Kids gather at the front of the stage during January's “almighty Opp” show, which features original songs on guitar and keyboard. A total of 33 albums by “almighty Opp” are available on Bandcamp.

(Carlin Stiehl / for The Times)

He made the original puppets and wrote the first album of the “almighty Opp” in the second-floor apartment where he lived, a stone's throw from the corner where he still performs, the corner where he would propose to his wife during a particularly difficult period in his life. During all those years he worked in a variety of creative roles to support himself: for the toy industry; briefly for Disney Imagineers; and for about eight years as an assistant to sculptor Chris Burden, for whom he helped craft the future land “Metropolis II,” which is in the permanent collection of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

Now that “the almighty Opp” is live again, Jeffrey benefits from the therapeutic aspects of writing down his emotions and experiences. “Secret Somewhere Services” will continue once a month, or perhaps every other month. Guests can check Instagram for tips on how to snag a coveted ticket, which comes with its own handmade entry token and a map to the ever-changing private venue. Jeffrey is making large puppets for these performances (one is 7 feet tall) and experimenting with the shape of the event.

Still, the corner will remain the soul of their operation and the music at the center of it all.

“It's about honesty, and the people who understand it and keep coming back know it's absolutely real,” he says.