Muppet Gals Talking is a series of interviews and spotlights on female producers, puppeteers, puppet builders, and other creatives who’ve worked with the Muppets. This series is researched, written, and expertly produced by journalist L. Drake Lucas.
Alice Dinnean, by her own admission, had good timing for a life of Muppets.
She was born the same year as Sesame Street first went on the air, remembers Friday nights at 7:30 watching The Muppet Show as a kid, and was 13 when The Dark Crystal came out, an influential movie in her life decades before she would be involved in the remake. She was raised in Berkley, California in the 1970’s and said it lived up to the Hippie cliché – tie-dye, Montessori school, and her parents having art sessions in the living room, drinking wine and painting as models posed.
“I had a very groovy childhood,” she said. “It was exactly the right time and the right parents to be indoctrinated into the Henson, zany vibe.”
Her parents were extremely supportive of her and her sister, Carol Binion, pursuing the arts. The two girls performed puppet shows together as kids, and later both ended up working for Sesame Street where Alice was a puppeteer and her sister was a costumer, sometimes leaving notes in the puppets for Alice to find.
Alice also happened to grow up in an area with an active puppetry guild, at one point run by Frank Oz’s parents, who used to get Frank to do appearances. Alice went regularly to Children’s Fairyland, a family-run amusement park known for its puppet shows at the Storybook Theater, run by Lewis Mahlmann. Eventually she worked there during the summers and started doing some performing, when she wasn’t taking tickets and helping run rides. She got paid to be a puppeteer as a teenager and got the idea that people did this for a living.
After graduating from Oberlin College, she got an internship at the Center for Puppetry Arts in Atlanta, a starting place for other well known puppeteers, including, importantly, Peter Linz. The two became lifelong friends and eventually married in 2023.
Her time at the Center for Puppetry Arts led to a chance to try out for Sesame Street and launched a career that has involved work with Sesame Workshop, Henson Company projects, The Muppets, and other puppet projects, including all seasons of Crank Yankers.
Her experience and talent allowed her to move into leadership roles such as training puppeteers and being a puppet captain, helping to bring up the next generation of puppeteers and give opportunities to others.
Working in children’s programming is one thing. Having children while working in children’s programming is a whole other challenge. Having Alice in a leadership position has been important for other female puppeteers who have praised her as an example of a mom who understands the demands of having a family. Alice brought her son on numerous sets as he grew up, including having him in the greenroom of Crank Yankers as a newborn.
“Showbiz is notoriously hard on families,” Alice said. As a single parent during one of the busiest parts of her career, she relied on her mom and best friend as baby-sitters when she had work until 1 and 2 a.m. She described pregnancy and having kids as hard on the body and hard on a puppetry career.
“It does make me want to make it easier any way I can for moms and dads,” she said. That includes asking puppeteers at the end of the day who wants to stay when only a few are needed. Some may need to get home to children while others may benefit from the extra hours. She doesn’t want people to feel penalized for having families.
She praised Brian Henson for always being great about welcoming kids on any set he is running and said they are not treated as annoying. If a kid blows a take because they laugh at something funny, nobody yells at them.
“We are in this for kids,” she said of her work on children’s shows.
The rarity of women in leadership roles reflects a history of a lack of female puppeteer roles in general in the Muppets.
“It is not lost on anybody that there was a gender disparity on Muppet stuff and still is,” Alice said, noting that the legacy Muppet characters have always been played by men. She gives the core group of classic characters a pass, equating them to a group like Monty Python.
“It’s hard to think of inserting female characters into that classic set of characters. It feels forced,” she said.
For women working with The Muppets, opportunities mostly exist for right hands, doubles, and background characters, roles she has often done. Even if she isn’t owning a main character, Alice said it has been some of her favorite work. Muppets have a universal quality she enjoys being a part of, a community feeling for puppeteers and their audience.
“Muppets appeal to people who have had a hard time finding their path, who are different from their families, who don’t fit in,” she said. “You see weirdos succeed in their dreams, and I love that.”
She described a joy that comes in the wordless communication on set that can lead to serendipitous moments when one puppeteer can signal to another puppeteer what to do spontaneously, whether it is someone right-handing being able to get the puppeteer to stop and look at something – or keep the scene going when something unexpected happens.
She described a scene in the The Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance where Brea is in a carriage with skekLach, who has a goopy pustule on her face. The pustule is supposed to be gross and oozing, but this one has a long tendril hanging down so much, it’s swinging.
Alice willed herself and puppeteer Helena Smee to keep going and let that thing dangle, to not laugh, so they could keep the scene.
“There are times when something unexpected happens and people laugh or break, like if we are shooting outside and a bird comes and lands on a puppet,” she said. “But sometimes something unexpected happens and everyone wills each other to keep going, don’t break, let’s see what we can make of this.”
When Alice talks about puppeteering, it is about working within a team. A lot of it comes down to trust, she said – trusting that times when you have to be physically close in an odd position won’t be weird. And trusting that everyone has the best interest of their fellow puppeteers at heart.
Alice does not describe it as glamorous. She has been in a manhole. She has been under a greasy truck. She was once smooshed in a box with three other puppeteers that was buried underground (for Turkey Hollow). There are two things she remembers saying no to – laying down next to an elephant and laying down in the path of a car that was coming toward her and had to stop suddenly.
“Safety was loose, especially on kids shows,” she said, emphasizing that this did not apply to Sesame Street.
Alice is drawn to the evolving technology of puppetry and considered becoming a CG animator.
“With a different bump of the pinball, I would be an animator at Pixar,” she said.
She saw an exciting new field developing and was tempted to move over, but found a way to pursue that interest within puppetry. The Jim Henson Creature Shop was doing a lot of animatronics, which was taken over by computer-generated-imagery (CGI) for a while, and now more of the practical is coming back. She also enjoys directable CGI, which is puppeteered animation, like Word Party, where the voices are live on set and the characters are manipulated, so that performers are acting off one another like puppets.
Her favorite project of all time, however, was The Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance, which she described as far beyond everything she could have dreamed of. Timing was in her favor again, and the opportunity to do the shoot came at the right moment in her career to take the character of Brea. She has studied Kathy Mullen’s performance as Kira in the original Dark Crystal since she was a teenager, watching her work over and over.
Seeing documentaries of Kathy performing during The Muppet Show allowed Alice to see that this was a career women could pursue. Now she is part of that tradition of successful women puppeteers, an example for the next generation of puppeteers to follow. Alice sees herself being a part of puppetry decades from now, even when she doesn’t feel like holding up her arm all day.
“I still want to be teaching and nurturing,” she said. “I want to be involved forever.”
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by Drake Lucas
