Photo from the production of Cthulhu: The Musical! by Josh Fitz of Liquid Reel
Cthulhu: The Musical! | 07.16.24, 7:30pm | City Winery, 3730 Foundry Way | All ages | $25 – $32
If the title Cthulhu: The Musical! is enough to pique your interest – prepare to be maddeningly engaged.
Since 2015, the Oregon-based group Puppeteers for Fears has been packing venues with original works such as Robopocalypse: The Musical! and Cattle Mutilation: The Musical! These days, they perform to sold-out audiences on the East and West Coasts, where folks are already familiar with their earlier work. On Tuesday, July 16, the touring “puppet musical horror troupe” brings their original work to the City Winery for the first time in St. Louis.
A live band and original script are features of Puppeteers for Fears productions. Their current show layers these elements with multimedia backgrounds and custom-made puppets to tell the troubling tales of H. P. Lovecraft’s most famous creation: the legendary, deep sea-dwelling cosmic monster, Cthulhu.
The Arts STL had the opportunity to chat with playwright Josh Gross as he and the crew of multitalented musicians and puppeteers road-tripped across the country.

The Arts STL: Thank you for making time to talk with me and tell me a little bit about the production and the troupe as a whole. Could you tell me a little bit about how Puppeteers for Fears has been a troupe, and how did this get started?
Josh Gross: Puppeteers for Fears started as a troupe Halloween of 2015, and its origins are a few years earlier than that. I had grown up playing in bands, and then when I went to college, I got into playwriting. So it was always in the back of my head to try to write a musical, but you need the right idea so it comes across as credible. I’m a big fan of Absurdism. And I was working in Boise, and some friends that ran a theater company there asked me to write a short Halloween puppet show for their Halloween show. Somewhere in the back of my head, I went, “If you make a horror puppet musical, all of those three things together are so ridiculous that no one will question any piece of it.”
That was the start of it. It was a collection of shorts. They just called it “The Horrific Puppet Affair.” So, I wrote a short piece for that. It’s like 15 minutes long. It was a satire Silence of the Lambs called “Ritual Murder of a Music School,” and that went really well. I did it again a second year, and then I was going to do it again a third year, but ended up moving away, so I had this third piece that was just sort of undone. It was a bummer. Never got staged. And around then I moved back home to Ashland, Oregon, where I had grown up, which is—if you don’t know—a big theater town because of the Oregon Shakespeare Festival. It’s kind of like Broadway of the West Coast. So I had all three of these pieces and thought it’d be fun to do them like a Halloween show, where we just do all three of them together. But I barely know any actors or anything. I was talking to a friend of mine about it, and right as I was talking to him at a little bar in downtown, I looked over and I saw someone I’d seen in a play once ordering a drink, and I thought she was fantastic in it, and I’d already had like, two beers—fuck it. I’ll just go for this weird idea. I’m sure she thought I was trying to pick her up, but I tapped her on the shoulder, and I basically, dumb luck, tapped the right person on the shoulder. She had studied puppetry in college, because they’ve been doing a one-term puppetry class at the University to prepare for a production of Avenue Q.
She called some people from the puppetry class, and we called some friends of mine who played music, we put it all together, and we were going to do this one-night Halloween show. But then people showed up, and it was a line out the door. People were sitting five-deep on the floor, and it was really crazy. And when they laughed, the whole room shook. It was definitely a fire hazard. But afterwards, I don’t even know how many people just said, “Thank you for doing anything different.” Because Ashland culture is so dominated by big, glamorous Shakespeare productions, people are really hungry for something of their own, or something that just wasn’t that, something a little more of the people, a little more populist, I guess. So, we were like, “Okay, this, this works. Let’s, try this again.” That was October 2015.
The person I tapped on the shoulder and I, we were like, “Let’s keep this thing going.” We plotted out how to turn it into a full-time company and sketched out—we’ll try to do two shows a year, like a spring show and a fall show. We wanted to start doing features, and so in spring of the next year, we launched it as a whole company and started trying to do two shows a year as full-time dedicated puppet horror musical company. And it just kind of kept snowballing. And as interest in it grew and we got better at it, we outgrew a lot of the places that we would perform at home. We have to do a certain amount [of business] to justify it, so we decided to try taking it on the road and seeing if people would like it elsewhere. We went up to Portland for one weekend and that sold out as well. Let’s try Seattle for a weekend. And that sold out. Alright, let’s go down to the Hollywood Fringe Festival, but since we got to go all the way down there, let’s just do the whole West Coast while we’re at it. And step-by-step, went through from one small thing to traveling around, touring, like any recording act would do. And we find we thought we’d do really well in a lot of music clubs, because they’re a lot more receptive to a one-night only performance, relative to more traditional theaters, which are oftentimes locked down for months at a time. And also, since there’s the music element, it fits in really well too, because it presents a shockingly traditional theater performance—it really is like musical theater, it’s got a lot of the elements of stagecraft, but it gives it to an entirely new audience who often felt that theater is not for them, maybe because tickets are $80 to see Death of a Salesman feels a little hoity toity. It feels a little more ‘of the people,’ meeting them where they’re at. I describe it as like if the Muppets were to do a production of Rocky Horror Picture Show or something like that.


Wouldn’t that be something. The City Winery, where you’ll be playing in St Louis, is going to be a really interesting format for this. I’m excited for it. I see you have Meow Wolf [in Denver].
Yeah, that one is, that was a great one for us. Our booking agent didn’t know what Meow Wolf was. He just sent us the link to it. He’s like, “This place looks neat.” We’re like, “Does it? Does it look neat??” Because that’s kind of the Holy Grail.
That’s going to be incredible. And you have a lot of sold-out shows already on this list. Am I right?
Yeah, it feels very arrogant, but the show tends to sell out. A lot of that, obviously, is the pre-existing fan base for H.P. Lovecraft and the ethos. That’s why, when we go to new places, we do this show first, rather than one of our six other original shows.
But also, people really like this project. It just speaks to something. It triggers a lot of nostalgia points. It has a Venn diagram of overlapping fandom. And I think some of that is that, for a lot of folks, they grew up loving something like the Muppets or puppetry as a child, but the materials didn’t age with them. They want something that—again—meets them where they’re at, and we’re providing that in a way that no one else is.
If you’ve seen something like War Horse, they do it all with puppets. The horse is a puppet, but they ride the horse. It’s incredible, next-level stuff, but also it’s still very traditional stage drama, and it’s not really for everybody. We’re just saying, “Okay, well, what if the goofy Saturday morning sort of like stuff you were into grew up and met you where you’re at?” And that’s what we’re bringing, which I think more people want than they realize. The whole job of the entrepreneur is to give the audience what they didn’t realize they wanted until they saw it. We didn’t even know that was the case, and we just kind of stumbled into it, but it’s been working like gangbusters ever since. We wouldn’t be doing a whole national tour if shows didn’t keep selling out.
You said somewhere that you really like to seek classical themes and give them the musical puppet theater treatment. I’m looking at titles like Robopocalypse and Cattle Mutilation. Are these classic themes or are these invented, newer themes?
Well, let me clarify what I mean by classic themes. We really like monsters in our company. But one of the things I personally like as a writer is when you have like a character, or a monster, that doesn’t have a story. It’s just more like a character. Bigfoot is a really great example. What is the story of Bigfoot? There is no story of Bigfoot. Bigfoot is just out there being Bigfoot. And that’s very different than something like Dracula. There’s a story of Dracula. So, if you do an adaptation of Dracula, which is a wonderful novel, a classic piece of literature, you still have to kind of stick to the beats the story. But if you do the story of Bigfoot, you get to just make it up, whatever you want. But it still has this character that people like, just from an iconography standpoint.
To me, that’s the really sweet spot, where you can find something that people like, and it’s a classic theme, like El Chupacabra or something like that. That’s what I’ve always dreamed of doing, because—what is the story of El Chupacabra? There is no story of El Chupacabra, but it’s a fascinating narrative. Interestingly, Cthulhu is the only one we’ve ever done where there’s a story that’s previously attached, and it was a really interesting challenge to adapt it, because the story itself is so hostile to adaptation. The one you mentioned—Cattle Mutilation: The Musical—it’s about Bigfoot and aliens. And the joke was kind of simple if you’re from Oregon: what’s something that people from Oregon would think is a documentary? Oh – Bigfoot. And there is the whole lore of alien abductions, that they mutilate cattle, for reasons unknown. The story is that some Oregon ranchers are like, “What’s happening to the cattle?” And one of them insists that Bigfoot is responsible. So, they go out looking for Bigfoot, and they end up on this insane adventure in space. But, you know, it’s a somewhat provocative title. You see it on a poster, and you’re like, “What?” It kind of grabs your attention.


It’s not what you expect to see in the context of musicals or puppetry or—
No, not really. But that’s part of the populist element of it. We’re bringing theater to people who thought that the theater may not have been for them. For me, as a writer, I grew up around this amazing, high-level Shakespeare Festival. It felt like it was beating me over the head all the time. I found it very exhausting, to be honest. It wasn’t until I moved away for college that I saw theater that I felt spoke to me a little bit: “Oh, I do like this medium. I just didn’t like that version of it.”
Do you feel like puppeteering and the musical aspect—is that a natural match? Do those naturally overlap? Or is that a unique combination? Has that been a challenge for anyone?
I mean, oh, it’s a challenge for all of us. It is a logistical nightmare. It’s a clusterfuck tied in a Celtic knot wrapped in a train wreck. To me, it makes sense, because it’s just bringing together all of these things that enhance one another. But it took a lot of work to a lot of our own weird internal best practices in order to make it work.
But I think it also is part of what makes the whole thing stick the landing. It would be very easy for something like this to come across as corny or trying too hard, but when you see all of the elements that come together, you go, “Oh, wow.” This brings the weight of something that you see in a Broadway or Off-Broadway show, but they’re doing it with puppets. That alone—puppetry is a really misunderstood medium, for how difficult it is. It has a reputation as either being kid stuff or sort of simple, and in fact, it’s incredibly sophisticated from a performance perspective, and physically grueling. You can imagine holding a five-pound weight in the air over your head for, you know, two hours and singing and dancing while you do it. It’s a pretty intense workout.
It must take a special person to get into this.
I think it takes five special people to get into this. They’re all sitting around me right now. That was what we in the industry called pandering.
And, I mean by that—you said somewhere that it’s not a cult. But maybe it is a little bit of a cult.
We did get all matching track jackets. We may be a cult.
I don’t know if you’ve ever read or heard of the book How to Sell a Haunted House by Grady Hendrix.
I love Grady Hendrix.
There’s a whole, long section on puppeteers, and it’s a little bit scary. It’s probably the scariest part of the book.
You know, it’s been on my to-read list. I haven’t gotten to it yet, so I can’t speak to that. But I will say that it is a really unusual skill set, because there’s a sort of transhumanist element to it. And I realize that sounds a little ridiculous when I say it. But the performance is being transferred from the actor to physical object. And the real magic of it, from an outside perspective, is if you see the puppets talking to a person, and the person stops talking to the actor, and they start talking to the puppet, because they become so absorbed in it. It takes a second level of sophistication in thinking about performance, to be able to transfer that to another thing. Have you seen Avenue Q?
I have not.
So one of the central things in Avenue Q is – what if the puppets in Sesame Street grew up and they went to college, and they’re trying to get by in New York right afterwards? But one of the things that they did is that they moved it out of a puppet house, and you see the actors, and they’re dressed the same as their puppets, and they walk around the stage. This is considered one of the major contributions that it made to the field, because no one had really done that before. But with this production of it that they did, where we live, the actors just basically acted with the puppet on their hands. They didn’t really transfer the acting to the puppet.
It really takes seeing something to understand the sort of distinction between the two, because I’ve seen Avenue Q on Broadway, and it was phenomenal. But a lot of it was because you’re not watching the actor, you’re watching the puppet. This version of that we saw was just the actor going about their thing, full face acting, with the thing on their hands. They didn’t have that second level of sophistication. It’s a nuance that you wouldn’t really think about until you have to think about it. But once you get into it, it’s fascinating, from a technical challenge aspect. It opens up all of these possibilities, and watching this gang of wizards work is just a constant joy.


So, do you have any puppeteering heroes?
Randy Feltface.
Randy Feltface?
Randy Feltface. I think everyone agrees he’s our hero. Yeah, I’m getting a lot of nods. Randy Feltface is an Australian comedian. His real name is Keith [McIvor]. He performs hour-plus long stand-up specials as a puppet, Randy Feltface. And he is both one of the best comedians I’ve ever seen and definitely one of the best puppeteers I’ve ever seen. The way he works with his movements is just painful even to think about. He doesn’t go on his knees. He does a whole thing in this yoga squat. And his shows are over an hour, with no breaks, so [the puppet] is up the whole time. It’s pretty astounding to watch. And his movement, his controlled movement, and his ability to riff and jump up and around—it’s totally immersive. You get completely lost. He has a bunch of specials on YouTube, if you look that up, you’ll see what I’m talking about. [You can also read The Arts STL’s interview with Randy Feltface here!—Ed.] But I would say he’s a big hero and inspiration for pretty much everyone around on board. And obviously, you know, Jim Henson, but that’s like a freebie.
So, there’s the creative aspect, and, like you said, the physically grueling aspect is not a piece that I’ve really given much thought. I guess you generally don’t, because it’s kind of out of sight, out of mind.
Yeah, very much so, and it’s really growing. Actually, we have to limit how many days in a row we do the show, because it’s so physically intensive, we have to have a lot more rest days than the average tour group would do.
Do you have to do physical preparation for a tour?
The moment we cast someone, we’re like, “Start doing push-ups.” We do group stretches beforehand and a lot of exercise. Everyone’s got to figure out their own regimen for it. But definitely, by the end of the tour, everyone looks like a tennis player where they have one beefy arm.
Ouch. Oh my gosh. Now, there’s going to be a live band for this also, right?
Yeah, we have a three-piece band for this one, and we’ve always done it with a live band. That is an essential component. Most musicals are performed with a pit orchestra, so it’s sort of in line with that. But we exist a little bit between being a band and being a theater company. And I think that’s part of what people like about it. When we first started performing in Ashland, there’s a lot of people who’ve been fans of my band in high school, who just sort of aged out of going to see live music, and they started coming back, and they said, “This is great, because it’s got the same sort of like punch and energy of the shows that you used to do, but now we get to sit down.” And we’re like, “Okay, we’ve cracked the code for old punks.”
No pressure to be moshing.
Yeah, pretty much. With that said, we’ve done a couple of shows in Legacy Clubs, like Bottom of the Hill in San Francisco, and those were wild people. They were singing along and getting really into it.
So, what are musical influences?
Oh, geez, like, in general, or just for this production?
I’ll take both.
I mean, first thing I remember truly loving was Weird Al Yankovic, and then I immediately became fascinated with Oingo Boingo. Those are things you can see. And then the energy and raw fun of ’90s underground music. But for this show specifically, for every show, we try to have musical themes that go along with the story. It should be in service of and an element of it. With this one, Lovecraft was not known for his comedy. But he has inspired a great deal of music, usually like heavy metal, that sort of thing. So, there is a little bit of heavy metal influence. But also, he’s an elder god that hibernates under the ocean, right? So, there’s nautical themes. So, what are nautical themes? You know, surf music—originally, I was trying to make like an evil Calypso score, but I quickly learned Calypso is much harder to play. But there’s still pieces. And then, his whole his whole deal is basically trying to sort of psychically drive people insane through their dreams, so there are elements of psych rock and trying to sort of use a lot of guitar effects that sound sort of unsettling.
There’s a lot of deliberate choice to use chord progressions that were either sort of atypical or that don’t always cleanly repeat at the same frequencies at the time. Nothing feels like, verse-chorus-verse-chorus-bridge-chorus. Sometimes they just kind of meander all over the place, and they don’t always stay in the same place for the same amount of time, so that you never really know what’s going to happen. The whole thing’s a little unsettling, but at the same time to also make it very deliberately catchy, hooky pop music, because I don’t like the sort of sing/talking style of composition of a lot of musicals. I would say that there’s an umbrella of psych-rock-adjacent, but there’s a lot going on in it.
Oh, that sounds like a lot of fun.
There’s also an attempt—since, again, the goal is to drive people crazy—I was like, “what drives you more crazy than getting a song stuck in your head?” So there’s an attempt to make repeating musical refrains that will get stuck in your head. Working with that sort of thing, and particularly pounding jungle drums. And it’s a really fun story.
I would love to know a little bit about the process of putting this together. Where does it begin? How do the layers get added? What are the challenges in translating a story like this to a story like that?
Well, from a compositional standpoint, the original story is not exactly a story. It’s more like a montage of flashbacks. Lovecraft as an author brought some things to literature that are very important in the historical canon, but not all of them were necessarily being a good writer, if that makes sense. This story in particular is very unsettling. It’s got this really great tone, but there isn’t really an antagonist or a protagonist. There isn’t really a clear chain of events. It’s like someone’s reading their dead uncle’s papers, and then there’s uncle’s papers that are describing reading someone else’s news reports. So it’s this series of flashbacks through the media of seemingly unconnected events that are being brought together in a sense, and it’s very unsettling. But as a story, it lacks a lot of the traditional elements of narrative.
That’s one of the reasons I referred to it as kind of hostile to adaptation. Many people have been interested and tried, but it fights you every step of the way, so the first thing was trying to figure out how to do that. We had to look at what the underlying elements were, and then say, “okay, how can we move a few pieces around to make it more coherent?” One of the ways we do that is by acknowledging, meta-textually that the story itself oftentimes doesn’t make sense. Puppetry ends up being an ideal medium for that, because Lovecraft’s thing was that reality is not necessarily as advertised. We’re telling you this piece of felt on our hand is a real person, but you know it’s not, but you’re going to behave as if it is. Already you’re going along with a Lovecraftian process just by watching the show in the first place. It ends up working out really well there. We play with some of those elements, those meta-textual elements, as a way of leaning into the parts that don’t make sense, which allows us this latitude.


Once we had the scripts, which took a couple drafts to get right, there’s a lot of stuff that’s a little different than how a normal theater company would do it. One, everything has to be sort of modular, so it can be portable, and it also has to seem bigger than it is. So, there’s some interesting elements there, but those are just design challenges. The more interesting thing right now is, when COVID happened, we immediately knew we were going to be the last thing that came back, if we came back at all, because behind the puppet house is basically a game of Twister. When we travel around, we would have been a disease vector unto ourselves. Then, in that two-plus years where the world was kind of shut down, most of our team had to either take jobs elsewhere or move back in with their parents. We had scattered to the four corners. When we were all in one place, it was very easy to have regular rehearsals and recruit new performers and that sort of thing. We had to spend about six months figuring out a process to move our rehearsals onto video chat, because it’s such a specific skill set of people who puppeteer and can sing and are into what we do. But by doing that, we were able to maintain the consistent ensemble of performers that we’d built up, even though they’d sort of moved all over the West Coast. Now, we have this complicated system where we have pre-recorded karaoke tracks, and the director directs through a Zoom window get a lot of the early work done. Then, we come together for the last week or so to do intensive, in-person rehearsals. That is choreographing the behind the puppet house, because at that point, they haven’t all been in the same room. They started practicing in isolation, and they’re like, “oh, but if I move to that side of the stage, that means I have to hop over these three people” or something like that. And for the band, at that point, we’re still practicing on our own. So, I think that’s pretty distinct. But other than that, how do you put a play together? You rehearse it.
But you have the added bonus of coordinating your Twister moves beforehand.
Yeah. I’m sure there are dance shows that are equally as complicated. We have a video on our Facebook page of a time lapse from behind the puppet house, and you can sort of see how crazy it is. Definitely something people don’t see, and that’s part of the magic of it. From the front, it’s fully immersive, and you don’t see all that it takes to make it happen. Which is great, because you shouldn’t be seeing how the sausage is made. But when you do later see how the sausage is made, it’s one of those mind blows. You’re like, “wow, this is some next level stuff.” I’m completely in awe of what the puppeteers do. I couldn’t do any of it. I’m quick with a fart joke, but I don’t have the skills that they have.
So you yourself don’t do the puppeteering.
No. I write the music, and I play in the band, and I run the company, but I can’t puppeteer to save my life.
But you know people who can, and that’s, that’s what matters.
You don’t need to be able to do everything yourself. You just need to find people who can.
And bring them together and keep them together.
Yeah, I like thinking of myself a little bit like Clooney in Oceans 11, putting a team together. It’s just our heist is a rock n’ roll puppet tour.
That’s excellent. Okay, now you mentioned your goal is to drive people crazy—
Well, I wouldn’t say that’s my goal. That’s Cthulhu’s goal. He’s trying to drive people insane through their dreams. I was trying to highlight that as an element of the musical score. But personally, I would like to drive them crazy more like in a Prince fashion, you know?
What kind of reaction do you hope to get from your audience?
I hope they laugh. That’s the easiest answer. But I hope people appreciate it. I mean, for one, we’re doing something odd. We hope that the oddballs of the world out there are like, “Hey, we see you. We feel seen,” etc. But also, and this is a little more esoteric, buy it’s important to me that some of the sophistication is appreciated. This is going to sound weird and self-aggrandizing, but once, when we were performing in Reading, California, when we were doing Cattle Mutilation: The Musical, which—you chuckle just when I say the name, right? So I’m sure you have an idea of what the show is like, and you’re not wrong. There’s like a whole song about anal probes called “In the Butt.”
So, here’s the thing. That show is bananas. It is so absurd and ridiculous, and the songs are wild and everything. And at the end of this performance, I had a guy come up to me in tears and hug me and say, “Thank you.” He said he’d been having trouble trying to figure out how to relate to his son, and finally, he knew how, because of seeing this puppet show, which is not what you would expect when I tell you, we’re doing a puppet show called Cattle Mutilation: The Musical. But that’s the sneaky trick. We’re like, “hey, come for this absurdist spectacle, but psych—we just suckered you into seeing a pretty weighty drama with some serious literary hats. And that’s what I hope people take away from it to some degree. That was legitimate and above the board as anything you’d see with the traditional theater. It’s just that we did it with puppets instead, which allows us some opportunities that you wouldn’t get with non-puppet actors.
Oh, that’s beautiful. Well, thank you very much for that beautiful Cattle Mutilation moment. Not a sentence you expect to say very often.
But that’s the sort of sneaky thing about this is that it opens up a lot of possibilities that you wouldn’t be able to do otherwise. The least interesting puppet is a person, right? With puppets, literally anything can be a character. That means you can explore the inner life of a ham sandwich or whatever you want. From a narrative standpoint, that’s a goldmine. From a comedic standpoint as well. And since the cast are such talented improv comedians as well, sometimes they just toss the script all together, and we go in some really weird places. You can usually tell when that’s happening [because] the band is laughing so much.
You know, the whole experience of being in a physical space with this thing that’s happening, where the script is changing a little bit each night, and each performance is unique. It’s all these different elements coming together, it’s a little bit future and it’s a really rare thing, for anyone in creative industries right now. That’s something I’ve been thinking about a lot lately. Kind of blundered into it, but it’s working. | Courtney Dowdall
For more information or to purchase tickets, visit citywinery.com/st-louis. Keep up with the latest on the troupe at puppeteersforfears.com.
Upcoming Cthulhu: The Musical! tour dates:
07.13.24: Knoxville, TN @ Open Chord
07.15.24: Kansas City, MO @ Record Bar
07.16.24: St. Louis, MO @ City Winery
07.18.24: Denver, CO @ Meow Wolf
07.20.24: Salt Lake City, UT @ Urban Lounge