It’s time for the 7th Chicago International Puppet Theater Festival! Every year, the puppets brighten our January and remind us of the amazing joy and ingenuity of puppetry storytelling. The performers are puppets immense and tiny, marionettes, glove puppets, shadow puppets, bunraku puppets, miniature worlds with detailed figurines, tabletop puppets, as well as the humans who bring them to life. There’s even a marionette made of ice. The puppets’ stories are powerful dramas, comedies and musicals, some for all ages, some definitely not for kids.
The 2025 Puppet Fest is bringing more than 100 performances plus puppetry activities over 12 days—from opening night on Wednesday, January 15, through closing on Sunday, January 26. Performances will be held at 14 venues all over the city and there also will be neighborhood tours, which bring puppet productions to 12 Chicago neighborhood venues, from Edgewater to Grand Crossing, from Old Town to Austin.
The puppet companies come from China, India and Scotland, the first time for these countries to play a part in the Chicago Puppet Festival, along with Canada, Chile, China, France, Germany, Israel, Italy, Norway, Poland, South Africa, and the U.S. including Puerto Rico and Chicago.
The opening night production of Dracula: Lucy’s Dream by Plexus Polaire (France/Norway) draws on Bram Stoker’s work and uses human-size bunraku puppets and video projection to tell the story. Another notable production—this one from South Africa—will be J.M. Coetzee’s Life and Times of Michael K, which draws on South African Nobel laureate Coetzee’s novel to tell the story of a humble man taking an epic journey. The puppets for Michael K are created by the Handspring Puppet Company, known for their work on War Horse and Little Amal.
Other puppet theater stories range from Edith and Me, a one-woman show (for ages 15 and up) with life-size puppets (by Yael Rasooly from Israel), to I Killed the Monster, a tabletop fable by Roizizo Theatre from France (for ages 9 and up). Most of the puppet performances are rated for tweens/teens and up. Some are for all ages.
Tickets for all performances are on sale now. This same link will take you to an overview of all festival events.
Neighborhood tour performances, designed to foster an appreciation of puppetry throughout the city, are all free. The two productions to be seen in neighborhood venues are The Amazing Story Machine and Hungry Garden. These 45-minute performances are family-friendly.
The Puppet Hub on the fourth floor of the Fine Arts Building, 410 S. Michigan Ave., will feature exhibitions, a puppetry symposium and master puppetry classes with festival artists. Also on the fourth floor, the Spoke & Bird Pop-Up Café will offer snacks and beverages throughout the festival. The café opens at 10am most days (closed January 20-21) but closing hours vary; see schedule here.
Tickets for all performances are on sale now. This same link will take you to an overview of all festival events.