When Ronnie Burkett’s parents ordered the entire World Book Encyclopedia collection to their Medicine Hat, Alta. home, seven-year-old Ronnie was not interested in reading them. 

But his mother chided him to please read the expensive books she bought for him. As Burkett picked up the P volume, the encyclopedia fell open to the entry on puppets. There was a picture of acclaimed puppeteers Bil and Cora Baird surrounded by their marionettes.

“I closed the book and thought, ‘That’s what I’ll do for the rest of my life,’” the acclaimed puppeteer tells Q guest host Garvia Bailey. “The family joke was: why didn’t it fall open to ‘podiatrist’ or ‘pediatrician’?”

When Burkett went to the movies a few months later, he saw the Bairds’ marionettes again in the goatherd scene in The Sound of Music. That day, seven-year-old Burkett found Bil Baird’s address in a puppetry magazine and wrote him a letter. 

Despite receiving no response, Burkett wrote to Baird again at age 10, 14 and 18. He never received any response. 

Around the time that he sent his final letter, Burkett heard about an international puppet congress in Moscow. Burkett dropped out of his university acting program and went to Russia, where he finally met his hero, Bil Baird. 

“He said, ‘I’ve been trying to find your address, I’ve got all your letters,’” Burkett recalls Baird saying to him. “‘Are you going to stop in New York on your way home? … Come to the theatre and see me.’”

Burkett went to New York and auditioned for Baird, who hired him to work at his puppet theatre company in Greenwich Village.

During his years in New York, Burkett also worked on commercial projects with Bonnie Erickson, the puppeteer who created the original Miss Piggy, Fozzie Bear and other Muppets. As much as Burkett enjoyed his work with Erickson, he yearned to create his first love: marionettes. 

“In New York, no one’s building marionettes. It’s old fashioned,” he explains. “And every time I bring it up, people are like, ‘We don’t do that anymore.’”

After complaining about this to an elder statesman of puppeteering, the man told Burkett to “go back to f–king Canada and make marionettes.”

A month later, Burkett came home. Then, a friend invited him to perform his marionette show in Edmonton at the first-ever North American Fringe Festival. 

The marionettes Burkett created at that show paved the way for him to create his Theatre of Marionettes in 1986. The company has produced shows with puppets that explore heavy subjects such as AIDS and the Holocaust. The Governor General Award’s committee noticed his work over the years and awarded him a performing arts award in 2024.

“Puppetry has given me … the freedom to explore all these voices in my heart and my head,” Burkett says. 

Currently, Burkett is using his marionettes to reimagine literary classics, such as works by Charles Dickens and William Shakespeare. He is currently performing his marionette play Little Willy, a humorous take on Romeo and Juliet. 

“The title Little Willy came to mind and it made me giggle,” he says. “It started basically like a 12-year-old boy thinking some d–k joke was funny.”

Little Willy is on at Canadian Stage in Toronto until April 5.

The full interview with Ronnie Burkett is available on our podcast, Q with Tom Power. Listen and follow wherever you get your podcasts.

Interview with Ronnie Burkett produced by Ben Edwards.