Over the decades, hundreds of thousands of Iowa children have grown up watching puppet shows performed by a small troupe from eastern Iowa called the Eulenspiegel Puppet Theatre, based in West Liberty. Monica Leo co-founded the group nearly 50 years ago because she loved the hobby, having no idea it would grow into a business with extreme longevity that would also be so widely adored.
“I was an art major and my mother was a freelance artist, and she told me, ‘If you want to make a living as an artist, you need to find something that you enjoy doing that other people enjoy paying money for.’ So I’d always loved puppets and dolls, so I started making puppets and dolls and selling them,” Leo says. “I had a friend that really wanted to put on puppet shows with them, so we started doing that and it kind of took off.”
Since 1974, Eulenspiegel (pronounced OIL-in-shpee-gul) has toured in 31 states and four countries around the world, as well as in hundreds of Iowa communities, in addition to thousands of performances at its theatre in West Liberty.
“Most of our shows are either based on folklore or on history,” Leo says. “We’ve got a lot of local and regional history shows. We build our own puppets and a lot of our shows have live music. They all have music of some sort, even if it’s just puppeteers singing or playing kazoo or something.”
Leo released a book this fall, “Hand, Shadow, Rod. The Story of Eulenspiegel Puppet Theatre,” which tells a little about her and a lot about bringing puppets to life. She’s enjoyed a long career as a puppeteer and finds it extremely rewarding, being able to entertain children, teens and adults. How many kids have seen her perform?
“Oh, I couldn’t even begin to count,” Leo says. “Yesterday, I had to count out for a grant application how many we’d reached in the last year and we ended up counting up 18,000, and that’s a fairly typical year.” Multiply that 18,000 by 50 years and you get 900,000. Leo’s been at this so long, she has had kids in the audience whose parents — and grandparents — saw her shows when they were kids.
Leo, who’s 79, says she has no intention of retiring and may just reach a million kids before she’s ready to hang up her puppets.
“I’m one of those fortunate people who has been lucky enough to be able to make my living doing the things I most enjoy doing,” Leo says, “and I have no intention of quitting because there’s nothing I’d rather do.”
Leo is the featured reader for this month’s Final Thursday Reading Series event at the Hearst Center for the Arts in Cedar Falls on Thursday, November 30th at 7:30 p.m. Her book is available at many Iowa book stores and through the publisher, Ice Cube Press, based in North Liberty.