Show Summary

🐜 Atomic Ants
March 15 – April 13, 2025
Playhouse on the Park – Phoenix, AZ

When you think “puppet show,” your brain probably doesn’t jump to 15-foot-tall ants, radioactive smoke, or Cold War hysteria. But Atomic Ants wasn’t interested in what anyone expected. This black-and-white sci-fi spectacle was All Puppet Players’ most ambitious stage production to date—and a full-throttle love letter to 1950s creature features, specifically the 1954 film Them!, with just the right amount of Silence of the Lambs weirdness and Independence Day bombast thrown in.

Performed entirely in black and white (a company first), Atomic Ants featured live miniature projections powered by Brian Newell’s “Staged Cinema” system—a game-changing collaboration that allowed puppets to interact with real-time model environments broadcast on a massive center-stage screen. It was part Ed Wood, part Area 51 fever dream, and all absurd.

The story took place in a small desert town where life is peaceful… until the ants arrive. Giant, mutated, and very hungry. A determined scientist, a laid-back cop, and an eager young doctor scrambled to save the town, while the ants got bigger and the jokes got weirder. And just when audiences thought they knew where it was going, the show unveiled the largest puppet in APP history—a towering ant queen that took up nearly the entire stage and more than a few nightmares.

Also making his monstrous return was Hamlet, reimagined as a fluffy black-and-white monster. Custom-built for this production, this new version of APP’s flagship character fit right in among the bugs and B-movie insanity, becoming both a fan favorite and a narrative wild card.

The show also marked the debut of our modular “whatnot” puppet system, allowing cast members to swap facial features, wigs, and accessories mid-show. That meant four puppets could become twelve characters. It was equal parts (re)innovation and barely-controlled chaos.

The script was born in true APP fashion: locked in a room for 48 hours, surrounded by Red Bull, popcorn, and an unhealthy amount of B-movie dialogue. And true to form, the show continued evolving every night. Scenes shifted. Punchlines improved. Puppets malfunctioned in hilarious ways. As always, no two performances were exactly alike.

Atomic Ants wasn’t just a puppet show. It was an event. A black-and-white, pop-culture-soaked, sci-fi stage invasion. And somehow, the ants won.

Performances ran:
March 15 – April 13, 2025
(Black and white. Big and bitey. The humans won the battle. The Ants won the war!)