Review Quote

Indeed, this is not the production of Cinderella that you might remember from your childhood. Instead, this lavishly produced and scored version of a classic tale packs a punch without compromising the beauty of the love story within. I was not alone shedding a few tears when Cinderella begins to believe. 

Featuring a cast of 22 exquisitely costumed and hand-crafted puppets, Zanzibar’s 35-minute production of Cinderella is a holiday show that everyone in the family over the age of 4 will appreciate. It’s quick and fun, so just go and thank me later.

 Cinderella, isn't your garden variety puppet show. Like many of us who grew up in the Bay Area, the creator,
Theodore Dawson, was first exposed to puppetry at Fairyland. This is one of
the most elaborate puppet presentations I've ever seen. A mind boggling expenditure of
funds and work has gone into this production and I think anyone with the
least inclination to enjoy puppets, family theater or fairy tales should not
miss it. Puppeteer friends and I went backstage
to view the figures close up, and the fine work on the costumes is museum
quality. They were very accommodating. Some figures have as much as ten
yards of decorative trim hand sewn on and took 80 hours of labor. They are an exquisite
collection of dolls. There is enough color, glamour and glitz in Cinderella to rival a Las Vegas
review. Comic relief is provided by the mean step sisters' bickering, while the show
is otherwise partly serious. It is full of lessons for life, and little
homilies that children can reflect on. This isn't intimate puppet theater
but pushes puppets to be something larger than life while remaining
miniature in scale. The show is obviously not just another commercial
venture but a labor of love.
 

Bay Area-based Zanzibar Fairytale Puppet Theater brings puppetry to a higher state of art. 

Until now my Bay Area-standard for puppetry resided at the Storybook Puppet Theater of Children's Fairyland in Oakland 

However, Zanzibar is different. It's full blown Broadway fairy dust. I never dreamed puppet shows could involve 7,500 watts of stage lights, two years of production, 22 hand-crafted puppets and tri-dimensional sets. 

Honestly, after reading the New Yorker's review of Basil Twist's Petrushka puppet-show-turned-puppet-ballet, I was very jealous that the Bay Area failed to offer such shows. But now I feel much better. 

What Zanzibar offers is very different from Basil Twist's but it definitely deserves praise and applause for the professionalism and artistry of the show. 

Even before the curtain opened to their production of Cinderella at the Starlight Room of the Sir Francis Drake Hotel in San Francisco, there was a magical buzz in the air. Dark room, purple lights, massive puppet theater stage with velvet and rhinestone curtains, symphonic music from Prokofiev's Cinderella ballet and Gounod's Faust opera. 

My two girls wanted to get up-close throughout the half-hour that the show lasted; they wouldn't take their eyes off the stage. Everything was so well done, the different voices on the puppets, the deep three-level sets with Christmas light curtains, the music, it was just a big treat. 

Interestingly enough, I saw quite a few adults without children in the audience.