Penn State alumnus designed the puppets of 'Avenue Q'

Penn State alumnus Rick Lyon performing on stage as the character Nicky in 'Avenue Q.' Lyon created the puppets for the show.

University Park, Pa. -- Penn State alumnus Rick Lyon came to puppetry as organically as an apple comes to a tree. Since the age of 9, Lyon has been creating puppets, and after majoring in theater at Penn State, he went on to work closely with Jim Henson (of Muppet fame) and worked for 15 seasons on the children's show “Sesame Street.”

Lyon is the designer and creator of puppets for the Broadway musical "Avenue Q," the touring production of which visited Penn State's Eisenhower Auditorium on Oct. 6 and 7. For photos from opening night at Eisenhower Auditorium, visit http://live.psu.edu/stilllife/2152.

He said he was drawn to puppets at age 5, and took up the hobby of creating them a few years later.

“Like so many kids, I was enamored with the work of Jim Henson with the Muppets,” Lyon said. “(Puppetry) was just something I always did. It always held my imagination.”

Beyond puppetry, though, Lyon said he was drawn to performance. As a young man he performed shows in high school, at church and in other places, with his puppets as his cast. When he was at Penn State as a theatre major in the mid-1980s, Lyon, who described himself as “thin and kind of dorky-looking,” got extensive acting experience because his looks made him “castable as a character-type.”

“While I was there (at Penn State), Helen Manfull, one of my professors in the theatre program, got wind of the fact that I was involved with puppetry and encouraged me to do performances at the Central Pennsylvania Festival of the Arts (in State College, Pa.),” Lyon said.

His exposure at the arts festival and his work with Manfull, who had him tour two schools in the State College area each week as a student, sparked in Lyon a serious interest in a career in puppetry.

“To that point I had never even met someone who was a professional puppeteer. I’m never satisfied with doing something half-way, so I sought professional training,” he said.

He trained in Connecticut at the Institute for Professional Puppetry Arts; through them, he connected with Henson’s production company and ended up working for 15 seasons on Sesame Street.

“Avenue Q,” he said, was born of his work with the show’s writers, Robert Lopez and Jeff Marx, whom he met through an acquaintance.

“’Avenue Q’ started off as a satire of ‘Sesame Street,’ but it really is much more than that. It’s built on the fondness that people have for those types of characters, but the characters are put into adult situations,” Lyon said. “’Avenue Q’ is the guide to navigating young adulthood done in the same sort of genre as ‘Sesame Street,’ but it’s not all about wise-cracks. It is a show with heart; it makes you care about the characters.”

Lyon has worked in the past as one of the actors in the production, singing and performing with multiple puppets during each show.

"My experience (as an actor) at Penn State prepared me for that," Lyon said. "When performing a role, puppeteers are actors -- they're not just people who are moving a puppet around. They have to dance, sing, act and manipulate the puppet all at the same time. It's a complicated process."

After debuting in March 2003 to sold-out houses at the Vineyard Theatre in New York City, the musical rocketed to Broadway, opening there for the first time on July 31 of the same year.

As the show was hitting it big on Broadway, Lyon said Manfull, his old professor from Penn State, reached out to him.

“(Helen Manfull’s) husband Lowell, who also was a professor of theatre at Penn State, had been sick and passed away while we were doing the show on Broadway. I got a card from Helen, and it was postmarked on the day before Lowell passed. It was a wonderful note; she said ‘we always thought you would be doing something great.’ That flattened me,” Lyon said. “I never knew how to write back. (Lowell) was sick and she still took the time to write.”

Since 2003, the show has expanded onto the global stage. Lyon has created more than 200 puppets for various touring productions of “Avenue Q” in the Americas, Europe and Australia; between that work and his life as the father of a 1-year-old, Lyon stays busy. Previous to “Avenue Q,” Lyon worked as an animatronic puppeteer on the movies “Men in Black” and “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles,” and on the Comedy Central television program “Crank Yankers.”