Adults Only

Think about it--a dirty puppet show. An evil puppet chains a lissome nude to a pillar and tickles her to death with a long pink feather. A vast bat helps tear the clothes off an undulating stripper, then flies away with her. A bawdy Balinese girl is seduced in a swimming pool. Bare-breasted beauties hang in bird cages over the audience, or parade around the stage, heaving, wiggling, sighing, shaking, and saucing the house.

The show, called Poupees de Paris, is modeled after the revues at Paris' Lido and Folies Bergere, and it is the smash hit of the Seattle World's Fair. Costing $200,000 to produce, it is a spectacle bathed in dancing waters, fireworks and rain. The puppets--131 rubber and plastic females, seven wooden males--are about three feet high, and no expense has been spared in fitting them out; some of the miniature gowns cost as much as $2,000 apiece and were designed by Balmain. Star puppets resembling such people as Mae West, Charles Boyer, and Liberace speak with the recorded voices of the stars themselves.

Poupees de Paris was started by a couple of vaudeville puppeteers named Sid and Marty Krofft, whose family experience in the craft goes back five generations in Greece. They mounted their first nude puppet show for $40,000 in an out of the way nitery in the San Fernando Valley last year. The place had only 90 seats, but in the Poupees' six-month run they drew more than 50,000 people and grossed $112,000. Another production is now in its ninth week in Hollywood, and the Kroffts plan to open still another in Manhattan next fall.

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