The Muppet performer who co-wrote “Muppets Haunted Mansion” is currently set to write, direct and star in a series centered around Dr. Teeth & the Electric Mayhem for the streaming service Disney+.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
For nearly seven decades, The Muppets have entered the homes and hearts of audiences around the world, bringing laughter, adventure and a whole lot of joy along with them. In the mid-1950’s, their leader, the late Jim Henson, created iconic characters like Kermit the Frog and Rowlf the Dog that would remain staples of pop culture to this day. Let’s face it, The Muppets are timeless, and many of them feel as real as you or I.
Bill Barretta, who joined the renowned troupe of artists a year after Jim’s untimely death in 1990, would inherit some of Jim’s most beloved roles including Rowlf, Dr. Teeth, Swedish Chef and Mahna Mahna — and indeed they are big shoes, or rather butts (because they’re puppets!) to fill. Barretta is perhaps best known, however, for creating and performing his own characters that include Pepe the King Prawn, Johnny Fiama and Bobo the Bear.
Like many die hard-fans, Barretta was introduced to The Muppets at an early age.
“I’m kind of a broken record, I’ve probably told this story many times,” Barretta told The New School Free Press on a Zoom call. “My brother [Gene Barretta] was kind of the orchestrator of our lives. He was interested in arts, drawing, making movies, and Jim Henson. Sesame Street was huge in 1969 and he was drawn to these new puppets. So, he actually wrote to Jim Henson, fearlessly as a kid and said, ‘how do you make your Muppets?’ Jim wrote back and sent instructions on how to make a Muppet!”
Bill, who has performed with The Muppets for over 30 years, wears many hats, and many different bodies on his hands.
“I was always interested in performing and entertaining people,” Barretta explained. “My goal wasn’t to be a puppeteer; my goal was to be an actor.”
Puppeteering and acting are but just a few skills a Muppet performer must hone to do their job.
“There are many aspects to what the Muppets do,” Barretta told the Free Press. “A lot of people think of it as ‘what voice do you do?’ As Frank Oz would say, that’s probably only about 10% of it. It’s an interesting dance we do. Literally sometimes we dance.”
There are a lot of moving parts to executing a Muppet performance, making it a complicated and collaborative effort. Humans are often only born with two arms and Muppet performers are no different. With one hand up a puppet’s butt, and one controlling the puppet’s left limb, each performer needs another puppeteer to operate the right.
“We see what the camera sees,” Barretta said. “We’re helping the director make the characters look good in the frame by how close they are, how far away, how much the audience isn’t supposed to see, the angle so it doesn’t look like the eyelines are off, a lot of the technical stuff, and then there’s the acting. We sing, we act, we try to figure out where we are, just like a person would do, except it’s coming through our arms.”
A Muppet performer has to be all-encompassing as acting, singing, dancing (apparently), puppeteering and character development are all part of the job.
“We’re not great singers, we try, and that’s part of the charm of the Muppets,” Barretta laughs. “They’re not supposed to be great singers, they kind of, hopefully get by.”
Barretta, who grew up in Yardley, PA, found summer work as a teenager at Sesame Place, a local Sesame Street-themed amusement park, where he befriended fellow coworker Brian Henson, Jim’s son.
“We were sweeping up cigarette butts and cleaning toilets, we became friends and kept in touch,” Barretta said. “It was about 10 years later, his father passed away, I was living in New York studying acting with Sanford Meisner, we reconnected. When I moved out to California, he was going to make a show called ‘Dinosaurs’ on ABC, and I just begged to audition, or pull cords or cables, whatever I could do to be close to the business, and I happened to get the part of the dad. There, I was working with other Muppet performers who were on the show. There were hand puppets on the show as well as these big ‘walk around’ characters, and that’s what I was. Occasionally when I wasn’t doing that, I was trying to watch them, and learn and assist.
From there I became friends with people, and we would play. It’s all about playing all the time. I felt comfortable having fun, and we just got along. I don’t know when it happened, but at some point, I did a voice that reminded someone of Rowlf the Dog. They were thinking about looking for a Rowlf, it was a very sensitive subject because it was Jim’s first big character. I built a really bad version of Rowlf on my own, they didn’t give me the part, but they said ‘oh, well let’s bring him in on some things.’ This all came out of Sesame Place, really.”
Many have passed through the gates of Sesame Place for employment, but not many of them went on to become Muppets. Nonetheless, there must be something in the water at the Pennsylvania amusement park.
“It wasn’t just me who came out of Sesame Place,” Barretta said. “Three of our friends and my brother also have done well in the industry. My friend Michael Newton is a producer, we’ve worked together out here [in Los Angeles]. Two other guys, Mark McCorkle and Bob Schooly, are executive producers and creators of Kim Possible and a lot of Disney animation stuff. There’s my brother with his career, and there’s John Tartaglia, who is a huge Muppet performer now. He’s the executive producer of the new Fraggle Rock. So, a lot of people came out of Sesame Place, and that’s really fun!”
Last October, “Muppets Haunted Mansion” was released on Disney+ to critical acclaim. The special, which, surprisingly, is The Muppets’ first foray into the realm of Halloween-themed content, stars Baretta as Pepe the King Prawn and original Muppet performer Dave Goelz as Gonzo the Great. The duo spend a night at the infamous titular mansion, where they encounter special guests, chills and spooks along the way. The series, which was co-written by Barretta, frequent Muppet collaborator Kirk Thatcher and Kelly Younger, incorporates classic elements of both the ride and the original Muppet Show which is sure to satisfy fans from each realm.
“The Muppets Studio was really a big part of how we thought we should approach this,” Barretta said. “First it was, ‘well, we should come up with a Halloween special.’ Then it was, ‘well maybe we should connect it to the mansion in some way. Can we do that?’ There’s a lot of different things going on at Disney, you don’t know who’s doing what project. The timing was right for us to be able to access the mansion. Because there are different mansions in different parks, the preference was not to put us in the park mansion, but to say, ‘here’s the mansion that bloomed all these other mansions.’ Our amazing production designer incorporated things from all of them in our house. It was our own mansion, but the ‘wink’ was, you’re going on a ride.”
Barretta, who played a large role in the creative development of the special, is currently one of three executive producer’s behind “Muppets Mayhem,” an upcoming series he co-created with “The Goldbergs” creator Adam Goldberg, and Jeff Yorkes. The show will follow Dr. Teeth and the Electric Mayhem as they attempt to record their long overdue first album and is slated for release on Disney+. The trio are currently writing the series with several other writers including Julie Bean, Hannah Friedman and Crystal Shaw. Barretta remains tight-lipped about what fans might expect in the upcoming series.
“It’s about the band making their first album and there’s this music executive that’s trying to wrangle them,” Barretta said. “In the broadest sense, that’s what it’s about. We get to know them better. It’s crazy and fun, and I’m sure we’ll have lots of cameos to stick in there. It’s one of my favorite writing experiences actually, it’s been really good.”
Barretta will play Dr. Teeth, one of many roles he inherited from original Muppet master Jim Henson. Other iconic characters who have had Barretta’s hands up their butts also include Swedish Chef, Rowlf the Dog and Mahna Mahna.
“I could never be those characters, really. They’re not me.” Barretta explained. “These characters that I created or have been a part of creating, are a part of me. So, it’s the same with Jim. Swedish Chef, Rowlf the Dog, Dr. Teeth, they’re all a part of Jim in some way. First, I have to tell myself ‘you’re never going to be them, so don’t pretend to be.’ But if I can find the heart, the soul and the motivation behind these characters, and try to interpret that part of what Jim did, if I can find the essence of what each one of these characters is based on what I’ve seen Jim do, then I feel like I can continue to allow them to grow, as long as I’m true to the original essence of them.”
Muppet characters certainly are extensions of their creators, and this remains true with Barretta and his own.
“Bobo is probably the most like myself,” Barretta told us. “The way that I usually put it is that he just can’t believe he’s allowed to be out in the world, that people haven’t put him in prison for being out at a restaurant. He’s just grateful to be a part of something, and that’s really me. I’m so grateful to be a part of such an amazing group, and an iconic, historical group of characters. So that’s me, the guy who came in late.”
Bobo the Bear debuted in 1996 on “Muppets Tonight.”
“His voice has this gravel,” Barretta said in Bobo’s voice. “The only reason I did Bobo, was because no one was doing Rowlf, and no one had done Dr. Teeth for a while. It was like my personal tribute to a Jim voice because there weren’t other people doing that in other characters when I started.”
Perhaps Barretta’s most well known character, Pepe the King Prawn, was based on his wife’s aunt, who is from Spain, the puppeteer told the Free Press.
“She would always put an ‘okay?’ at the end of her sentences,” Barretta explained, switching momentarily to Pepe’s voice. “I took that and her characteristics and added a part of myself which I think is the ego. I don’t put it out there, but we all have one.
Johnny Fiama is based on my father and grandfather. Not the most educated guys in the world, but they both were musically driven. Although my father never entered the music business he could sing beautifully. My grandfather was an amazing dancer, but was never a dancer, right? Both sides of my family were innately musical. That’s part of Johnny. It’s still me, because they’re huge parts of who I am. So, that feeds Johnny, as well as Johnny thinking he’s a contemporary of like, Tony Bennett or Frank Sinatra, although he’s never met them. He may have served them soup at a restaurant or something.”
Since joining the Muppets over three decades ago, Barretta has seen many of the group’s iconic characters change hands, most recently and prolifically with Matt Vogel stepping into the role of Kermit the Frog, a character he inherited from original Muppet performer Steve Whitmire, who inherited the character upon the death of Jim. He created characters like Rizzo the Rat and Lips, a member of the Electric Mayhem. Whitmire was dismissed from the Muppets in 2017 and audience reactions to Vogel’s performance as Kermit have been mixed at best.
“It’s hard,” Barretta said. “There’s always been this core group of performers who have been doing these characters that then got handed down in different ways. But it’s about the dynamics and relationships under the puppets that’s really important, that’s what feeds these characters that are up in the frame. My relationship with Steve can never be replaced. The dynamics we had with Pepe and Rizzo, and Kermit and Pepe, there’s nothing like it for me, and that can never change.
It takes a long time I think, for any of us to feel like it’s okay to let these characters grow and change. There has to come a point where you go ‘okay, I have to let it become part of me now and let myself feed the character.’ Stop doing an imitation, trust that you’re going to maintain the essence of that character, play and let things happen. Otherwise, the character is stuck, all he is, is an imitation. With Matt having to take on what Steve did and Steve having to take on what Jim did, it’s the same thing. When I first heard Steve’s Kermit, I just didn’t hear it right away. I thought, ‘who’s that?’ To me, there’s a very clear difference, for a new generation, there’s a very clear difference between Matt and Steve.
I think Matt has actually gone back to something that sounds a little closer to Jim. I think it’s still developing and growing, and he’s still working on it all the time. You can imagine the pressure he must feel. I’m not saying it’s better, but it’s his take and approach to Kermit. Steve’s Kermit is phenomenal, how could anyone think it could be replaced or changed? I miss him, but I love Matt, he’s also a brother. I’m encouraging him all the time, and I think he’s doing an amazing job.”
The prospect of seeing what lies ahead for the Muppets is indeed exciting.
“I think there’s something to branching out these characters more,” Barretta said. “I love being able to explore and see what other people do with characters they’ve taken on and are fortunate to be able to present again. I think there’s so much more fun to be had.”
You can stream a plethora of Muppet content, including “Muppets Haunted Mansion” at Disney+ now.
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I love these Muppet articles. Keep it up!