He’s been a Mormon, a punk and a hedonist. As a performer, he’s served up whores and virgins; Christ and a rapist; football players and drag queens; a skateboarding monkey, a cow and a beaver; communists, fascists and Progressive Conservatives. You could say he’s versatile, but that’d only make him laugh dirtily until you blushed. He’s been called both a genius and “Norma Desmond ready for her close-up.” For his productions, he draws on a bewildering variety of skills: singing, acting, writing, stand-up, improv, painting, sleight of hand and carpentry.

Ronnie Burkett is a puppeteer, one who builds his own marionettes and sets, who writes his own scripts and composes his own songs. Now nearing 50, he is considered the world’s premier puppet master. His new show, Ten Days on Earth—opening at CanStage this month—is already booked at the Sydney Opera House, as well as top playhouses in Brisbane, London, Vancouver and Vienna. He’s won an Emmy, an Obie and umpteen theatre awards—Puppeteers of America recently gave him their highest honour, which insiders (presumably knowing the absurdity of the phrase) call the Pulitzer of Puppeteering. He’s broken attendance records set by conventional dramas at small theatres in New York and Toronto, outpacing Rent and Angels in America. In the process, he’s become—to use a phrase he has applied to one of his puppets—a superstar diva. He has been known to berate critics and refuses to ever play in the U.S. again. “Politically, I hate Americans so much. They are the stupidest audiences on the planet.”

Burkett has built his international reputation—as all puppeteers do—on his ability to manipulate his marionettes. He stands above his puppets, each only a foot or two tall, unhidden by a scrim, moving all of them single-handedly, adopting a myriad of voices. His technique, honed over the past four decades, is impressive: in one production, a basset hound droopily schleps across the stage; in another, a girl figure-skates on a pond as gracefully as Dorothy Hamill.

Technical polish aside, it’s his scripts that set him apart: his sprawling stories typically feature at least 10 vivid characters hell-bent on giving us their perspectives on the world. His 2003 show Provenance is about a girl who travels to Europe to uncover the story behind a beloved painting. In the process, she passes through a brothel in Vienna, bohemian parties in Paris and high-society London; the painting’s history is mixed up with war, incest and rape. The show is an Old Hollywood–esque epic; it’s also a serious commentary on the purpose of art. But it never feels pretentious. Burkett presents his thoughts in palatable ways, philosophical tidbits squeezed between bad jokes and raunchy stories. He so animates his little blocks of wood that the audience ends up caring more about them than about most flesh-and-blood actors.

The critic who accused him of having Norma Desmond tendencies was on to something; like Sunset Boulevard’s silent-screen queen, Burkett loves melodrama. In the course of two hours, Provenance gallops through loyalty, betrayal, triumph, adversity, agony, ecstasy—the whole shebang. More, more, more is the aesthetic governing his work and his life—for Ronnie Burkett, too much is never enough.

Burkett is part class clown (in our interview, he did an impression of his Yorkshire terrier burping) and part serious artiste, veering wildly between the two extremes. He’s tall, with deep-set eyes that alternately twinkle and stare penetratingly. On a tour of his high-ceilinged studio in an old factory in Liberty Village, he introduces me to his assistant, Dina Meschkuleit, who’s manically lacquering papier mâché puppet heads. He shows me the carpentry shop, with its tiny jigsaw and odd assortment of tools. On the far wall, there are stacks of neatly labelled boxes (“Uncarved Hands and Feet” reads one, “Reject Paperclay Heads” another). “I’m a freak for organization,” he says as we proceed to a couch beneath a series of packed bookcases. The construction noises from outside the window make him wince, as does any mention of the schedule for his upcoming show. “We’ll get there, I hope,” he says with crossed fingers. Even while sitting, he’s not still for a moment.

Adopted shortly after birth (“for 10 days, I belonged to no one”—hence the title of his latest show) by a probation officer and homemaker in Medicine Hat, his mania for marionettes began at age seven. The P volume of the World Book fell open—or so the legend goes—at the entry for puppetry, which showed Bil Baird, the man responsible for the “Lonely Goatherd” puppet show in The Sound of Music. “My parents never said no to me [about puppetry], so I took that for a yes. My joke is that I’m sure my mom wished the book had opened to podiatrist or proctologist, but it didn’t, and well, here we are.”