Review
San Diego Union-Tribune
| January 17, 2005
| What's not to like about life the K way?
| By James Hebert STAFF WRITER/January 17, 2005
| "Life: A Guide for the Perplexed"
| 8 p.m. Wednesdays-Saturdays; 2 and 7 p.m. Sundays; additional performance 2 p.m. Saturday. Through Feb. 6.
San Diego Repertory Theatre's Lyceum Stage, 79 Horton Plaza, downtown $26.50-$41.50
(619) 544-1000, or www.sandiegorep.com.
| There's
an old saying that you can't make an omelet without breaking some eggs,
which might help explain why the stage of the Lyceum Theatre looked
like the aftermath of a riot at the henhouse Friday night.
It doesn't explain why, exactly, the eggs came to be broken during
a spirited bout of juggling that involved a frying chicken and a
5-pound bag of flour.
But then nothing much about the Flying Karamazov Brothers, who just
opened a three-week run at the San Diego Rep, lends itself to rational
analysis. The laughter and bedazzlement (along with the bad-joke
groans) these multithreat jesters evoke seem to originate in a part of
the brain disconnected from normal intellectual processes.
And anyway, the Brothers K aren't really looking to dish up an
omelet. The venerable troupe's latest creation, "Life: A Guide for the
Perplexed," is more of a souffle, whipped together from the traditions
of vaudeville and commedia dell'arte, infused with music, salted with
politics and served in a spirit of pure weirdness.
The four "brothers" (not actually related except for their
membership in the Brethren of Terrible Puns) are jugglers first and
foremost, although it's more than just balls and clubs they keep up in
the air; it's also an interconnected series of characters, songs and
story lines.
Although there were occasional drops of the literal and figurative
kind on opening night, it was startling that - in spite of some lulls -
the whole thing never went splat.
The eggs were another matter, and their presence hinted at the
devotion of the troupe's more knowing fans, even though K-rations have
been slim in San Diego in recent years. (The Karamazovs haven't
performed around here since an Escondido gig in 2000.)
As a standard fixture of their ever-evolving act, the brothers trot
out The Champ - this time, it was troupe co-founder Paul Magid, who
goes by the K-name Dmitri - to juggle three objects provided by the
audience.
Magid managed to keep the chicken, the flour and the
eggs (or at least the carton) aloft for the requisite count of 10, thus
avoiding a pie in the face. Which hardly would have been further
insult, since the flour bag was open and left him coated in white, like
a geisha in garter socks.
The story proper of "Life: A Guide" has to do with Dmitri's looming
midlife crisis. He denies he's having one, to which the grand book of
life that Dmitri is reading from responds, in its chatty way: "That's
what they all say. Didn't you just have a colonoscopy?"
The tome, written in "Judeo-Spanish" - his ancestral language,
Dmitri claims - serves as both a character and a kind of libretto for
the show's mock opera of midlife. It moves through a litany of rules
and lessons - "Life is a coincidence," "Life is a conundrum" - which
serve to launch one inventive, juggle-happy interlude after another.
The other brothers - Ivan (Howard Jay Patterson), Mark Ettinger
(Alexei) and Roderick Kimball (Pavel) - serve as a succession of foils
and fools. One of Alexei's characters is obsessed with the appearance
in his beard of white whiskers - or, as he calls them, "foreign white
invaders. Like in Iraq."
That's one of several fleeting political jibes, on topics from
taxes to the military, although the tactic seems designed more to
provoke and surprise than to proselytize.
One extended vignette is a dead-on impression of a scene from a
Bollywood movie musical, complete with Hindi-pop music and bad
lip-syncing. Beyond the mimicry, its tale of the love troubles of the
goddess Indira - who smells like new car leather, for reasons
unspecified - has a one-note quality that may not endear ya. (Because
all those bad puns deserve one more.)
Still, the juggling is likely to leave you goggle-eyed, and its
many variations, from frenzied group club-tosses to the playing of
music with the juggled objects, demonstrate the quiet, sublime rhythms
beneath all the dazzle.
Above all else, it's a funny show. In fact, even on a night when
the stage is paved with eggs, it's possible to say this definitively:
There are more yuks than yolks.
James Hebert: james.hebert@uniontrib.com; (619) 293-2040
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