Life: A Guide for the Perplexed

The Flying Karamazov Brothers at Edison Theatre

It was novelist Mary Ann Evans - a.k.a. George Eliot - who observed, in her 1861 novel Silas Marner, that “nothing is as good as it seems beforehand”. Nearly a century and a half later, I find that pithy quote leaping to mind as a capsule summary of the appearance this last weekend [October 14th, 2006] of the comedy juggling troupe The Flying Karamazov Brothers at the Edison Theatre.

It has been over eight years since the Karamazov's last wowed me with their unique combination of juggling, music, and comedy. Back then (March 6th of 1998, to be precise) it was a program titled Sharps, Flats, and Accidentals that they did with the St. Louis Symphony. This time around it's the ambitiously titled Life: A Guide for the Perplexed, which they perform all by themselves - unless you count the remarkably lifelike puppets in the second half of the program as extra Brothers.

This time around, alas, I was not wowed.

Part of the problem is that one member of the troupe - Howard Jay Patterson, a.k.a. Ivan Karamazov and a founding member of the company - had broken his foot and was obliged to hobble about the stage with a walker or balance on his one good foot. I don't know how long he and his fellow performers have been coping with that, but at least at Saturday night's show, his temporary disability hurt both his comic timing and his juggling. The opening club routine had to be restarted twice, and there was a generally hesitant quality about anything that required him to make his way around the stage.

That's regrettable, but understandable and forgivable. The Flying Karamazov Brothers don't have understudies. When disaster strikes, they're obliged to make the best of it. Less forgivable were the numerous technical snafus that plagued the evening: follow spots that didn't follow, wireless microphones that weren't turned on, and a key prop that simply didn't work.

The last is especially unfortunate since the prop in question - a six-octave circular electronic percussion instrument called the “Juggletron” (pictured above) - is the centerpiece of the first act finale. What's supposed to happen is that the Karamazovs stand inside the contraption and play four-part harmony on it by juggling clubs and bouncing them off the tuned pads. It should have been a striking combination of music and motion, but when half of the pads simply refused to sound, the overall effect fell flat.

It seemed to me, in short, that the company didn't get the kind of tech support it should have from the Edison's staff.

The script itself is also problematic. Written by founding member Paul Magid (Dimitri Karamazov) during a 2005 Italian vacation, Life: A Guide for the Perplexed is based in part on a the tract A Guide for the Perplexed by the medieval philosopher Maimonedes (whom Magid claims as “a distant relation”). The attempts to draw parallels between life and juggling are fair enough - I know I often complain of having “too many balls in the air at once” - but the inclusion of episodes from the life of Krishna are somewhat baffling. Granted, the idea of staging those episodes as Bollywood musical numbers is clever, but I doubt that most Western audiences will know enough about The Mahabharata to appreciate most of the jokes. I certainly don't and, judging from the audience response, I was far from alone.

That said, quite a lot of Life: A Guide for the Perplexed was entertaining and even enlightening. There was, for example, Shakespeare's “Seven Ages of Man” soliloquy set to rock music and illustrated by increasingly complex ball juggling routines by the youngest Karamazov, Roderick Kimball. With each successive age, the number of balls being juggled increases until, at one point, Kimball was actually working with six at once; most impressive.

Balls also figures in a perfectly timed table-juggling routine that opens the second act, which also suffered from fewer technical snafus and included the always-entertaining “jazz” routine in which the Karamazovs pass clubs back and forth in patterns that are literally invented on the spot while keeping up a running line of generally quite funny patter. The “Dimitri's Gamble” segment - in which Magid has to juggle three items chosen by the audience - was also great fun, even if the three items in question (a hub cap, a Slinky and a bizarre gag item consisting of a bag with a small motor inside and a fake squirrel tale sticking out of the top) presented an essentially impossible challenge.

On the whole, though, Life: A Guide for the Perplexed came across as rather rough and even unfinished - not at all the sort of thing one expects from a seasoned, award-winning troupe like the Flying Karamazov Brothers. Let's hope they return again in less than eight years and bring a more polished show with them.

Until then, I will continue to be perplexed.

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