File puptcrit/puptcrit.0606, message 113


From: "Czechoslovak-American Marionette Theatre" <newsletter-AT-czechmarionettes.org>
To: puptcrit-AT-driftline.org
Date: Fri, 9 Jun 2006 15:40:27 -0400
Subject: [Puptcrit] "The Bass Saxophone" with Czech marionettes featured in


	"The Bass Saxophone" featured in today's New York Times!

In the June 9th, 2006  New York Times, Laurel Graeber (Family Fare) describes Czechoslovak-American Marionette Theatre's revival of "The Bass Saxophone" as a "revelation" and a "brilliant theatrical experience for all."

FORBIDDEN MUSIC, LIGHT IN A DARK ERA
By Laurel Graeber

The Nazis' extermination plans were not confined to human beings. They also hoped to murder music: styles deemed decadent, subversive, undisciplined, non-Aryan.

Those melodies are now resounding at Grand Army Plaza in Brooklyn, where the Czechoslovak-American Marionette Theater is presenting "The Bass Saxophone." This haunting 90-minute show, based on a short story by Josef Skvorecky, simultaneously celebrates the triumph of jazz and swing music and delivers a moving elegy for all the other sounds - not least the voices of poets and the laughter of children - that the Third Reich silenced.

The production, adapted and directed by Vit Horejs, the theater's founder, begins outdoors with live jazz. Cast members read radio announcements condemning swing music and dance and "instruments alien to the German spirit." Danny, the Czech hero, soon arrives at what the audience is told is an old hotel in Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia, where a performance "for Germans only" is to take place. Danny (Alan Barnes Netherton) feels torn when asked to help an elderly man cart a bass sax. Why aid the enemy in staging work it has itself forbidden?

What follows is not precisely a puppet show or a concert, though it has elements of both. The audience members, who play the patrons, follow the cast into Grand Army Plaza's arch and up spiral stairs to a level just under the roof. There, a huge draped bed functions as a stage, a resting place, a landscape or a lovers' nest, depending on the scene.

Actors and puppets - designed by Milos Kasal and Theresa Linnihan, they range from tiny marionettes to enormous figures - portray poignant vignettes from Danny's past and that of the fictional musicians. Each is accompanied by a musical number, though a lighthearted song like "Don't Sit Under the Apple Tree" becomes bitterly ironic when it follows the story of a girl Danny loved who marries someone else to hide her partly Jewish heritage.

Clearly, this is not a show for young children. But for those over 10, "The Bass Saxophone" - including also the talents of Deborah Beshaw, Steven Ryan, Ronny Wasserstrom, John Hyde, Colin Stetson and, at the performance I attended, Ed Rosenberg - is a revelation. Seen in the stone arch, with the city's sirens echoing outside, it serves as a vivid reminder that freedom can also be as fleeting and fragile as a song.

"The Bass Saxophone," through June 25 at the Grand Army Plaza memorial arch, at the intersection of Flatbush Avenue, Eastern Parkway and Prospect Park West, Park Slope, Brooklyn. Saturdays at 2 and 7 p.m.; Sundays at 2 and 5 p.m. Free; reserved seats available with a suggested donation: $18; students and 65+, $11; low income, $10. (212) 868-4444.

For the full  review, click to:
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/09/arts/09fami.html

Online ticketing: http://www.smarttix.com/show.aspx?showcode=BAS0


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