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San Diego Union-Tribune
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January 17, 2005
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What's not to like about life the K way?
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By James Hebert STAFF WRITER/January 17, 2005
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"Life: A Guide for the Perplexed"
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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.
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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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