CAMT Reviews

• New Yorker, June 28, 2007, Once There Was A Village

• New York Times, November 4, 2007, Hamlet

• The Village Voice, January 30th, 2007, Once There Was A Village

• New York Times, June 9, 2006 Bass Saxophone

• New York Times, April 18, 2003, Don Juan

• United Press International, March 8, 2002, Hamlet

• New York Times, December 28, 2001, A Christmas Carol, Oy Hanukkah, Merry Kwanzaa

• Louis Lopardi, July 23, 2001, Richard III

• Talkin' Broadway, July 17, 2001, Richard III

• The Dance Insider, April 11, 2001, Prose of the Transsiberian and of Little Joan of France

• New York Times, March 31, 2000, Johannes Dokchtor Faust

• New York Times, October 22, 1999, The Fisherman's Clever Daughter

• New York Times, January 15, 1999, Rusalka, the Little Rivermaid

• Time Magazine, November 17, 1997, The Czechoslovak-American Marionette Theatre

The New York Times

June 9, 2006

Forbidden Music, Light in a Dark Era Top of Form

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 otake 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.