Old Show in Manhattan

Theatre of the Piccoli (produced by Cheryl Crawford) is--mechanically speaking--the world's greatest marionette show. Last seen on Broadway in 1934, Vittorio Podrecca's marionettes returned last week to demonstrate once more an art whose masters require 20 years of apprenticeship. No suitcase theatre, but a vast marionet-work involving three miles of string, over 800 wooden performers and 20-odd flesh-&-blood puppeteers, the Piccoli offers a bill as long and elaborate as a Broadway revue.

For puppet-actors, it proves too elaborate. A puppet Cinderella needs more than a fairy godmother's wand to make it come alive. All the Johann Strauss music in the world cannot make puppets waltz with Alt Wien charm. When they imitate human beings, they come to grief.

But when they travesty them, they are delightful. The Piccoli take-off of a red-hot Negro jazz band going into spasms and contortions of rhythm is brilliant burlesque. So is their exaggeratedly alcoholic and rumba-ridden picture of a Havana nightspot. And the temperamental concert pianist, frenziedly pounding away at the Second Hungarian Rhapsody, affectedly fiddling with his coat tails, orchidaceously turning the pages of his music, is not only a miracle of string-pulling, but a hilarious parody of 1,001 humbugs who have infested the concert halls of the world.

Compared to the Piccoli's mechanical perfection, a puppet Pinocchio which also opened on Broadway last week merely strings along. But as a children's show (which the Piccoli primarily is not) it has its own naive, storybook charm. Unlike the Walt Disney cinema, it does not play ducks & drakes with the Collodi story.

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