Word: piccoli
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...been bewildered by the lavish amount of talent he has steadily produced. When in 1925 he went into bankruptcy, his day seemed done. But luck came again with Depression and he presented such money-makers as Dancer Mary Wigman, Hindu Uday Shan-Kar, the Singing Boys of Vienna, the Piccoli Marionettes...
...what Hollywood calls "class" audiences. Partly a masterpiece and partly a mess, I Am Suzanne is unique among this season's musical pictures because it strives for satiric fantasy instead of a high-priced combination of pornography and farce. Its most important actors are not humans but the Piccoli puppets (TIME...
...persuasive tricks. Its most entertaining personage is Novelist Christopher Jarret whose wife is hideous and mercenary. When she accuses him of overenthusiasm in their conjugal relation, Jarret is amazed. "Look in the mirror," he says, "and tell me it is anything but a disagreeable habit.'' The Piccoli (produced by Vittorio Podrecca). In a window on a miniature stage a four-foot wooden man dressed in the black velvet costume of Don Juan sings a glib, impatient seduction at a peasant girl. He shakes with emotion and lack of breath, turns from girl to audience on the high notes...
...Party." A lacquer-haired caricature of Negro Singer Josephine Baker, star of a "Little Tropical Revue," wiggles and shakes menacingly. In "The Bullfight," a wilder burlesque than the others, a hollow-eyed toreador fliply kills the bull with super-human mag nificence. Plump, beaming Impresario Vittorio Podrecca adapted his Piccoli ("The little ones") from traditional Italian marionets, hates to have them called marionets or puppets. Charles Dillingham first brought him and his little ones to Manhattan in 1923 when they failed dismally. Last year Podrecca came again, succeeded hugely, toured the country, ending this week in Manhattan. Sometime lawyer, author...
Unlike the Tony Sarg productions, no serious effort is made at realism. The puppets are a race apart, talented and entertaining, but with the temperament of a Pinocchio. It is scarcely possible to describe "The Piccoli" as a mere puppet show, it is rather a carnival, acted by an immense cast under the aegis of a group of maestros in the art of manipulating marionettes...