Word: piccoli
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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...
...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...
...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...
...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...