Vermont’s landmark Bread and Puppet Theater performs its “Man = Carrot Circus” for Free on Cambridge Common, near the intersection of Massachusetts Avenue and Garden Street in Cambridge, Massachusetts, at 6 tonight, Friday, Sept. 2, 2011.
The all-ages show includes the company’s signature giant puppets and is a fun grab-bag alternating between thoughtful dances, including a memorial to Iraq and Afghanistan war dead, and bright, boisterous satires of current events from President Obama’s “Race to the Top” education policies to the crappy economy. The past few years have also seen the company take up wonderfully madcap Broadway musical parodies.
That said the version of the circus that we saw in Glover, Vermont, in July was one of the company’s weaker efforts (though we saw the show very early in its run, so it has certainly been revised since then). Schumann’s symbolism is often powerful because it comes perpendicular to its subject. But the title analogy of man being like a carrot didn’t gel—particularly in a skit straining to draw parallels between the lives of people (or are we just talking about “man”?) and carrots: “Man gets a job and moves to Connecticut with a summer home in Vermont. Carrot is picked and gets a job.” “Man is retired. Carrot is sold.” “Carrot is eaten and man dies.” “They both return to the dirt.” The similarities aren’t enough, and the leaps of logic aren’t illuminating enough to make the analogy work.
Photos by The New England Journal of Aesthetic Research.
