ArtsWatch

If you bring your 7-year-old son to see the Salzburg Marionettes, he’s likely to lean over and say, “After a few minutes I forgot they were puppets.”
The good news is that the puppets themselves seem to have forgotten, too. So deftly and intricately did they move Saturday night at the Kimmel Center’s Perelman Theater that when 10 puppeteers came out to accept applause at the end of The Magic Flute you almost wondered what they had to do with it all.
The conceit, though, takes some getting used to. Puppets doing opera. Actually, puppets lip-syncing opera. Well, okay, they weren't moving their lips. But they were moving every other part of their bodies, which is more than you can say for a lot of flesh-and-blood opera singers.
That ability to move – and glide and float – made the Queen of the Night’s first aria memorable in an otherworldly way. In a dark, elaborate sequined gown that would have made Priscilla Queen of the Desert mad with envy, she floated down onto stage against a deep bed of stars. It’s not that the idea was revolutionary. It’s just that it was so alarmingly well done. Other scenes created the illusion that the stage receded several yards back.
Those scary frozen-smile marionettes with rouged cheeks and jerky movements singing against flat painted backdrops? That’s kitsch compared to the Salzburgers (whose show was imported to Philadelphia by the Kimmel’s presenting arm).
One aspect of the concept that took me aback was the music. It was not live, but a recording, which when you think about it is understandable. How could any traveling troupe come with an orchestra and a cast of singers (including chorus)? But there is something disturbing about going to the opera and sitting in a room with 600 other people to hear a recording. It was a wonderful one, though, with Rita Streich singing the Queen of the Night, Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau as Papageno, and Ernst Häfliger as Tamino. Cuts in the Mozart’s score were chosen so well they came across only as minor artistic violations.
The bigger point is that this sort of treatment is best thought of as its own thing, a distinct genre that, although tracing its beginnings to 1913, seems especially well suited to our time. For one thing, it’s a friendly entry point to an art-form that needs all the entry points it can get. For another, if a 7-year-old can become engrossed watching big movies on the tiny screen of an iPod, Mozart staged by three-foot-high wooden figures doesn’t seem so absurd.