The Flying Karamazov Brothers have been doing their thing for an awfully long time. They started their comedic juggling act in April 1973, honing their craft at Renaissance faires and on the streets of Santa Cruz and San Francisco. By the 1980s they had taken their act to Broadway, appeared in an acclaimed juggle-centric version of The Comedy of Errors at Lincoln Center and co-starred in the movie Jewel of the Nile. By that time the original Karamazov crew had grown from a duo to a quintet, with each new arrival taking on the stage name of another character from Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov.
Since then many Brothers (none of them related) have come and gone. They’ve long since run out of names from the novel, so heretofore unknown Karamazov Brothers have popped up with various Russian or vaguely Russian-sounding names. Now the only founding member left is Paul Magid, alias Dmitri Karamazov, and he recounts the history of the group at San Jose Repertory Theatre in the world premiere of 40 Years of Wandering, Juggling, and Cheap Theatrics.
You might think a show like this would feature the greatest hits of the troupe’s act over the years, maybe even a reunion. In fact it turns out to be more like a lecture. Magid stands at a podium reading his account of the group’s genesis, career highlights, all the cool people they met, and all the buses they bought. A slideshow of old photos accompanies the narrative, plus clips from The Comedy of Errors and some paper commercials they did. On opening night Magid had to poke his head out to tell us not to stay and watch the commercials, because it was actually the intermission.

The allure of the ads may be indicative of how starved the audience was for actual juggling in this particular show. Magid and three other Karamazovs perform bits of the act from time to time to illustrate its evolution, but most of the time it’s just Magid reading aloud. He’s an entertaining raconteur, euphemistically referring to lovers as “hats” and drugs as “glasses,” but the show, directed by Alan Cohen, feels loose and under-rehearsed. On opening night Magid lost his place a lot and the jugglers dropped more objects than usual.