Keeping All the Notes in the Air

They’ve been sliced by sickles, burned by torches and bashed with any number of blunt instruments, but those renowned zany jugglers, the Flying Karamazov Brothers, are reasonably sure to avoid bloodshed in their latest touring show, a family-friendly evening of musical madness called “Sharps, Flats and Accidentals” playing four Southland venues.

The tour will be at McCallum Theatre in Palm Desert on Thursday, at Escondido’s California Center for the Arts on Friday and at the Alex Theatre in Glendale on Saturday as part of the Alex’s new “Chaplin” family series. It ends Jan. 28 at Pepperdine’s Smothers Theatre in Malibu.

Filled with the astonishing juggling feats, vaudevillian comedy and theatrics that have taken the troupe to Broadway, film and TV, the revue includes such excerpts from past shows as a black-tie and tutu ballet, cardboard box percussion and Japanese fan dancing. It revolves around the Brothers’ fantasy that they are “the new musicians of the 21st century,” said Paul Magid, whose Karamazov alias is Dmitri.

(The members of this Washington-based quartet are not actually related. The name was inspired by the title of the Dostoevsky novel.)

“Our contrivance [in the show] is that we, as modern, innovative musicians, have figured out what music needs to proceed into the 21st century: to be visual as well as auditory.” He added, “Then of course, we go completely off on irrelevant and irreverent thoughts on the whole thing.”

In one rock ‘n’ roll number, Magid plays the bass line on drum pads “set on a walker like an elderly person would use.” Howard Jay Patterson (Ivan) “plays sort of lead guitar” by bouncing balls off drum pads, Michael Preston (Rakitin) “plays the horn line on the floor piano, like the one in the movie ‘Big’ ” and Sam Williams (Smerdyakov) “is the drum.”

Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy” is given the Brothers’ “passionate” touch, with drum pads worn inside hockey helmets that, when struck, sound computerized notes. “We play Beethoven while beating ourselves senseless with clubs,” Magid said.

The most difficult number? It isn’t the ballet, in which the troupe memorably plies and jetes while wearing black-tie above the waist and frothy pink tutus below. It’s Bach’s Two-Part Invention in D-Minor. It took six months to learn, Magid said, because they had to figure out how to hit every note by “juggling over a marimba.”

Although there is always an element of danger in the Karamazovs’ shows, especially when the quartet defies gravity with lethal objects, Magid said this show, an expansion of a revue the company began performing with symphony orchestras in 1995, is mostly musical. “The only way we’ll get hurt is if we bash ourselves with a club.”

Or if they contract salmonella. All Karamazov shows include “The Gamble,” a segment in which the troupe accepts potentially “unjuggleable” objects from the audience. This challenge has led to such bizarre offerings as a plucked raw chicken, a pig stomach filled with lime jello and slimy fish. “We got a 9-foot octopus once,” Magid said.

Not surprisingly, juggling is not just juggling to the Karamazovs. “Look at the Earth, the sun and the moon,” Magid said. “Or, look at any L.A. freeway. It’s all a ballet of movement and relationship. So, in a way, juggling is almost as true a metaphor for life as one could imagine.”

* “The Flying Karamazov Brothers: Sharps, Flats and Accidentals,” McCallum Theatre, 73000 Fred Waring Drive, Palm Desert, Thursday, 7 p.m., $15-$27, (619) 340-ARTS, (619) 220-TIXS; California Center for the Arts, 340 N. Escondido Blvd., Escondido, Friday, 8 p.m., $16-$36, (800) 988-4253; Alex Theatre, 216 N. Brand Blvd., Glendale, Saturday, 8 p.m., $22.50-$29.50, (800) 233-3123; Smothers Theatre, Pepperdine University, 24255 Pacific Coast Highway, Malibu, Jan. 28, 8 p.m., $27, (310) 456-4522.