The Cosmic Bicycle’s delicate music-puppet piece Theatre of Little Broken Hearts depends hugely on the atmosphere of the company’s venue itself. Walk in from a gold-and-pink evening, still dazzled by the sun setting over the Brooklyn waterfront, and you are instantly thrilled by this low, dark, incense-filled hall where marionettes dangle and a thousand glass eyes peer from the gloom. The nonliving performers are carried ceremonially by their animators, and solemn mystery (we sit in actual pews) perfumes the air. It’s not quite enough, though, to waft away a rather less sacred odor: Broken Hearts, commissioned by a record company as a kind of live music-video for the latest Norah Jones release, always smells a bit like something made, rather obediently, to order.
The Jones album in question (Little Broken Hearts) exudes its own smoky atmosphere—a dreamy-voiced but pointedly angry set of songs about dying relationships and betrayal. Director-designer J.E. Cross (Jonny ClockWorks) imagines our puppet heroine, “Norah,” an Alice after Wonderland. Working in the Jan Svankmajer junkshop-and-taxidermy vein, Cross makes Norah a rickety Bunraku mannequin with a dress made of two birdcages. As Jones’s tunes play, puppeteers dressed in funereal steampunk finery take Norah through her sad adventures—up towers made from decks of cards, past her Jack of Hearts lover capering with a new doll. Ultimately, and despite a great deal of charm, the experience suffers from being set entirely to a CD. The onstage Norah, her eyes just golden cogs, seems like a real girl. It’s the canned music that never quite feels alive.—Helen Shaw