Peter the Great’s April Fool’s jokes
Of dwarves, arson, stammerers, and binge drinking.
Tag: The Physiology of Saint Petersburg
Organ-grinding tweets for March 2018
The latest barrel organ news from Hackney, London.
The Singing Organ Grinder’s tweet archive for February 2018
Another abundance of redundance. Featuring Russian, German and Italian puppetry, organ-grinding, and other nonsense.
How to perform El retablo de Maese Pedro aka El retablo de la libertad de Melisendra in Don Quixote with one puppeteer and a narrator/bottler
Whether Cervantes saw it or not, it is possible as he describes.
The secret life of organ-grinders
Speculation in French revolutionary fiduciary currency, the murder of the great British ballad-singer, & a revised date (1802) for the start of the supposedly post-Napoleonic emigration of Italian puppeteers & organ-grinders
Whatever became of Christian Lehmann, pioneering Petersburg Shrovetide zookeeper, Pierrot, illusionist, showman?
Newly uncovered evidence shows that, following the fire which destroyed his Russian theatrical business in 1836, he and his family pursued a career in London and Europe, before repeating their Petersburg triumphs in the USA and Australia. Also, a very curious copyright case.
Organ-grinder tweets for December 2017
More inanity from the Hackney organity.
Organ-grinder tweets for November 2017
More monkey mess from the peripatetic Homerton/Hackney barrel organ.
London organ-grinding tweets for October 2017
Lukewarm barrel organ-ish ephemera from Hackney, London and thereabouts.
On the French penchant for inventing things already in existence elsewhere
François Dominique Séraphin, Bourbon favourite and reputedly the father of ombres chinoises (shadow puppetry), began operating 15 years later than is generally thought, and may have copied his techniques from an itinerant Italian or a London Alsatian. Featuring the memoirs of the valet to the later Louis XVII, early descriptions of the delights of the renovated Palais Royal (including a pygmy show), jolly old Baron Grimm on the lamentable state of French opera, shadow plays, and marionettes, and William Beckford’s favourite designer of theatrical perversions.
