Freedom Fighters From Music and the Theatre Speak Out Against Authoritarianism and Mass Hysteria
A panel discussion on CHD TV a couple of days ago, moderated by Mary Holland, featured six artists from the worlds of music and theatre who provided a revealing inside look at how the plandemic has destroyed the performing arts. Yet, the takeaway is that there is considerable hope for the future.
Holland (who appears as a conductor in a fleeting second of the video if you look closely) mentioned that there were artists who were afraid to join her six panelists on the show for fear of reprisals. The first one in a fascinating lineup, versatile opera singer Lisa Eden, organized a benefit concert in Greenwich, Connecticut for Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s Children’s Health Defense organization and spoke truth to propaganda. She revealed that she’d suffered myelitis as a result of vaccines required for travel two decades ago. While there are classical artists speaking out against lockdowner restrictions and the lethal Covid injection campaign, their ranks seem to be slim at this point.
Eden has a medical exemption, but initially lost all her work in the performing arts, or as she terms it, “The carrot that gets people being ‘vaccinated.’ I think there was an agenda to shut down the arts in the manner that they did,” Eden asserts. She fled New York at the beginning of the lockdown: “I know Fauci from chronic fatigue syndrome and how he rebranded it, so I just left New York.”
When she returned, she was shocked to find that “My colleagues who stayed in New York were highly traumatized. There was this hypervigilance, people being afraid to be around you.”
The music director at her Connecticut church job “was deathly afraid of me,” as she recalls. He refused to let her sing unmuzzled when restrictions were lifted, required her to wear it when leading the choir, and to put it back on the second she wasn’t singing.
The priest at the church saw how ridiculous the situation was: in a “compromise,” she was eventually exiled to the side of the room opposite the music director as punishment for the crime of thinking for herself. “You’re being labeled as germy, or dirty, or not fit to be around people ” she recalled. “Meanwhile, this music director was on public transportation, on the train – you’re around ‘unvaccinated’ people all day.”
Later, Eden was able to sing with other ensembles including Lighthouse Opera, who didn’t make her “stand out like a scarlet letter.”
“I keep trying to come back to New York but the restrictions that persist, they’re requiring boosters now.” Eden mentioned how ubiquitous compliance with Covid theatre has become, beyond this city: “It’s a tightrope this whole time because of the polilticization, and the arts are highly liberal because it triggers things that have been programmed,” about what it means to be unjabbed. “I’m selfish, I’m horrible, I’m a granny-killer, all these really horrible associations.”
She also addressed the superspreader myth: “Another one of those propaganda/hypnosis words…singers were scapegoated as superspreaders. and singing is regarded as superspreader activity….used to curtail our right to worship and our freedom of assembly. I feel personally offended that we were scapegoated as somehow deadly and dangerous and called nonessential…there’s a lot of healing that needs to take place around this trauma that’s been inflicted on us….the trauma of propaganda. It’s made people fearful of each other, and fearful of normal activities.”
Like Eden, oboeist Gerry Reuter – the longest-tenured member of the Dorian Wind Quintet – was barred from work when the arts were criminalized during the lockdown. Reuter says that in the spring of 2021, his bandmates forced him to meet with them in Central Park since they were afraid to be indoors with him because he didn’t take the lethal Covid injection or comply with their requests that he subject himself to a meaningless PCR test.
As he tells it, a year later, the rest of the quintet were still afraid to meet with him indoors and then sent him a letter telling him he was being allowed to resign. A month later, this past July, he got the pink slip from the ensemble he’d played with for forty years.
Reuter related a hilarious moment from a rehearsal during the lockdown when the group members were playing fifteen feet apart from each other. One of them mentioned a MIT study that cited the oboe as being the superspreader of all wind instruments…when in reality the oboe is the one which requires the least air to play!
“I’m not surprised that they would fall in line with the narrative…it tells you a lot about how deep and real your relationships may not be,” says Reuter. He sees the experience of the past thirty-two months as character-building. “We have a whole new network of wonderful friends. something that comes from a place that’s really deep, not a matter of convenience.”
He was quick to give a shout out to St. Anthony of Padua Church in Fairfield, Connecticut and their music director Frank Maraci, who continued to program artists who refused the lethal injections. Reuter has also noticed that woodwinds are conspicuosly absent from many chamber music concerts since the lockdown.
Violinist Jeffrey Ellenberger lost his jobs at the Bar Harbor Festival, with the Masterwork Chorus and the New York Mandolin Orchestra. “The emotional pain of being around colleagues who think you’re contagious is so ridiculous,” he related. “The alienation is really staggering, but on the positive side there are groups like this,” he asserted, relating to his fellow panelists. Lately the now-politically marooned, former leftist Ellenberger has been playing a lot of house concerts. “It’s much better, but the scars will take awhile to heal over.”
Actress Dagmar Stansova was driving from her North Carolina home to Los Angeles, the first stop on a world tour, just as the lockdown was unleashed. She couldn’t resume after theatres reopened since she’s unjabbed. Her dad had been vaccine-injured, and her mother, a doctor, forbade her from taking the lethal injection. “I’m still a little bit in shock from betrayal from the industry,” she told Holland. Stansova, who has been a Screen Actors Guild member since 1981, is now “trying to create a new world.”
“It’s not like just going someplace and they want you to put a mask on, you just say, I’ll go somewhere else…all the people I knew in Los Angeles and the Screen Actors Guild, I know only one person who’s going the route I’m going. All the other people have the fake passports.”
Stansova spoke forcefully to the power of the arts: “Art can be used for good or evil…working in Hollywood, I realized that I was giving my life force to an agenda that I didn’t agree with. In the last couple of years when I saw certain shows normalizing myocarditis in children, I’d be like, WHAT???” It’s not only important for artists to be artists, but for all people to become more of an artist.”
Stansova defines an artist as “Someone who is available and capable of feeling…where we are right now, all this artificial intelligence and technocracy is the opposite of feeling, trying to remove us from our native human capacities…you can’t access good art without being connected to your feelings.”
“Propaganda is a skill…we have to be a skilful as they are at inverting the inversions that they have put out into the media,” she explained. “The communists regarded art as very dangerous. Art is something that can create the space for us to become more compassionate, more outraged if need be, so that we can process the chaos of being alive…maybe we can process all the grief, all the friends that we are losing, some of my friends who have passed away after the injections. Where we have our imagination in full play along with our logic, not just one or the other, we can find the compassion for all the people, including the people on the so-called other side. What they are going through, and the fear that they’re in, and the betrayal that we are going through…to find the compassion to rise above and be the expression of our best selves.”
Singer and Epoch Times reporter Enrico Trigoso, whose mother was murdered by the Pfizer shot, auditioned and was accepted by a bunch of choirs, but when they found out he didn’t take the injection, that killed those opportunities. In his dialogue with Holland, he focused on the commonalities between the lockdown and communism, and how communism targeted the spirituality implicit in the arts. Quoting Herbert Marcuse, he reminded how “Art subverts the dominant consciousness,” and how that can be weaponized.”
Actress and former Rockette Heather Berman was injured by the tetanus vaccine six years ago. Her activism was springboarded by a conversation with Dr. Pam Popper, founder of Make Americans Free Again and author of the first plandemic expose, the 2020 book COVID Operation.
“Being vaccine injured, there was no way that I was going to set and be masked for twelve to fourteen hours and get tested,” Berman insists. She discussed how the SAG/AFTRA “Return to Work” agreement was put into place without any input from the union rank and file. “It seemed to trickle down to all other entertainment…with daily testing, masks, completely covered up, hands, face, shields, like they were going to a hospital – I saw this whole thing playing out, OMG this was insane. They’re up to two boosters, this includes children! They were even going to test infants!
SAG/AFTRA have continued the Return to Work agreement through January of next year.
“We’re all told we don’t ‘make it’ until we’re on Broadway, in Hollywood or at Lincoln Center. That’s the lie,” Berman insists. “The more of us that gather, including those who have been injected – there are many with fake cards, plus those who got injected – we’re going to be a stronger front against this darkness that’s literally trying to obliterate us. Without the arts, what is humanity? I can’t imagine anyone would want to live on this planet without the arts!”
The Yiddish Fiddler on the Roof: More Relevant Than Ever
Believe everything you’ve heard about the Yiddish Fiddler on the Roof. The National Yiddish Theatre Folksbiene‘s production is fresh, the acting and singing are strong, the casting is smart and the music is both extremely dynamic and classy. Potentially vaudevillian moments are muted in favor of a gravitas that’s sometimes lush and sweeping, at other times austere and plaintive. At a time when people from Syria to Colombia are being forced from their homes to seek refuge thousands of miles asway, and when Jews from Pittsburgh to Poway, California are being murdered, this familiar old story has never been more relevant. And the fact that the narrative concerns daughters breaking free from patriarchal domination shouldn’t be overlooked either.
While the ongoing Manhattan run at Stage 42 marks the Yiddish version’s first American series of performances, Shraga Friedman’s Yiddish translation from the original English is not new: the Polish-Israeli actor and director debuted it in Israel in 1966. However, it is probably safe to say that despite the huge revival of Yiddish as a spoken language, the vernacular probably hasn’t changed much since then.
This is a long production, over three hours including a brief intermission, but it flies by. For non-Yiddish speakers (or those of us who only know terms of endearment and curse words), there are English and Russian supertitles – and some actual Russian sprinkled into the dialogue when the cossacks enter to stir up trouble. The entire cast seem at ease with the language throughout both the narrative and the musical numbers. Friedman’s translation not only rhymes but also pretty much matches the meter of the original songs, although a close listen reveals many instances where both the Yiddish and Russian take some clever poetic license.
As Cencral patriarch Tevye, Steven Skybell brings a curmudgeonly charisma but also an unselfconscious vulnerability to a role that in other productions all too frequently is done completely over the top. As his long-suffering wife Golde, Jennifer Babiak plays her cynicism as survival skill – and also gets to thrill the crowd with her vast, minutely nuanced, operatic vocal range. In a neat bit of casting, Tevye’s oldest daughter, Tsaytl (Rachel Zatcoff) towers over her shy, nebbishy would-be fiance Motl (Ben Liebert). The rest of the cast – notably Jackie Hoffman, as barely tolerated busybody matchmaker Yente, and Joanne Borts, as Tsayt’s namesake ghost of a grandmother – bring as much resonance as sardonic humor to what are in many cases multiple roles.
The music is rich and often symphonic in scope. Andrew Wheeler conducted the orchestra with remarkable restraint and attention to detail. The group only cut completely loose in the klezmer dance numbers, which were as boisterously chaotic as anyone would want. Clarinet wizard D. Zisl Slepovitch snuck from behind the curtain to the corner of the stage where he bopped and fired off an all-too-brief series of biting chromatic riffs. As the eponymous Fiddler, Lauren Jeanne Thomas sometimes mimes and sometimes plays, but either way her timing and dynamics are perfectly precise.
At last night’s performance, the two best numbers were the tantalizingly brief, rustically ambered Sabbath Prayer – a momentary showstopper for Bobiak – and a sweeping, lingering version of the bittersweet, saturnine ballad Sunrise, Sunset. If I Were a Rich Man gets translated as Ven ikh bin a Rotschild, along with some sly wordplay that’s not in the original. Hannah Temple’s accordion along with the trumpets of Clyde Daley and Jordan Hirsch, and Daniel Linden’s trombone, brought equal parts fire and poignancy to the traditional tunes, especially at the end.
Beowulf Borritt’s stark, minimalist set design creates a striking milieu for the people of Anatevka and the never-ending succession of trouble they have to face. In one of many subtle strokes of staging, a fabric backdrop seems to be repaired, between acts, in a way that would befit one of the central characters. And the simple change of language helps immeasurably in creating a defamiliarizing effect. So you think you’ve seen Fiddler? You should see this one. Shows are Tues-Sun, generally at 8 PM with matinees as well. While the performances have been selling out for months, discount rush tickets are sometimes available.
A Potentially Paradigm-Shifting Series of Women Performers at the New School
In conversation with the audience and performers at her potentially paradigm-shifting new series Women Between Arts at the New School yesterday, singer/actress/impresario Luisa Muhr contemplated the complexities of branding interdisciplinary works. How do you market something that resists easy categorization? Maybe by calling it what it is: outside the box. Considering the turnout, there definitely is an audience for what might be the only interdisciplinary series focusing on women performers whose work encompasses so many different idioms in New York right now.
When Muhr springboarded the project, she’d assumed that Women Between Arts would be one of at least five or six ongoing programs here. But this seems to be the only one at the moment – If there’s another, would they please identify themselves, because they could be doing very important work!
Dance on the same program as storytelling? Sure! Writer/choreographer Allison Easter wryly remarked that audiences at dance performances don’t mind being talked to. Her piece on the bill featured dancers Tiffany Ogburn and Paul Morland subtly and then explosively tracing Easter’s spoken-word narrative about a couple of American college girls intent on thwarting a would-be rapist on a train winding its way through the Alps.
Klezmatics violinist Lisa Gutkin proved to be the ideal headliner for a bill like this. Born and raised in a secular Jewish family in Sheepshead Bay, the songwriter/actress revealed an insatiably curious worldview that mirrored her sizzling musical chops, via excerpts from her one-woman show. Likewise, part of her eclectic background stems from the demands of being a highly sought-after sidewoman. Irish reels? OK. Tango? Si! Klezmer? No problem! She grew up with that culture, inspired by her immigrant grandmother, who would hitchhike upstate to her bungalow where she’d book artists like Pete Seeger to entertain her garment worker friends.
And Muhr illustrated her own, similarly eclectic background with wistful projections, a subtly humorous dance piece and poetry, following her own Greek immigrant great-grandmother’s journey as a refugee from Istanbul to Vienna. In pushing the boundaries of diverse idioms, a program like Muhr’s has the potential to spur the growth of new synapses for both audiences and performers.
The next Women Between Arts performance features songwriter Jean Rohe, choreographer Sasha Kleinplatz, brilliant carnatic violinist Trina Basu, singer/actress Priya Darshini and Brooklyn Raga Massive tabla player Roshni Samlal on January 7 at 3 PM at the New School’s Glass Box Theatre (i.e. the new Stone) at 55 W 13th St.
A Harrowing, Ferociously Relevant Mother-Daughter Conflict at the French Institute
While there’s nonstop drama and some actual physical violence in Nazmiye and Havva Oral’s No Longer Without You, a searing mother-daughter conflict currently in its US debut run at the French Institute/Alliance Française, its most serious fireworks are only alluded to. We don’t get more than a mention of the abortion, or passing references to the screaming matches and literal tug-of-war between religious Muslim mother and her willful daughter determined to escape the confines of what she feels is an antedeluvian, misogynist environment.
On a surface level, this is a feel-good story of female empowerment and triumph over adversity. A Turkish immigrant in Holland, Havva raises her Nazmiye with an iron fist in a strict religious household. Nazmiye’s father dies young and doesn’t figure much in this story: it’s clear who runs the show in this family. But Nazmiye doesn’t want an arranged marriage at age eighteen and a life of domesticity like her mom. So she leaves home, marries a foreigner, has a couple of daughters of her own, divorces and becomes a world-famous journalist and performer along the way. What’s not to be proud of?
Havva doesn’t exactly see it that way. In this performance piece, she’s less volubly critical than Nazmiye recalls, dredging up one childhood battle after another. And she’s withholding. What Nazmiye wants most is her mother’s love. In the piece’s most touching scene, Nazmiye recalls that despite the disputes and the terror of being dragged off by a teenage husband-to-be whom she doesn’t even like, the one place she feels secure is in her mother’s arms. And time after time, Havva keeps her at arms length.
Yet Havva is also anything but an ogre. Her traditional garb makes a stark contrast with her daughter’s scarlet dress. She’s calm, stolid, unassailably confident and someone who says a lot in a few aphoristic words. And she’s funny! As the piece progresses, it’s clear that the apple didn’t fall far from the tree, two indomitable women, each with big dreams. Daughter speaks in English, mother answers in Turkish, usually translated by Seval Okyay, who also provides gorgeous, haunting musical interludes with electric saz lute and a soulful, often plaintive voice. If there’s anything this performance could use more of, it’s Okyay.
While the cultural idiom here is specifically Muslim, the story is an all-too-familiar one: escapees from militant Christian and Orthodox Jewish environments tell the same tale. Beyond the breaking of one taboo after another – where Havva seems genuinely worried for her daughter’s soul, not to mention her own – the most shocking moment of all might be where Nazmiye asks what right a mother has to live vicariously through her daughter. Havva asserts that it’s perfectly kosher for a child to be the vehicle for a parent’s aspirations – or dashed hopes, perhaps. It’s another familiar dynamic. Obsessive Colorado pageant moms, psycho Texas football dads and harried Park Slope helicopter parents would find themselves more at home in Nazmiye’s childhood environment than they might think.
More poignantly, there are several “do you love me” moments: the answer may surprise you, like the ending, which is anything other than pat. But the one question that Nazmiye never asks, after all she’s accomplished, is “Are you proud of me?” One suspects the response would be more predictable.
Adelheid Roosen’s direction is everything the relationship isn’t: comfortable and familial, the audience seated on comfy cushions around the floor, living room style. There is also a little interaction with the audience, which is similarly welcoming and comforting and a serendipitous respite from the intensity of the performance. The final show today is sold out, but the Institute’s long-running events and concert schedule, including their legendary film series continues through the fall.
Sylvia Milo’s Powerful Biodrama The Other Mozart Goes Global
“They didn’t save my letters,” Sylvia Milo’s Nannerl Mozart muses early on in The Other Mozart, Milo’s witheringly relevant one-woman show now on world tour after a wildly successful three-year New York theatrical run. If you find the glass ceiling in music troubling, consider that it wasn’t until the Reagan era – irony of ironies – that an all-female rock band, the Go-Gos, achieved national prominence. For a woman instrumentalist in jazz, the challenges continue to be daunting. And you can still count the internationally known women orchestral conductors on the fingers of one hand. In that context, is it any wonder that Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and his dad tossed aside Nannerl’s responses to their breathless chronicle of touring their era’s great European concert halls?
Milo’s tragicomic biodrama about “Wolfie” Mozart’s lesser-known but reputedly just as talented older sister has already been performed in the Mozart family apartment in Salzburg; the Mostly Mozart Festival here in New York would be the logical venue for a triumphant homecoming. With a lithely luminous, charismatic presence and a balletesque grace in a physically taxing role, Milo transports the audience into a world of 18th century high society drama and intrigue that puts this era’s celebrity Twitter feeds to shame. The action is nonstop, so much that in the early going, her whirlwind delivery demands especially close attention. The dialogue, most of it drawn verbatim from the Mozart family’s archival correspondence, reveals that Amadeus was hardly the only drama queen in this story. That’s a family trait, and Milo dives into that for maximum entertainment value, juicy gossip and all, although it eventually takes its toll on pretty much everyone concerned.
The great tragedy is that Nannerl’s kid brother at least got the chance to pursue his art fulltime. Her mom – who, predictably, has been lost to history to an even greater extent – couldn’t wait to put Nannerl’s childhood dreams of stardom to rest and marry her off to some bigwig. Complicating those efforts is the Mozart siblings’ past as child stars. Clearly, Nannerl dreads the thought of having peaked at a young age after having been feted as a child prodigy alongside her brother while Father Mozart, desperate to escape his dreary dayjob, pulled out all the stops in trying to ride his kids’ talent all the way across the continent, and, ultimately, out of town.
Jealousy simmers while Nannerl busies herself with smalltown drudgery, cast aside by her father and brother in their headlong dash for fame, fortune and an increasingly elusive rich patron to facilitate all of that. Milo puts all of this in context, resulting in many of the performance’s most cruelly amusing moments. After all, in Enlightenment-era Europe, everyone knew that women’s fragile constitutions and similarly weak minds put all sorts of all-male activities, the concert tour among them, permanently off limits. Milo dredges up a couple of particularly ugly, piggish quotes from none other than Immanuel Kant and Jean-Jacques Rousseau to drive that home: compared to those two, Donald Trump may not be Simone de Beauvoir, but he’s definitely a cut above when it comes to misogynist prejudice.
Although Milo saves a particularly ironic twist for the very end, the conclusion of this tale isn’t as tragic as it could have been. History tells us that Nannerl Mozart was able to find some late-career redemption, such as that could have existed for her then. Widowed and supported by an inheritance, she earned respect as a teacher, salon operator and champion of her late brother’s works. Milo doesn’t address this, but one can only wonder if Nannerl could have achieved as much without living in her brother’s shadow.
The musical score, with spot-on musical direction by Nathan Davis deserves its own stand-alone release: it’s that good. Rippling, uneasily and vividly atmospheric original compositions for toy piano and music box by Phyllis Chen are juxtaposed with well-chosen, familiar excerpts from works by Mozart and also from Marianne Martines, a popular salonniere and composer in mid-1700s Vienna. What we don’t get is Nannerl Mozart’s own work: only a fragment of one of her compositions survives.
The Faux-Real Theatre Company Puts Their Original Stamp on an Ancient Greek Classic
The Faux-Real Theatre Company have made a name for themselves lately with their acerbic, punk rock-style takes on classic Greek theatre. Their versions remain true to the originals, employing the full text in translation while adding edgy musical and dance elements, not to mention mining the wry subtext of these works for contemporary relevance. Their version of Euripides’ The Bacchae winds up its run at LaMama‘s first-floor theatre on East Fourth St. with two sold-out shows tonight, March 19 and tomorrow the 20th at 7:30 PM. If you’re feeling lucky, a handful of standby tix might become available.
Interestingly, while this performance is very funny, it’s not as over-the-top as a real bacchanal. The theme is hubris, Dionysus raining down fire and brimstone on an upstart ruler and his subjects who’ve forsaken the old ways and no longer pay tribute to their erstwhile protector deity. Other than the two main lead roles and a couple of supporting characters, pretty much everybody else is confined to the chorus, so director Mark Greenfield gives them an elegant dance piece to keep the crowd attentive.
Andrew Bryce plays the wine god with a campy smirk. Throughout the play, the homoerotic subtext is underscored with very amusing results. All the women of Thebes off in the woods by themselves, in the grip of Dionysus’ spell? You do the math. And the sequence where the god examines rebellious ruler Pentheus prior to putting him in a dress and a woman’s wig is downright hilarious. PJ Adzima’s cold, deadpan, corporate portrayal of the doomed king makes an apt foil to the fun-loving but merciless deity. The one point last night where the audience broke into spontaneous applause was where Jy Murphy’s wise old Cadmus explains that without wine – the one thing that makes living bearable – there’s also no love, and no Aphrodite.
Tony Naumovski makes the most of his vaudevillian role as Cadmus’ buddy Tiresius, while the rest of the supporting cast are strong in their sometimes tightlipped, sometimes unselfconsciously grinning roles. Greenfield’s direction encompasses the group’s signature style of breaking the fourth wall: spectators are enticed with grapes and real wine (and grape juice for the non-Dionysan among us) as they take their seats. Naumovski, who also serves as musical director, has assembled a tight percussion-and-clarinet team of Jim Galbraith, Jeff Wood (also of lyrically fiery original oldtimey swing jazz band the Fascinators) and Naum Goldenstein. They play a sometimes ominous, sometimes boisterous, minimalist original score that blends elements as disparate as Gregorian chant and Balkan music.
Pandemonium and Nonstop Laughs at the Faux-Real Theatre Company’s Lysistrata
Somehow the Faux-Real Theatre Company has found a way to make Lysistrata even funnier than the original. Their performance of Aristophanes’ filthy antiwar feminist polemic last night at the Nuyorican Poets Cafe, directed by Mark Greenfield, mixed in-your-face punk rock shock value and carnivalesque pandemonium into an orgy of hilarious sexual innuendo and battle-of-the-sexes humor whose relevance has never waned in the span of more than two millennia. While dramaturge Aaron Poochigian has taken some liberties with the original by sprinkling in some droll contemporary references, the script follows the original more closely than you’d think from this adaptation, emphasis on sexual politics which even by this era’s standards might seem risque.
Men do not get off very well in this play to begin with, a springboard for this production’s most side-splitting moments. See, the never-ending war between Athens and Sparta has not only sent all the guys off to battle, it’s also cut off the sex toy trade. So one, or two, or…um….maybe a handful of them (or, more accurarely, an armload of them) make an appearance throughout the show. The sight gags, and how they’re directed, are too good to spoil. Suffice it to say that the Greeks in this cast may want their wives first, but they’ll settle for their fellow soldiers in a pinch. Arguably the funniest moment of the entire play involves a demigod cast as a lubed-up drag queen, another moment that the cast relishes: the sold-out crowd was howling.
In a nod back to ancient tradition, everybody plays multiple gender roles, but in this case so do the women in the cast. Stephanie Regina imbues – and sings – the titular role with an unexpected, tongue-in-cheek gravitas in contrast to Elena Taurke’s sardonic Calonice, Josephine Wheelwright’s cynical Myrrhine, Emma Orme’s irrepressible chorus girl, Dominique Salerno’s self-centered Lampito and Layna Fisher’s feisty sexy-grandma role. The men in the cast are all pretty much the same lunkheaded guy, easily manipulated and unable to think outside the box, but the group as a whole – Jason Scott Quinn, Tony Naumovski, Alan Fessenden, Aaron Scott, Dorian Shorts, Ricardo Muniz, Tom Metzger and Aidan Nelson – have a stomping, dionysian good time setting themselves up to be pussywhipped and then brought to embrace the womens’ ironclad pacificist logic.
Greenfield has fashioned an entertainingly vaudevillian acoustic score where the cast join in singing several of the chorus parts, plus a couple of what sound like originals that suggest what John Waters might do with this, played with tightness and wry verve from many corners and a considerable distance by multi-instrumentalists Jeff Wood and Jim Galbraith. You will be offered wine by a tunic-garbed cast member as you enter (grape juice and grapes are an alternative), and you may become something of an extra in the play’s most comedic moments if you take an aisle seat. The final two dates in the currrent run are tonight, Oct 21 and tomorrow, Oct 22 at 7 PM at the Nuyorican Poets Cafe, 263 E 3rd St. between Aves A and B. Admission is $18/$15 stud/srs.
Object Collection Stages a Deliciously Noisy, Messy. Provocative Piece at LaMaMa
Longtime LaMaMa impresario Nicky Paraiso reminded last night’s sold-out crowd at Object Collection’s latest experimental opera, Cheap & Easy October, that the experience would be what used to be called “total theatre” back in the 80s – a description that really nailed it. With a tight, often scorchingly intense four-piece band playing behind a ratty knitted curtain of sorts and cast members scampering, leaping and chasing each other around the stage, it’s more of a concert with a cast acting out a dadaesque video of sorts than it is anything else. And what a show it is. As immersive and pummeling as composer Travis Just’s score is, it’s far less abrasive than it is enveloping: you are drawn into the heart of the cyclotron, violently thrust out or, surprisingly, cast gently into a starlit reverie. Earplugs will be handed out, hut you don’t really need them. The run at LaMaMa is coming to a close, with final performances tonight, October 17 and then tomorrow at 10 PM; tix are $18/$13 stud/srs.
The band shifts abruptly but strangely elegantly through dreampop, post-hardcore and Mogwai-esque nightmarescapes, with acidic mid-80s Sonic Youth close harmonies, furious percussive interludes that recall taiko drumming, moments of what seem to be free improvisation, and echoes of the cumulo-nimbus swirl of guitarist Taylor Levine’s quartet Dither. Violinist Andie Springer uses a lot of extended technique and nails-down-the-blackboard harmonics; she also plays bass. Explosive drummer Owen Weaver doubles on Telecaster, while keyboardist Aaron Meicht also adds the occasional trumpet flourish or joins the stomp on a couple of floor toms.
The text – drawn from Soviet revolutionary histories by Leon Trotsky and John Reed as well as conversations between writer/director Kara Feely and cast member Fulya Peker (whose butoh background informs the simmering menace she channels throughout the show) veers from lickety-split spoken word to a bizarre, falsettoey singsong. Sardonic symbolism is everywhere: there’s a zombie apocalypse subplot, a telephone gets abused, and swordplay abounds. The rest of the cast – Deborah Wallace, Daniel Allen Nelson, Tavish Miller and Avi Glickstein – take on multiple roles, some of them living, some of them presumably dead.
There’s some toying with poststructuralist japes, springboarding off the premise that if you control the conversation, you control the situation. “Do you think a revolution of words can be as profound as an actual revolution?” one of the cast poses in one of the performance’s less chaotic moments. Much of the iconography in the set is sarcastic and ultimately portends a lot of very gloomy endings: as Feely and Just see it, revolutions tend to disappoint.
No less august a personality than Robert Ashley gave this group’s work the thumbs-up. For those who need their ideas packaged neatly and cohesively, this isn’t going to work. And it raises fewer questions than it intimates – which by itself is reason to see this provocative piece, one more nuanced than its sonic cauldron might initially suggest.
ThingNY Debuts a Blackly Amusing, Sonically Rich Reflection on Hurricane Sandy
ThingNY‘s provocative, often hilarious performance piece This Takes Place Close By debuted last night, making maximum use of the spacious, sonically rich Knockdown Center in Maspeth, a former doorframe factory recast as adventurous performance venue. Through the eyes of various witnesses to Hurricane Sandy, the multimedia work explores apathy, anomie and alienation in the wake of disaster. It raises more questions than it answers – which isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Is this limousine liberal self-flagellation, a vain attempt to demonstrate eleventh-hour empathy? A simpering, self-congratulatory meme for gentrifiers hell-bent on their fifteen minutes on Instagram? A welcome dose of perspective on where the hurricane falls, historically speaking, in terms of disastrous consequences? A caustic and often poignant critique of narcissism raising its ugly head at the least opportune moment? You can find out for yourself when the piece repeats, tonight, September 25 through Sunday the 27th at 8 PM; general admission is $20.
Ostensibly an opera, this is more of an avant garde theatre piece with music. The six-piece ensemble lead the audience from one set to another, creating a surround-sound atmosphere, voices and instruments leaping unexpectedly from the shadows. The live electroacoustic score – a pulsing, rather horizontal, minimalistic theme and variations – is gripping and often reaches a white-knuckle intensity, and the distance between the performers has no effect on how tightly they play it. The narratives vary from more-or-less straight-up theatre vignettes, to phone calls, harrowing personal recollections and surrealist spoken-word interludes. Other than Gelsey Bell – whose pure, translucent chorister’s soprano is the icing on the sonic cake – the rest of the ensemble do not appear to be trained singers. Yet they gamely hold themselves together through some challenging, distantly gospel-inspired four-part harmonies. Violinist Jeffrey Young‘s shivery cadenzas and the occasional creepy glissando enhance the suspense, while Bell’s keyboards and Dave Ruder’s clarinet supply more resonantly ominous ambience. Percusssionist Paul Pinto wryly doubles as roadie and emcee of sorts with his trusty penlight. Bassist Andrew Livingston distinguishes himself by playing creepy tritones while sprawled flat on his back in the rubble; meanwhile, Bell projects with undiminished power despite the presence of Livingston’s bass on top of her diaphragm.
Intentionally or not, the star of this show is multi-saxophonist Erin Rogers, whose vaudevillian portrayal of a 911 operator slowly losing it under pressure – in between bursts of hardbop soprano sax – is as chilling as it is funny. Happily, she later gets to return to give the poor, bedraggled, unappreciated woman some dignity. And playing alto, she teams with Livingston for a feast of brooding foghorn atmospherics during a portrait of a philosophical old bodega owner for whom the storm is “been there, done that.”
The characters run the gamut from enigmatic or gnomic to extremely vivid. Young gets to relish chewing the scenery as he channels a wet-behind-the-ears, clueless gentrifier kid who’s just self-aware enough to know that he ought to cover his ass while expunging any possible guilt for gettting away with his comfortable life intact. Livingston’s shoreline survivor, horror-stricken over the possible loss of his girlfriend, really drives the storm’s toll home. Bell’s baroque-tinged ghost is more nebulous, as is Pinto’s mashup of tummler and historian at the end – in a set piece that seems tacked on, as if the group had to scramble to tie things together just to get the show up and running in time. Yet even that part is grounded in history – which, if this group is to be believed, does not portend well for how we will react when the waters rise again. And they will.
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