Who: Shomyo no Kai — Voices of a Thousand Years
What: An evening of shomyo Buddhist ritual chant
Where: Japan Society and University of Chicago
When: Tuesday, March 30, $12-$15, 8:00 (available through April 30)
Why: Japan Society and the University of Chicago have teamed up to present a concert by the vocal group Shomyo no Kai — Voices of a Thousand Years, which specializes in rarely heard early chanting rituals. On March 30 at 8:00, the company’s performance of a new work, Moonlight Mantra (Tsuki no Kogon), by female composer Yu Kuwabara, will premiere, available on demand through April 30. Part of Carnegie Hall’s “Voices of Hope” festival, the concert was held in the eight-hundred-year-old An’yo-in Temple in Tokyo, with the group, founded in 1997 by Rev. Yusho Kojima and Rev. Kojun Arai of the Shingon sect and Rev. Koshin Ebihara and Rev. Jiko Kyoto of the Tendai sect, wearing traditional monastic robes and moving slowly throughout the sacred space. (In March 2014, Shomyo no Ka made its North American debut at St. Bartholomew’s Church as part of a tour organized by Japan Society.) The online premiere will be followed by a live Q&A. In addition, there will be a “Shomyo for Everyday Wellness” online workshop on April 8 ($5, 8:30), in which participants can practice shomyo with the monks. “Voices of Hope” continues through April with such other events as “Ayodele Casel: Chasing Magic,” “Ephrat Asherie Dance: Odeon,” “Different Strokes / Different Folks: Queer Artists of Color Paint the 21st Century,” “Voices of Hope: True Stories of Resilience, Recovery, and Renewal,” and “American Voices: Selected Piano Works by Black and Native American Composers.”
this week in music
BROADWAY BACKWARDS 2021
Who: Chasten Buttigieg, Ariana DeBose, Debra Messing, Sheryl Lee Ralph, Tony Shalhoub, Ben Vereen, Stephanie J. Block, Deborah Cox, Lea Salonga, Amy Adams, Debbie Allen, Matt Bomer, Brenda Braxton, Len Cariou, Glenn Close, Loretta Devine, Jesse Tyler Ferguson, James Monroe Iglehart, Cheyenne Jackson, Cherry Jones, L Morgan Lee, Raymond J. Lee, Aasif Mandvi, Eric McCormack, Michael McElroy, Debra Messing, Ruthie Ann Miles, Brian Stokes Mitchell, Jessie Mueller, Javier Muñoz, Kelli O’Hara, Karen Olivo, Jim Parsons, Bernadette Peters, Eve Plumb, Roslyn Ruff, Sis, Elizabeth Stanley, Tony Yazbeck, Anderson Cooper, Don Lemon, Robin Roberts, Robert Creighton, Danyel Fulton, Eileen Galindo, Sam Gravitte, Sheldon Henry, Diana Huey, Aaron Libby, Nathan Lucrezio, Melinda Porto, Shelby Ringdahl, Vishal Vaidya, Blake Zolfo
What: Benefit for Broadway Cares/Equity Fights AIDS and the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual & Transgender Community Center
Where: Broadway Cares and YouTube
When: Tuesday, March 30, free, 8:00 (available on demand through April 3)
Why: Mayor DeBlasio has announced that he expects Broadway to reopen in September, but that doesn’t mean the forty-one official theaters will be hosting shows come the fall. In the meantime, we have to keep quenching our thirst with Zoom readings, filmed stagings, and virtual gala celebrations. Next up is “Broadway Backwards,” premiering March 30 at 8:00 and available on demand through April 3. The benefit for Broadway Cares and the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual & Transgender Community Center in New York City, which honors gender diversity and love, began in 2006, raising $7,325, rising each year until it reached $704,491 in 2019; the 2020 edition, scheduled for March 16, was canceled because of the coronavirus.
It has now returned with a vengeance, featuring clips from previous shows (Tituss Burgess, Len Cariou, Carolee Carmello, Darren Criss, Cynthia Erivo, Andrew Keenan-Bolger, Debra Monk, Andrew Rannells, Chita Rivera, Lillias White, more), appeals from Chasten Buttigieg, Ariana DeBose, Debra Messing, Sheryl Lee Ralph, Tony Shalhoub, and Ben Vereen, and new performances from such major names as Stephanie J. Block, Amy Adams, Debbie Allen, Glenn Close, Jesse Tyler Ferguson, Cheyenne Jackson, Cherry Jones, Eric McCormack, Brian Stokes Mitchell, Jessie Mueller, Kelli O’Hara, Karen Olivo, Jim Parsons, and Bernadette Peters. This year’s edition is centered around Jay Armstrong Johnson portraying a lonely New Yorker navigating the Covid-19-riddled city with the help of a late-night TV host played by Jenn Colella. The show is written and directed by event creator Robert Bartley, with Mary-Mitchell Campbell as music supervisor, Ted Arthur as music director, and Eamon Foley as director of photography and video editor. It’s free to watch, but donations will be accepted to help members of the LGBTQ community and others who have been significantly impacted by the health crisis and pandemic lockdown.
THE JACKSON C. FRANK LISTENING PARTY W/ SPECIAL GUESTS
59E59 Theaters: Plays in Place
New Light Theater Project
March 29 – April 11, pay-what-you-can (suggested donation $15)
www.59e59.org
www.newlighttheaterproject.com
In addition to watch parties, where people from around the world gather online to experience streaming content together, from old TV shows to theater productions and Zoom cast reunions, listening parties have taken off as well. One of my favorites is Tim Burgess’s Twitter edition, in which he spins classic records, sometimes joined by members of the band who talk about the making of the album. Melding that idea with Kanye West’s 2018 Wyoming media listening party for Ye, New Light Theater Project and 59E59 Theaters have teamed up for The Jackson C. Frank Listening Party w/ Special Guests, a virtual show running March 29 to April 11, an interactive listening party for Jackson C. Frank’s eponymously titled 1965 record, which was produced by Paul Simon. Written by Michael Aguirre and directed by Sarah Norris, the eighty-minute show is hosted by Allen, who is still upset that he could not make it to Kanye’s party, so now he is putting on an event to outshine all others, while also sharing the story of his missing brother. The cast includes Aguirre as Allen, Bethany Geraghty as Mom, Dana Martin as Grandma Woodstock, and Sean Phillips as Simon, with film and sound editing by Hallie Griffin.
After purchasing your ticket, you’ll receive a link to download the record and instructions on how to make the official event cocktail, Hippie Juice. The folk album, originally released in 1965, features ten songs remastered in 2001, from “Blues Run the Game,” “Don’t Look Back,” and “Kimbie” to “I Want to Be Alone,” “Just Like Anything,” and “You Never Wanted Me.” It was the Buffalo-born Frank’s only record during a tragic life; when he was eleven, he suffered severe burns across half his body in a fatal fire at his elementary school, was given a guitar while being treated at the hospital, and later recorded Jackson C. Frank in England in six hours. He lost a child, was shot in the eye by a pellet gun, was homeless, and battled debilitating mental health issues; he died in Massachusetts in 1999 at the age of fifty-six, having never released another album (although a box set of his complete recordings came out in 2014). Despite his influence on many musicians, he has faded away into history, now to be resurrected at a virtual, interactive listening party, using his intimate songs to explore contemporary society.
HISTORIC UNCLE FLOYD SHOW WATCH PARTY: THIS WAS THE UNCLE FLOYD SHOW
Uncle Floyd and Oogie are back on Tuesday nights in weekly live clips show
Who: Uncle Floyd, Scott Gordon
What: Live watch party
Where: StageIt
When: Tuesday nights at 8:00, $5
Why: I was aghast to learn that there will be a live, online watch party of great moments from The Uncle Floyd Show on Tuesday, March 30, at 8:00. What made me so upset was not that the event was happening at all but that it was the eighth presentation, meaning that I had missed the first seven. The horror! I spent a significant part of my childhood dedicated to The Uncle Floyd Show, a super-low-budget pseudo-children’s show beaming out of New Jersey, available on cable station WHT, Wometco Home Theater, and U68. The host, onetime circus entertainer Floyd Vivino, was a warped version of Soupy Sales, in a checkerboard suit, bowtie, and porkpie hat, cracking jokes from before your grandparents’ time, along with double and triple entendres, delivered by a madcap group of characters that included Scott Gordon, Craig “Mugsy” Calam, Richard “Netto” Cornetto, Jim Monaco, Art “Looney Skip” Rooney, Charlie Stoddard, David “Artie Delmar” Burd, Clark the Wonder Dog, Bones Boy, and Oogie, the Uncle Floyd’s ever-present hand-puppet sidekick. They performed ridiculously silly skits (oh, how I loved the Dull family) and musical parodies (Bruce Stringbean, Neil Yuck, “Deep in the Heart of Jersey”) and had such famous guests as the Ramones (who name-check Uncle Floyd in “It’s Not My Place [in the 9 to 5 World”]), the Boomtown Rats, the Smithereens, Marshall Crenshaw, Tiny Tim, Squeeze, Cyndi Lauper, and David Johansen lip syncing to their hit songs. My favorite was vaudeville veteran Benny Bell playing his 1946 novelty classic “Shaving Cream.” I even went to see the gang perform live at the Bottom Line, and so did David Bowie, who was turned on to the show by John Lennon; the Thin White Duke’s song “Slip Away” is actually about Uncle Floyd. The Uncle Floyd Show was a nostalgia act with no past, instead predicting the future of DIY variety series and internet programs, an early version of Instagram and TikTok.
The Uncle Floyd Show ran in one form or another for nearly twenty-five years. Fortunately, Gordon preserved more than seven hundred hours of excerpts and complete broadcasts, and he and Vivino are now streaming them on Tuesday nights at 8:00 for five bucks on the StageIt platform, as Uncle Floyd and Scott’s Video Clip Club, with live, interactive discussions. This week’s edition features the full New Jersey Network show from January 8, 1985, with additional segments from the WHT broadcast from May 12, 1980, including a song from a group from Whitestone that had a hit on the Billboard Hot 100 for seventeen weeks and on the R&B charts as well. (For more fun, engineer Gordon and Vivino also team up Sunday mornings at 9:00 for the WFDU-FM 89.1 radio show Garage Sale Music.) “Once a time they nearly might have been / Bones and Oogie on a silver screen / No one knew what they could do / Except for me and you,” Bowie sings on “Slip Away,” continuing, “Don’t forget to keep your head warm / Twinkle twinkle, Uncle Floyd / Watching all the world and war torn / How I wonder where you are.” Now you know: They’re on StageIt every Tuesday night. See you there. And don’t forget to snap it, pal.
MUSEUM OF CALM — IN CONVERSATION: HOLLAND ANDREWS WITH MORGAN BASSICHIS
Vocalist, composer, and performance artist Holland Andrews will discuss Museum of Calm on March 24 (photo by Maria Baranova)
Who: Holland Andrews, Morgan Bassichis
What: Live discussion about streaming performance film
Where: Baryshnikov Arts Center Zoom
When: Wednesday, March 24, free with RSVP, 8:00 (film available through March 29)
Why: Baryshnikov Arts Center’s free digital spring season continues with Holland Andrews’s Museum of Calm, a sixteen-minute performance filmed by Tatyana Tenenbaum at BAC’s John Cage & Merce Cunningham Studio on West Thirty-Seventh St. “For me, a lot of what I had been focusing on was channeling all of my focus on my interior world,” Andrews, who previously recorded albums under the name Like a Villain, says in a video introduction. “And meditation, thinking a lot about tending to what was going on inside of my emotional world because, with everything from the external being cut off, this was all I had,” they add, bringing their hands to their chest. “So the idea of Museum of Calm is your own self being your Museum of Calm, whether or not you like it because, you know, what we were attached to in finding peace, in finding calm, had been taken away.”
In the piece, a barefoot Andrews (Wordless, There You Are), whose recent Onè at Issue Project Room dealt with ancestral loss, family tragedy, and healing, incorporates a yellow ball — the kind generally used in physical therapy, but here it is more involved with psychological therapy as Andrews roams the empty studio, beautifully vocalizes words and melodies into a microphone (“I spent so much time feeling I was no good”; “How do I feel better?”), plays the clarinet, layers the different sounds into an audio palimpsest using foot pedals, and watches the sun set over the Hudson River. On March 24 at 8:00 — the day Afterwardsness, their collaboration with Bill T. Jones, was scheduled to premiere at the Park Avenue Armory but had to be postponed indefinitely because some members of the company contracted Covid even in their bubble — Andrews will take part in a live Zoom discussion and Q&A with performer and author Morgan Bassichis (The Odd Years, Nibbling the Hand That Feeds Me) about the BAC commission. The lovely and moving recording of Museum of Calm will be available on YouTube through March 29 at 5:00.
THE ACTING COMPANY: IN PROCESS
ALUMNI SPOTLIGHT SERIES
The Acting Company
March 23 – May 19, free (donations accepted)
theactingcompany.org
www.youtube.com
Founded in 1972 by John Houseman and Margot Harley, the Tony-winning Acting Company has served as a training ground for hundreds of performers over the years. During the pandemic, they are looking inside artistic creation with “In Process,” a series of online presentations written by and starring alumni. From March 23 to 26, you can stream Luis Quintero’s Hip Hop Therapy, a preview of a concept album in which Nick Bottom from A Midsummer Night’s Dream is a therapist for out-of-work actors. That is followed March 26-29 with an untitled piece by Joshua David Robinson and Susanna Stahlmann consisting of poems written in response to the protests of the summer of 2020. And March 29 to April 1 sees Jimonn Cole’s Chickens, in which Megan Bartle, Zo Tipp, and Rich Topol portray fowl creatures living on Michael Potts’s farm. Each short play will also include a Q&A with Tatiana Wechsler. After a break, “In Process” returns April 21-25 with Muse, a new play written and directed by Tom Alan Robbins, starring Dakin Matthews as a painter and Helen Cespedes as an aspiring artist and his inspiration, followed May 24 with a virtual adaptation of Nilo Cruz’s Pulitzer-winning Anna in the Tropics, directed by Alejandro Rodriguez. All events can be watched for free on YouTube, although donations will be accepted, to be split between the Acting Company and Jeffrey Wright’s Brooklyn for Life!, a nonprofit that supports Brooklyn health-care workers and small businesses, primarily restaurants.
VISION RESIDENCY: RAJA FEATHER KELLY
Tuçe Yasak’s Light Journals kicks off raja feather kelly’s Ars Nova Vision Residency
VISION RESIDENCY
Ars Nova
March 20 – April 9, $10 per show
arsnovanyc.com/SUPRA
thefeath3rtheory.com
It’s time to face facts: This is raja feather kelly’s world; we’re only living in it. Kelly is an Obie-winning choreographer, director, artistic director of the feath3r theory, and creative associate at Juilliard who has been involved with such productions as Young Jean Lee’s We’re Gonna Die at Second Stage, Electric Lucifer at the Kitchen, A Strange Loop and If Pretty Hurts Ugly Must Be a Muhfucka at Playwrights Horizons, Fireflies at the Atlantic, and Fairview at Soho Rep and TFANA. In December he premiered his solo performance installation Hysteria in the glassed-in lobby at New York Live Arts, for which he is also making the film Wednesday, a queer-fantasia reimagining of Dog Day Afternoon that he offered a sneak peek of at a wild watch party also in December. He will be bringing back Hysteria for encore performances April 8-10.
Kelly is now curating Ars Nova’s Vision Residency program, featuring presentations by four creators: Tuçe Yasak, Tislarm Bouie, L Morgan Lee, and Emily Wells, running March 20 to April 9. “There is no separation between who these people are as artists and who they are as people. Their work is indelible and one of a kind,” kelly said in a statement. The Ars Nova Supra events begin March 20 with Yasak’s virtual installation Light Journals, inspired by poetry by Rumi, followed March 25 by Bouie’s dance film on Black masculinity, THUG; a reading on April 8 of The Women, the working title of a play in progress, led by L Morgan Lee and kelly as Kirsten Childs, Dane Figueroa Edidi, Donnetta Lavinia Grays, Christine Toy Johnson, Bianca Leigh, Carmen LoBue, and Nia Witherspoon explore what it means to be a woman in today’s society; and, on April 9, kelly & Wells’s Artifact, a listening and viewing party previewing their work-in-progress Album and Opera. Tickets to each show are $10; a monthly subscription to Ars Nova’s Supra digital platform is $15. Kelly is one of seven 2020–21 Vision Residents; the others are Starr Busby, nicHi douglas, JJJJJerome Ellis, Jenny Koons, David Mendizábal, and Rona Siddiqui.