Harris’ 1891 Tin Pan Alley waltz After the ball, with added commentary to elucidate the subtext of the lyrics. The last song judy performed was Charles K. But there followed a group singalong of Gilbert and Sullivan’s Willow, tit-willow from The Mikado (1885) in which we were asked to repeat the refrain so many times that the already sinister tune drove us into a collective delirium. The loose grasp I had on proceedings was lost at this point. When I returned the stage was lit in neon and a wedding seemed to be taking place between a performer in an alien costume and an audience member. My only regret about the night was that, at one point, hunger got the better of me and I slipped out of the theatre. To convey conflict and division, we were then called upon to throw the ping-pong balls at each other in a pantomime of fury. We were handed ping-pong balls by the ‘dandy minions’, a ragtag bunch of performers from every conceivable point on the gender spectrum whose job it was to go among the audience and rally participants. © Berliner Festspiele/Eike WalkenhorstĪmerican songbook standards and spirituals transported us through the Civil War and the abolition of slavery. Taylor Mac, A 24-Decade History of Popular Music, Chapter 1. The show at the Festspiele was performed to over 500 people, with a live band and a wardrobe of costumes provided by Mac’s long-time sartorial collaborator Machine Dazzle, but Mac’s performance had lost none of the intimacy, openness and honesty that endeared judy to me over a decade before. One song, The Palace of the End, imagined an encounter between Lynne Cheney and Saddam Hussein (both of whom wrote romance novels, albeit in very different registers). On a tiny stage, dressed in a riot of glitter and feathers, judy sang then to a small audience about politics, sex and intimacy.
#GREAT AMERICAN SONGBOOK ARTISTS MAC#
I attended the second night in October, having some knowledge of Mac’s style from judy’s performance The Be(A)st of Taylor Mac at the Edinburgh Fringe in 2006, which made such an impact on me that I went twice, and then a third time when it came to Dublin. It was for ‘fearlessly experimental works’ of theatre such as these that judy was awarded a MacArthur Genius Grant in 2017 (oh yes, Mac’s preferred gender pronoun is judy with a lower-case j). Add to this more than 100 performers, musicians and dancers, and a fully realised stage musical that involves maximum audience participation, and you have some idea of the challenge that Taylor Mac undertook in writing, producing and performing the 24-Decade History of Popular Music.
#GREAT AMERICAN SONGBOOK ARTISTS PLUS#
A song for each year plus a few more, performed over the course of four six-hour-long stage shows at the Berliner Festspiele. Here’s the concept: to offer an alternative history of the United States through 246 popular songs from the Declaration of Independence to today.
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