PhillyStage

epic radical faerie realness =

judy

Taylor Mac

judy

A 24-Decade History of Popular Music

judy

at the Philadelphia International Festival of the Arts

 The undisputed house down performance at Philadelphia International PIFA was Taylor Mac’s A 24 Decade History of Popular Music at the Merriam Theater.

Mac’s opus features over two centuries of hit songs as a cultural document & interpreted through a social justice lens/ GLBTQueer fantasia by ‘judy’ Mac’s preferred pronoun because “my gender is performer.”

the nomenclature perhaps an homage to the great Judy Garland, who used to be called leather lungs, because of her versatility and vocal stamina, qualities that can certainly apply to Taylor Mac, previously performed in the uncharted time zone of 24 continuous hours, but for PIFA a still staggering 12 hour installments.Popular songs and music that annotate the cultural history of America, from decorous baroque of the late 17th century to our tumultuous and perilous times.

Part 1 covered 1776 to 1896 on June 2 covering music from 1776 to 1896 and on June 9, Philly Pride weeken spanning music from 1896 to the present. judy was joined at various times by over 30 musicians and other guests including Philadelphia Temperance Choir, dance troupes Urban Bush Women, Tangle Movement Arts, Camden Sophisticated Sisters/Distinguished Brothers and drag diva bestie Martha Graham Cracker. And working both shows onstage and in the audience the corps of ‘Dandy Minions’ of dancers, aerialists, burlesque performers and superdivas stomping the aisles.

The 246 song cycle showcasing among other things Machine Dazzle’s devastating radical faerie drag realness with judy transitioned into (with the help of dressers) in front of the audience.

I was only able to attend a chunk of four hours+ spanning the 60s-through the 80s~

by that time, judy had been on the Merriam stage for six or so hours- Here are just a few random highlights

First kudos to the incredible vocals of backup singers-soloists Steffanie Christ’an and Heather Christian.  judy’s blazing version of the Stones ‘Gimmie Shelter’ the scorching  duet with Christ’an was the house down as ‘judy’ turning it into a GLBTQueer anthem of liberte.

Bringing girl group realness to the Supreme 60s gay jukebox DL song “You Keep Me Hangin’ On.”  From “I’m Just a Soul (whose intentions are good)” to Nina’s Simone’s “Mother Goddamn” her searing j’accuse against racism in America.  judy gave the backstory of Simone appropriating an essentially minstrel tune structure in a searing  j’accuse against racism in America.

Judy mused on the parallels (and differences) of the black civil-rights movement of the 60s and the gay rights movement. judy providing local history about a son of West Chester PA, black gay activist Bayard Rustin organizing the march on Washington in 1963 and kept in the background by the movement leaders because he was an out black gay man.

judy talked about the protests in San Francisco and historic Stonewall riots, the queens who fought back on the weekend that Judy Garland died. He sang ‘Goodbye Yellow Brick Road’ finished off with “over the rainbow” on piano.  A member of the audience portraying dead Judy Garland, was carried out in a spontaneous cortege over the stage and down the aisles with the Dandy Minions in fab funeral drag.

The gay sexual liberation of the 70s transitioned to the catastrophic decade of death, survival and solidarity in queer America.  Judy inspired by the uncompromised gay firebrands of ACT-UP Larry Kramer and Maxine Woolf as inspiration to create unapologetic confrontation through civil action and public performance art.

Judy exalted the soundtracks sex in 70s gay club backrooms, where between hookups “one minute you could be talking about Foucault, the next Cher.” Refusing to be shamed about anonymous sex, joking that it was indeed an intimate experience, consider the truism “a stranger knows something about you that your mother will never know.”

Looking for songs specifically composed by out gay men during the worst years of the AIDS epidemic in New York, when record producers were blocking any GLBTQ expression. judy found a searing testament of courage with out gay British songwriter Marc Almonds’ dirge ballade about grim realities of the disease and the inhumanity that PWAs faced in the 80s.

judy’s raucous survival manifesto through the AIDS years a mash-up of Led Zeppelin’s titanic Kashmir with the static disco frenzy of ‘Stayin Alive.’ judy’s vocal prowess seems almost in a category by itself, judy can turn something like the musically static ‘Addicted to Love’ turned into a polemic against the ‘moral majority’ movement of Christian evangelists and political hypocrites who demonized the gay community and called for PWAs to be put in camps and branded.

judy was loathe to learn his “Snakeskin Cowboy” (about “fag bashing” Nugent proudly said publicly) judy nevertheless turned the song into an ironic cautionary tale about washed up homopanicked fossil rockers.

Judy slipped into a blinding Purple sequined jumpsuit with a glitter Mohawk headdress to perform “the best make out song ever” singing Prince’s “Purple Rain” perched on the Merriam Theater balcony ledge.

Even after eight hours of performance, perfect pitch, even in an air pocket or two. balladeer, B’way belter, soulful chanteuse, art song artiste. judy’s muscled baritone on Bob Dylan’s “A Hard Rain is Going to Fall” the song reaches dramatic heights that Dylan’s limited vocal ability could not and all of Dylan’s poetry is realized.

On Bowie’s “Pretty Things” judy is the equally powerful falsetto queen and is the baritone crooner on ‘Heroes’ a manifesto of sexual freedom, and accompanied by the burlesque troupe in leather in the balconies, for some acrobatic sex,

Inflatable Macy’s Day Parade size penises of the American and Russian flags are floated & come together.  judy weighs in with scathing editorial as the gasbags deflate.

The transitions from era to era with judy being changed in Extravaganza symbolic costumes in front of the audience, when judy is near naked, it was symbolic too, of this full throated, thrilling performance. She evokes the ghost of Judy at Carnegie Hall, who told  the audience in 1962, that they can stay all night and she can sing them all. In Philly for Pride Weekend judy took everybody over and back through the GLBTQueer rainbow, not only singing the history of pop music, but reclaiming our history through theater, music and drop dead diva drag.

 

 

 

 

Poetics

splotch

(photo by Jan Carroll)

Delphinium ~ a gay garden, revisited
May 2000

‘Till the shadows
on his past
In a separate garden.

Except that we were
laughing
They couldn’t have cared less
Not to check mindless
Blooms.
Throwing our heads back for
The last Brunch
The sun mocking itself
meanwhile
frond noir
Tricking the eye into
Thinking that it is

~reseeing a day of youth
the shade in shadows
in shadows
we don’t really remember
30 years ago before the last fall
When everyone was
subsumed
million-rooted blood hydra
just another monster
to be melted
on this day buried
behind black purple
Siberian irises
splashed with cheap mimosas
aubergine morning glories
all flora staying out for a long
morning luxuriant

Lurching
fox gloves
slap each other with lilies
forgetting a century
(cream laced with black Pagliaci tears)
Spilt over lips
With winds swirls
making us blink vs,
red or violet afterburns
a lace pink fade

blade swat and sway
before noon
Trying to dance against
the lazy chorus of chive hammers
In blur organza
brushing by
Spiked feathers
Tripping over bowl of clover
Whisper over
villainous amaryllis
loitering
With intent

Snapdragons in
Venereal poses
shaded
Under arc of skid row
rails repopulated with lilac clematis
(ear-ringed, dreadlocked)
As the
Ladies of the Nellie Mosers,
Descend.
On neon Medusa

sundial
Stare
granite dragon
ignored
unbloomed with doubt
certain of never

galaxy seeding
chrysanthemum
if it survives
Root map of the ants
cotillion next door to
The red speck-flies
Amok on mauve silk belles
willow spiraled in
gnarled beauty
because of the early heat
and forget-me-nots
lost on other endless afternoons
the amber showdown
vaporized our outfits
reassemble from last
night,
forced bloomed
to thought
and wry composition
the limpness
with immediate history
we’ve never looked worse

The lovers gone
Friends silenced
from ultimately
out of the
heroic era
of Unheralded souls
What we
were once
& need to be again
Will always be the
Ghosts of the gardens at Versailles.
Those forgotten blooms
still perennially lost

no we did not
remember promises not to
fall in love
Have sex
Not to cheat on our lovers
Or press leaves between
The pages of the unsigned pact that
We are finally
loving witness for each other
and that is a sanctified root
the perpetual motion

So the light changed
there is laughter
The same larkspur
flying out of Troy
To drown out
the next rain
soaring in this
dank metropolis
so supple
so fetid sometimes
it wanders
in the field of
Delphinium

So instead do not
turn our back
On the blinded warrior
going back in
to say goodbye
unforeshadowed
Queen of the Garden

Elizabeth, the Queen

A remembrance

‘What is the victory of a cat on a hot tin roof?‘ Paul Newman’s character Brick asks Maggie, the Cat, who replies ’Just Staying on it, I guess…long as she can.’ Elizabeth Taylor, made movie history with those lines and stayed on the Hollywood tin roof longer than most.

Taylor started as a child star working in the studio systems of movie moguls and pristine grooming on and off screen. Taylor remained Hollywood royalty even through a virtual garbage heap of bad films she made, her tumultuously personal life as dramatic and riveting as any part she was playing.

In typical Taylor fashion, when she accepted the American Film Institute lifetime achievement award she joked with the Hollywood a-list audience “I wasn’t that bad, was I?” Before her late career film excesses, that included campy gay cult films such as ‘Boom!’ (One of John Waters favorite films), ‘Reflections of a Golden Eye’ (with a crazed Marlon Brando and ‘X, Y and Zee’ that traded off her toxic mouth image. Among the 60 films she appear in, Taylor filmed a dozen movies that made displayed her obvious gifts as an actress and an iconic movie star.

Taylor became a child star in the 40s, in such films as ‘Lassie, Come Home’ and ‘National Velvet.’ In the early 50s, Taylor was ’kitten’ to onscreen father Spencer Tracy, and adoring audiences, in ’Father of the Bride.’ As socialite Angela Vickers opposite Montgomery Clift in ‘A Place in the Sun‘ Taylor emerged as a screen goddess. In ‘Giant’ with Rock Hudson and James Dean, perhaps her most dimensional role as a Texas oil baron‘s wife, she became an actress to reckon with.

Taylor was haunting in the literary melodrama ‘The Last Time I Saw Paris’ and she was the only actor who didn’t come off as completely crazy surrounded by heavyweights Katharine Hepburn and Montgomery Clift, as the mental patient in the hysterical homopanic film ’Suddenly, Last Summer.’

During the filming of ‘Cat on a Hot Tin Roof’ Taylor’s husband, Richard Todd died in a plane crash, yet she finished the film. It remains her finest performance on screen. Playwright Tennessee Williams declared she was the best of all his Maggies. As Martha in ‘Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?‘’ Edward Albee’s bawdy, intellectual drama, she made herself look bloated and sloppy, but delivered a sexually charged performance.

She never took acting lessons, was one of the last great studio stars, learned her craft in production, but commanded the screen for 3 decades. She was nominated for five Oscars and winning two. The first for a role that she hated, a John O’Hara Manhattan potboiler ‘Butterfield 8’ in which she played a Park Ave. call girl, a part Taylor didn’t want to play. Taylor picked up her second statue playing the boozy, foul-mouthed libertine Martha opposite her then husband Richard Burton. Taylor and Burton were married to other people when they carried on a very public affair during the filming of the disastrously overblown big studio production of ‘Cleopatra.’ Taylor was the first actress to receive a million dollar fee for a movie. Her serial marriages, including two times with Burton, were so full of tabloid drama that they eclipsed her onscreen achievements.

Semi-retired and the butt of many jokes about her acting and weight gain, in the 80s Taylor became a fierce AIDS activist, educating the public about HIV/AIDS, raising millions for AmFar and a championing other causes.

Human Rights Campaign president Joe Solmonese praised Taylor’s work combating AIDS. “We are deeply saddened by the death of Elizabeth Taylor…a true ally to the LGBT community. She was one of the first public voices to speak up about the AIDS crisis while many others stayed silent in the 1980s and she helped raise millions of dollars to fight the disease.”

Whitman-Walker named its main facility after Taylor in 1993 to honor her work combating AIDS. GLAAD honored Taylor in 2000 with its Vanguard Award and the Also that year, the British born Taylor, became Dame Elizabeth by order of the realm of the other Queen Elizabeth.

In declining health for many years, Taylor kept connected to her fans through Twitter. During her last brush with death a couple of years ago, appearing on Larry King Live, to personally dispel tabloid rumors that she was dying and had Alzheimer’s disease. “Does it look like I’m dying” a dilapidated, but no less vibrant Taylor, said, violet eyes as luminous as ever.

Botanica

‘tall queen’ by Jan Carroll

Botanicals (& Royalty)

‘a Queen and I’ by Jan Carroll