by Geoffrey Paddy Johnson on May 15, 2012
There’s an undeniable elegance about the Irish singer/performer (composer, orchestrator, producer) Julie Feeney who is appearing for a 10 day booking at the Irish Arts Center on 51st Street. The elegance is there in the assemblage of instruments she has corralled on stage, as well as in the controlled voice, smooth flowing toothy lyrics, and sophisticated orchestral arrangements she deploys. But the elegance really comes about when Feeney emerges into the auditorium, using the regular patrons entrance way, singing in hushed tones the introduction to her song Myth. Leaning over from the aisle, she breathily exchanges some of the words with a surprised, somewhat unnerved audience. She’s sparkling in the reflected stage lights, an ornate crystal gemmed collar on her dress and tiny rhinestones in her hairnet twinkle in the shadows. It’s nothing to get really alarmed about, but that towering beehive coiffure is teased up just that little bit high enough to signal caution; who is this? And the song she is singing keeps dropping into abrupt silences. Before picking up once more and conducting you along a melody that achieves its pop bounce from a delicate arrangement of strings, bowed and pizzicato. She attains the stage and relaxes the audience with a complicit, almost coy smile, while working a silken black balloon dress that is at once sumptuous and brief. It’s a wonderfully poised balancing act between refinement and boldness, and it proves the perfect introduction for what is to follow.
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by Geoffrey Paddy Johnson on January 31, 2012
Stabat Mater Fabulosa
The Morningside Opera company offered up a quite singular interpretation of Pergolesi‘s Stabat Mater in their Fabulosa rendition on January 26th at Dixon Place, which proved, at once, a scholarly as well as a quite literal undressing of the original. Composed in 1736 – the year of Pergolesi’s death at the august age of 26 – the piece has been an iconic work in the canon of western sacred music ever since and has enjoyed an unbroken record of performance for nearly three hundred years. This surely says something about a work, to have endured so vigorously the vagaries of artistic, musical, and religious change, never mind or dare one say, taste. Which in many ways explains its attraction for Morningside Opera, who see their role as boundary-pushers wishing to invigorate dialogue between traditional and new modes of the form. Their stripped down presentation was both scholastically dense as well as visually provocative.
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by Karen Tortora-Lee on November 4, 2011
Vocalist Champagne Pam, the Dog Walking Diva had the audience eating out of her palm last night at Don’t Tell Mama, New York’s legendary cabaret room. With a song list that ranged from jazz to R&B to original songs, every note was a little drop of love for the clients she so adoringly tends to day after day … the dogs who depend on her, love her unconditionally and occasionally steal her heart.
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by Geoffrey Paddy Johnson on August 20, 2011
It’s pretty clever when a theatrical production adopts the stance that what it is about to present you with is nothing more than offensive, odious rubbish. And when it does so persistently, warning you at each interval that things are only going to get worse, more unbearable, it seems cleverer, because you have no one to blame but yourself for hanging around. And when each performance or act hones so close to the edge of becoming merely cacophonous insult, while convincing you that the method in this apparent chaos is quite sound, well, that makes it even more clever. In fact, everything about Inverse Theater‘s Smoke the New Cigarette by Kirk Wood Bromley at the Bowery Poetry Club is exceptionally clever; so clever it hurts.
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by K. B. Abele on November 11, 2009
Said The Whale, photo by: Vanessa Heins
Said The Whale, hailing from the ever-blossoming music town of Vancouver, British Columbia, released their sophomore album last month on Hidden Pony Records. As I was a quick fan to one of their earlier singles “The Light is You,” I was eager to get my hands on the album and check it out. The band’s upbeat sound and amazing energy never fails to leave me wanting more, and all this just from their records! I’m still waiting my turn to catch these guys live. (Hint: please come to NYC soon!)
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