Theater The 'Radio Purgatory'
Murder! Mayhem! Live Music! TheaterThe’s Radio Purgatory is a multi-disciplinary theatrical piece featuring the radio aesthetic of the 1930s and 1940s.
A down on his luck detective finds himself in purgatory and, encountering its other inhabitants, is subjected to a farcical nightmare. Is there a way out?
The show features an original 16mm film by Tatsushi Tahara, sound design by Aldo Perez, foley, live music and slapstick. Barry Goldman directs. The music is composed and arranged by Perez and his venerated NYC group The Renaldo The Ensemble, who also double as the performers.
Its full of wild flights of lyric delight and stunning surreal humor and horror. The music is powerful and strange and all instruments are played by the actors themselves. You cannot imagine what a ridiculously fulfilling dramatic experience this is. Whatever expectations you have, the TheatreThe ensemble will twist them, rearrange them, surpass them, and toss them out into the rainy street. If you are even thinking about going, do not wait.
-- Theater Mania user
saw the final performance of the current run of Theater The’s Radio Purgatory at Dixon Place on Friday. This group brings a high degree of virtuosity (both musical and…clownical?) to bear on their singular performance niche, a kind of stream-of-consciousness comic thrill ride along a collage-coaster of noir cliches. The closest thing I can compare them to is Spike Jones, or perhaps Hellzapoppin during its least coherent, most surreal, moments. The guy at the center of it all is guitarist-composer-singer-verbal-and-visual-comedian Aldo Perez, a sort of living cartoon mixed with the wiseguy attitude of a burlesque comedian. For a good-looking guy, he can make the ugliest faces I’ve ever seen. The token gun moll is one of my favorite performers in the city, Jenny Lee Mitchell who consistently out rivals all comers in whatever she turns her hand to, whether it’s clowning, belting out a number, or blowing the licorice stick. (Now I’m starting to talk like them!) The rest of the ensemble each gets is turn to shine, not just with the live musical and visual clowning, but in several expertly contrived short films designed to look like fragments of Warner Bros. gangster pictures. This was the first production I’ve seen in Dixon Place’s innovative new upstairs space and it bodes well for future ferment
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Travalanche
directions:
3LD Art & Technology Center, 80 Greenwich Street near Rector St., Lower Manhattan
