Michael Costagliola

Orbiting the Cabaret

Review of The Satellite Festival, Yale Cabaret

Sprawling over three nights from 8 p.m. to midnight, in seven locations, and comprised of 19 different offerings, including musical performances, theater, videos, and multimedia events, the Yale Cabaret’s Satellite Festival, now in its third year, makes for a varied experience. Attendees determine for themselves how much to see and which pieces. With admission times at 8 p.m. and 10 p.m., from March 29th through March 31st, the schedule demanded a certain flexibility and a willingness to move around if one wished to see as much as possible. What follows are some impressions of the performance pieces I saw.

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The provocative title of Michael Costagliola’s Hey Secret Service—This is My Official & Genuine Threat to Assassinate Donald J. Trump: The Musical meant it was not to be missed. The show combined video graphics with a cabaret-style presentation of songs by Costagliola, a third-year sound designer.

The key historical referent of the show was the plan to assassinate Trump hatched by Michael Stephen Stanford, a British citizen, in June, 2016, while Trump the media-star was campaigning for the highest political office in the nation. Singing from Stanford’s perspective, Costagliola deftly scored points for the violent overthrow of the current president, the virtues of musical theater, and the dismaying number of murders that would be necessary before one might arrive at someone who, in the succession to the country’s chief executive office, might be ascribed basic decency. Strumming a guitar, accompanied by piano, with odd heckling from the guy at the soundboard, Costagliola, as Stanford, also interacted with his confused but supportive mother via the internet.

Stanford, presented as something of a well-meaning naïf, determines that violence is the key to taking back the government from someone manifestly incompetent, what’s more, he argues, U.S. law allows the government to kill anyone deemed a threat to the nation’s welfare. So, offing the individual who poses the biggest threat to our collective welfare would have to be seen as an act of patriotism. Clever, indeed. And even cleverer was the song in which—citing how incensed Trump became about the reception afforded Vice President Pence at his attendance of Hamilton—Costagliola asserts that we may need no greater weapon than musical theater to bedevil our fatuous First Citizen.

Whether or not one would endorse Sonny Perdue as president, the litany of unacceptable candidates in line between Trump and the Secretary of Agriculture leaves one with a grim sense of the sad state of affairs. Ironic, funny, tuneful, Hey Secret Service… is a creditable and very American act of theater as provocation.

Hey Secret Service—This is My Official & Genuine Threat to Assassinate Donald J. Trump: The Musical
By Michael Costagliola
Devised with Wlad Woyno Rodriguez
Dramaturgy: Molly FitzMaurice; Design: Wlad Woyno Rodriguez; Associate Sound Design: Emily Duncan Wilson; Music played by Joshua Chu & Emily Duncan Wilson
Yale Cabaret: 3/29, 11:30 p.m.; 3/30, 10 p.m.; 3/31, 8 p.m.

 

Wolf/Alice by Lucie Dawkins

Wolf/Alice by Lucie Dawkins

In the studio space above the Cabaret, third-year director Lucie Dawkins presented a performance piece called Wolf/Alice through all three nights of the Festival. Based on a story in Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chamber, an imaginative reworking of figures from folk or fantasy literature, such as vampires and werewolves, Wolf/Alice depicts the challenged life of a feral child.

Carter’s Alice combines the wolf and the little girl from Little Red Riding-Hood, where the threat and attraction of the bestial contributes to the story’s thrill, and, of course, Lewis Carroll’s ever-inquisitive Alice. The nuns who attempt to rehabilitate the beastly child—played by Anula Naklevar and by Rachel Kenney in an amazingly detailed oversized head-mask—are creepier, in their cyborg-like appearance, than the human-flesh-eating, elderly vampire that Alice eventually takes up with.

The combination of music and puppet-handling made the sequences with the vampire completely involving. The entire enactment, with eerie lighting, haunting music, expressive puppeteering and liberal amounts of blood, was a moody and macabre theatrical work. The vocals by Sylvia D’Eramo, of the Yale School of Music, as the Moon, sometimes in counterpoint to a looped track of her own voice, were particularly effective (even with the incessant din provided by the very loud show occurring simultaneously in the Cabaret below on Friday night).

Wolf/Alice
By Lucie Dawkins
Collaborators: Daphne Agosin, Stephanie Bahniuk, Sylvia D’Eramo, Emma Deane, Roxy Jia, Rachel Kenney, Zoe Mann, Anula Naklevar, Emona Stoykova, Adrienne Wells
Cab Studio: March 29-31, 11 p.m.

 

On Saturday in the upstairs studio, Yale College junior sculpture major Victoria Blume’s projections of symmetrical, abstract digital art pieces, me, myself, and iPhone, was combined with the solo violin performance by Matthew Woodward (Yale School of Music) of Luciano Berio’s Sequenza VIII. According to Woodward, one of the significant aspects of Berio’s composition is that it is both abstract and absurdist. And, for Blume, the phone is a conduit for creativity, allowing her to manipulate apps in ways not intended.

The loop of Blume’s images and the hypnotic, repetitious nature of Sequenza VIII complemented each other well, even if each was fully self-involved and indifferent to the other. Woodward played clad only in a tight swimsuit-like garment and moved while playing as though he were wandering within the music itself. Blume’s images looked a bit like Rorschach blots become video game backgrounds.

Here were works that, in their non-narrative rigor, let each viewer/listener find their own way. It can be so agreeable to be relieved of the need for interpretation.

me, myself, and iPhone
By Victoria Blume
Cab Studio: 3/29, 8 p.m.; 3/30, 8 & 10 p.m.; 3/31, 8:30 p.m.

Sequenza VIII
By Luciano Berio
Performed by Matthew Woodward
Cab Studio: 3/29, 10 p.m.; 3/31, 8:30 & 10:30 p.m.

 

Brittany Bland's Sea Witch

Brittany Bland's Sea Witch

Perhaps that lack of interpretive edge went with me into Sea Witch, a shadow puppet show by second-year designer Brittany Bland, inspired and adapted from a play by Genne Murphy, a third-year playwright. Here, there was a narrative relayed in pictures only. The effects achieved by the overlay of the shadow-puppets on background cels were poetic at times, at other times more dramatic.

The story of the Sea Witch, an old fisherwoman, and her interaction with Lia, a “card shark,” and Ozzy, a casino boss, was, to me, murky at best. Suffice to say there was a traumatic backstory. The images, some beautiful, some more disturbing, accompanied by music and live Foley by Kathy Ruvuna, created a trance-like experience. Like a dream, meaning seemed subordinated to intangible effects such as the play of light and color in the background of the black foreground images.

Sea Witch
Proposed by Brittany Bland
Inspired by and adapted from a play by Genne Murphy
Adaptor, proposer, puppeteer: Brittany Bland; Puppeteers: Wlad Woyno Rodriguez, Laurie Ortega-Murphy; Live Foley: Kathy Ruvuna
Annex: 3/30, 9 p.m.; 3/31: 9:30 & 10:30 p.m.

 

All three nights, the African-American Cultural Center at Yale featured third-year director Shadi Ghaheri’s Post Scream and Terror. “A theatrical experiment about Love, Sex and Beauty,” the show brought female performers together to enact a series of entitled segments, some solo, some relational, some songs, some mostly interpretive movement. The sequence of the segments was determined by audience members pulling cards from a hat, with the proviso that the evening ends with the segment called “Crave,” after Sarah Kane’s play. The program lists Kane’s name among a number of “known and unknown female artists” that inspired the various pieces. Between segments, at times, one of the performers might comment or reminisce, the seeming informality drawing attention to the way the entire work moved through all four women—Ghaheri, Patricia Fa’asua, Kineta Kunutu, Juliana Aiden Martinez—in succession and at once.

At times there was a deliberate playfulness or childishness to the performance, as when Ghaheri introduced the show while rocking on a rocking horse or when Martinez rode around on an oversize tricycle. Some titles were simply the name of the performer, as for instance “Tricia” for Fa’asua’s stirring a cappella vocal, or “Ilia” for Ilia Paulino’s song, accompanying herself on guitar. Others, such as “Rope,” named the main prop, a long rope that both divided and united Ghaheri and Kunutu.

The purpose of most of the pieces, it seemed, was the effort to express female experience in both its joyous and oppressive aspects. At one point, in a piece called “Fashion,” three women entered and donned fanciful accessories as a mockery of the catwalk of fashion shows; in another, called “Stephanie,” Stephanie Machado presided over a table of objets before selecting a bracelet and exiting, babbling happily.

The show’s title could be taken to indicate that the lives being depicted have moved past “scream and terror,” so that most of the segments seemed to indicate strength, resilience, and a sense of supportive belonging. The final segment, which began with Fa’asua walking in wide circles reading a long speech from Sarah Kane’s Crave while the others moved about in freeform dance, ended with a delightful valedictory. Moving as one entity, processing out of the playing space on their butts, the women sang and chanted fervently, “fuck that life!”

Post Scream and Terror
By Shadi Ghaheri
Devised and created by Patricia Fa’asua, Shadi Ghaheri, Kineta Kinutu, Juliana Aiden Martinez, Stephanie Cohen, Mika Eubanks, Kathy Ruvuna; with Louisa Gummer, Stephanie Machado, Ilia Paulino, Sohina Sidhu
AfAm House: March 29-31, 11 p.m.

 

Diverse in its aims and inspiration, the Satellite Festival is a hard event to summarize, its main strength is letting audiences have access to short works, works in development, tech-based and multimedia works, and works that eschew the traditional methods of storytelling for means more expressive and intuitive. Keeping audiences on the move throughout the weekend brings an air of festival to theater, a welcome break from the rhythm of shows with which audiences have become perhaps too comfortable by this point in the season. Made even more ambitious this year by the intention of its curators, Jeremy O. Harris and Amauta Marston-Firmino, to encompass the Cabaret’s history, the Satellite Festival demonstrates again the range of talents and the unexpected collaborations that Yale Cabaret has fostered in its first 50 years.

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Yale Cabaret’s 50th Season
Satellite Festival

 

Curators: Jeremy O. Harris, Amauta Marston-Firmino; Producer: Carl Holvick; Associate Producer: Zak Rosen; Producing Stage Manager: Zachry Bailey; Producing Technical Director: Matt Davis; Producing Sound Director: Roxy Jia; Producing Props Director: Madeleine Winward; Basement Lighting Designer: Ryan Seffinger; Sound Engineer: Noah Gershenson; Stage Manager for Wolf/Alice: Mert Dilek; Stage Manager for CCAM: Joelle Besch

Yale Cabaret and environs
March 29-31, 2018

A Tale of Two Uprisings

Review of Bulgaria! Revolt!, Yale School of Drama

In Bulgaria! Revolt!, the wildly imaginative thesis show by third-year Yale School of Drama director Elizabeth Dinkova and her co-creator, third-year playwright Miranda Rose Hall, parody might seem the dominant mode. Parody of the traditional musical, certainly, but also of the more avant-garde versions that have come along at various times, including the Brechtian, and, in that vein, parody of the committed political drama. There’s a tongue-in-cheek quality that keeps us amused by a tale that traverses some unsavory aspects of 20th century history. In creating a musical that clearly favors the underdog—here the committed leftist poet Geo Milev, a casualty of a fascist regime, and his wife the actress Mila—Dinkova and Hall see clearly how difficult it would be to play the story with a straight face. Ours is a time best suited to burlesque.

And yet, it would be wrong to see the show as entirely parodic. Rather, Dinkova and Hall, with their composer and sound designer, Michael Costagliola, have concocted a musical that sustains its dramatic intentions while keeping its ironies in play. And that makes for a rather mercurial evening of theater, full of surprising turns and tones. The show incorporates the political history of Bulgaria, a deal with the devil, and the shameful working conditions in the Chicago meat-packing district in the 1920s. Ambitious? Yes, but that’s just another word for having a lot on its mind.

Ostensibly set in the 1920s, the story begins with its rather mild-mannered hero, the poet Geo (Leland Fowler), who is beside himself at the fact that his poem, September, about a recent brutally-suppressed peasant uprising, may cost him his life. His wife Mila (Juliana Canfield) sticks up for his poem’s value, but Geo wishes he could undo it. And, presto!, there to take advantage of his moment of weakness is the devil herself (Elizabeth Stahlmann), who casts them in her own version of a morality tale: As the poet Yanko, Geo will have the chance to undermine his own poem, meanwhile, as Miroslava, Mila will play the very soul of insurrection among the people.

The target of their revolt is now The Butcher (Dylan Frederick), a gleefully dissolute character who has his eye on Miroslava while imposing his whims on a gaggle of workers who seem as if they’ve stepped out of a Marx Brothers version of an Eisenstein classic: the Drunk (Ben Anderson), the Farmer (Sebastian Arboleda), an Old Witch (Marié Botha), the Historian (Anna Crivelli), an Old Priest (Jonathan Higginbotham), a Milkmaid (Courtney Jamison), the Tobacco Lady (Stephanie Machado), and a School Boy (Patrick Madden). Each is amusing in his or her own right while being forged into a collective by Miroslava’s spirited rebellion.

Canfield shines in her song of insurrection, like a rabble-rousing force of nature, and she’s matched by Crivelli’s dance of the many suppressions as the Historian reels off a chronology mind-boggling in its catalog of the many times hope for democratic freedoms has been beaten down in Bulgaria. And those are just some of the strengths of Act 1, which includes Frederick’s big number “The Butcher,” the comic highpoint. He’s attended by Stahlmann, who shape-shifts between brash devil and Toma, a fawning elder.

Yanko, shaken by the forces of violence aimed at The Butcher, takes the devil’s bait and decides to decamp for the U.S. Seemingly a victory for the devil, Act 1 ends with Mila insisting on another round, this time in Chicago, where everyone will be recast in a tale of her recounting.

The notion of America as the land of the free is swiftly given the lie when we’re introduced to a host of immigrants from various lands—Poland, Ireland, South Africa, Italy, Mexico, to name a few—who toil under distressing conditions in the meat factory of Frank’s Famous Franks. Frank (Frederick) is, of course, “The Butcher” under new auspices, aided by his assistant Patty (Stahlmann, as the moral equivalent of a concentration camp commandant). A harrowing situation in Act 2 almost strips aside all the comic burlesque in favor of the most abject horror, and it’s a great tribute to Dinkova’s resources as a director that the show can shift toward the bathetic and recover its humor. In fact, the situation Dinkova and Hall create is a sharp commentary on the dehumanization of capitalist production at its most callous. And the cast—particularly Madden and Arboleda—are emotionally convincing in their grisly discovery.

Act 2 also boasts the most lyrical moment as Geo/Yanko and Mila/Sally sing a touching duet to their love, despite all. Indeed, Act 2 serves to vindicate Mila enough to rally the show into something like an upbeat register.

The scenic design by Emona Stoykova places the show on a platform surrounded by seats, making the action accessible in many directions, with, at one end, a hard-working pickup band being put through its paces and, at the other, an incredibly imposing portal. Lights and costumes and wonderfully involved projections—at times surveillance-style taping of the proceedings—add many lively effects, including childlike paintings that capture the folkloric quality of this varied tale.

Standouts in the show are Fowler’s pleasant singing voice, Canfield’s inspired ardor, Frederick’s zany villain, Crivelli’s rhapsody of history, and Stahlmann’s striking shifts among three characters, but it’s also a great ensemble show, and I’d be remiss not to mention Higginbotham’s brief-exposing pratfalls as the Old Priest and Machado’s Tobacco Lady saddled with a bevy of babies in slings. It’s the sort of show that has so much going on you’re bound to miss some of it in a single viewing.

It's unusual for a thesis show at YSD to be an original work, though it sometimes happens. Michael McQuilken’s Jib, an original musical from 2011 I remember fondly, is currently onstage in Philadelphia. May Bulgaria! Revolt! also find legs for future productions.

 

Bulgaria! Revolt!
Created by Elizabeth Dinkova and Miranda Rose Hall
Books and lyrics by Miranda Rose Hall
Music by Michael Costagliola
Directed by Elizabeth Dinkova

Choreographer: Christian Probst; Music Director: Scott Etan Feiner; Scenic Designer: Emona Stoykova; Costume Designer: Sarah Nietfeld; Lighting Designer: Krista Smith; Sound Designer: Michael Costagliola; Projection Designer: Wladimiro A. Woyno R.; Production Dramaturg: Maria Inês Marques; Technical Director: Kelly Pursley; Stage Manager: Shelby North

Cast: Ben Anderson, Sebastian Arboleda, Marié Botha, Juliana Canfield, Anna Crivelli, Leland Fowler, Dylan Frederick, Jonathan Higginbotham, Courtney Jamison, Stephanie Machado, Patrick Madden, Elizabeth Stahlmann

The Band: Alexander Casimiro, percussion; Allen Chang, clarinet; Ginna Doyle, violin; Scott Etan Feiner, piano; Jiji Kim, guitar; Adam Matlock, accordian; Ian Scot, bass

“Three Chains a Slave” performed by the Yale Slavic Chorus

Yale School of Drama
December 9-15, 2016