The New York Times

Bastille Day With a Philadelphia Twist

By DAVE MAYERS (July 14, 2014)

Twenty years ago, Terry Berch McNally and a few fellow Philadelphia restaurant owners ran down to the stone walls of the nearby abandoned Eastern State Penitentiary. “Let’s storm the Bastille,” Ms. McNally said, Champagne and French bread in hand. Then it dawned on her. “Oh my gosh,” she said, “this sounds like an event. We could do this.”

Two decades later, Philadelphia’s take on France’s Bastille Day draws thousands to the prison walls in a wildly inaccurate recreation of the event that set off the French Revolution.

Every year since, Ms. McNally has played Marie Antoinette, the French queen who famously said, “Let them eat cake,” before losing her head to the revolutionaries. The performances change from year to year, addressing topical issues like the underfunded Philadelphia schools and the Hobby Lobby Supreme Court decision.

The Bearded Ladies cabaret company has spearheaded most of the performance for the last three years. When the Bearded Ladies were first asked to turn the celebration into a full-on theatrical event, Mr. Jarboe asked, “What would a revolution look like in Philadelphia?”

“Cleary there would be a talking baguette,” he said.

The New York Times

Opera Philadelphia to Take On Andy Warhol

By ALLAN KOZINN (April 24, 2014)

Opera Philadelphia, the company that earlier this year announced its plan to stage Daniel Schnyder’s opera about the jazz saxophonist Charlie Parker in 2015, is pushing further into the world of popular culture in its search for unusual subjects. The company’s plans for 2015 also include “ANDY: A Popera,” a work about Andy Warhol with music by Heath Allen, a Philadelphia composer and pianist.

The company, which described the pieces as a “cabaret-opera hybrid,” is collaborating on the project with the Bearded Ladies, an experimental cabaret troupe. Mr. Allen is the group’s resident composer, and writes in a style closer to jazz than opera. A spokesman for the company said that as the work gets closer to completion, Mr. Heath will work with a composer with more operatic experience. That composer has not yet been selected.

Audiences will have a chance to see this work-in-progress as it develops. On May 2, some Mr. Allen’s music will be included in a concert at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, at which the Bearded Ladies, singers from the opera company’s chorus and a rock band will present selections from the piece. 

The Bearded Ladies are also planning to perform selections at pop-up concerts around the city in May, to be announced on Twitter by both the group and Opera Philadelphia.  An hourlong concert version of the opera will be presented at the Wilma Theater, in Philadelphia in July. From there, the team will transform its materials into a completed work, suited to the opera stage. The date of the premiere has not yet been set, but the process is expected to take about a year.

The Philadelphia Inquirer

Bearded Ladies' 'Marlene and the Machine': On being human

By Jim Rutter (December 07, 2012)

Each day, Internet users upload nearly half a billion photos to Facebook, add 60-plus hours of video per minute to YouTube, and post several hundred million messages on Twitter.

I thought of this penchant for compulsive oversharing while watching the Bearded Ladies' intense, illuminating Marlene and the Machine, a cabaret that probes the boundaries between the chaos of uncontrolled emotion and the veneer of manufactured control.

And who better to explore these themes than that icon of carefully constructed character, Marlene Dietrich (John Jarboe)? Together with performers Liz Filios, Kate Raines, and Kristen Bailey, Jarboe presents a seminar on "Affect Management," a 90-minute tutorial on manipulating others by mastering your own emotions.

As Filios and Raines enact grotesque choreography and exaggerated pantomime, the quartet weaves in songs from composer Friedrich Hollaender that Dietrich turned famous and more contemporary selections about isolation, narcissism, and manipulation by Paul McCartney, Regina Spektor, and Fiona Apple, not to mention a mocking rendition of lyrics penned by Fred Rogers (yes, Mr. Rogers).

Jarboe's lanky frame totters on platform heels, lunging into the audience, frightening and entrancing with a dangerous charisma. Rebecca Kanach dressed the cast in tattered gauze dresses, fraying lederhosen, and vinyl head wraps that blur the lines of gender. Bailey's stunning turn startles with a fascinating androgyny.

The group's German expressionist approach (think Fritz Lang) and comic theatricality lend distance from the darker themes, though Jarboe's teasing indicates the true targets. While machines can control their responses, "it's hard being human," he laments, dealing constantly with emotions, "the magic tricks of the body." Lighthearted touches (and forced audience involvement) extract probing questions from the lyrics - "If we didn't have faces, would we still want to live?" - that touch on our daily interface with machines.

By the time you read this review, I already will have Facebooked, tweeted, and tumblred this piece, expressing faceless thoughts to unknown recipients. And as I type, I'm haunted by the show's final image: Jarboe's hand, outstretched in an unrelenting yearning to reach, to grasp, to connect.