DANSE MACABRE
David J’s The Chanteuse and the Devil’s Muse is not so much a play as it is an art installation. But, as an art installation, it has a terrible beauty and some moments of bizarre theatrical innovations that linger in the memory.
While it purports to be an investigation of the Black Dahlia murder, the unsolved Los Angeles crime that has mesmerized America since the late forties, it is content to serve up its revelations in terms of startling images rather than in-depth exploration. The body of the victim, Elizabeth Short, severed in half, becomes a dance macabre in which the torso and the lower part of the body, separated from each other, dance in concert. Butoh artist Vangeline performs hypnotic doll-like movements with scarily electrifying results. An extended sequence which brings to us the penultimate scene from Robert Aldrich’s apocalyptic film noir version of Mickey Spillane’s Kiss Me Deadly will drive you home eager to see the entire film. The noirish mood is further enhanced by some scenes wherein Detective Lt. Frank Jemison (Douglas Dickerman) questions blues singer Madi Comfort (Daniele Watts), a possible mistress of suspect George Hodel; these scenes are the only real connection to theater and, if they had been developed, could have made for strong stuff, since Dickerman and Watts are certainly the right actors. Watts’s limpid portrait of Comfort, slow and emotionally inscrutable, looking as if she’s either nursing a cold or has just snorted some heroin, tells us more about the woman than the writing does, and her torch song is so smoky, one wants to hear even more.
Indeed, the entire piece has been developed around a song cycle originally written by David J (of Bauhaus and Love and Rockets) in collaboration with Ego Plum (of Ebola Music Orchestra) and which they perform, largely in silhouette, behind a makeshift screen, accompanied by violinist Ysanne Spevack; it is clearly the raison d’etre behind The Chanteuse and the Devil’s Muse and has its own eerie intensity.
Do all the pieces come together? Not really, but the brief evening is as tantalizing as it is self-conscious, and its peculiarities do make some sort of impact.
harveyperr @ stageandcinema.com
The Chanteuse and the Devil’s Muse
at the Bootleg had to close early for financial reasons
BUT
there is one (1) final performance on November 16 at another theater, as previously scheduled in the event Theatrefication.
For more information regarding The Chanteuse and the Devil’s Muse at Theatrefication on November 12, please visit http://www.theatrefication.com.
For question concerning tickets purchased thru Bootleg for the cancelled shows, please contact jessica @ bootlegtheater.org
or visit http://www.bootlegtheater.org/theater.html
