Taylor Mac offering his musical interpretation of the culture of the 1930s through the 1950s. Credit Sara Krulwich/The New York Times
“Everything you’re feeling is appropriate,†says Taylor Mac, repeatedly, as if to soothe anxious children, during the second three-hour installment of his opus in progress, “A 24-Decade History of Popular Music,†which is having its premiere at New York Live Arts as part of the Under the Radar festival. The assurance may well be needed for anyone in the audience uncomfortable with being uncomfortable â€" either physically, emotionally or politically.
In Mr. Mac’s frolicsome romp through three decades of the hit parade (with many digressions into music more obscure), much is asked of the audience. We descend from our seats almost as soon as the show has begun to huddle onstage together as if in a Depression-era shantytown. Later, all the white members in several rows of the audience are asked to squeeze into the sides to mimic in miniature the white flight to the suburbs that took place in the 1950s.
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Theater Review: Taylor Mac's 'A 24-Decade History of Popular Music: 1900-1950s'JAN. 14, 2015
Given the demographics of theater audiences â€" even for a genre-bending and gender-obliterating performer like Mr. Mac â€" much squeezing is necessary; the suburbs are more crowded than the shantytowns. I was relieved when the gays were allowed back downtown. (“But no gentrifying!†Mr. Mac admonished.)
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Taylor Mac in “A 24-Decade History of Popular Music,” at New York Live Arts. Credit Sara Krulwich/The New York Times
And how do you feel about Nazi armbands rendered in glittering sequins? Would you be interested in slipping one on and joining Mr. Mac for a romp through the bucolic German countryside to the jaunty tune of Rodgers & Hammerstein’s “The Surrey With the Fringe on Top�
In truth, of course, those of us who have come along for Mr. Mac’s sprawling adventure into the making and masking of culture(s) through music will mostly feel the same giddy exhilaration we experienced through the first part. And even Mr. Mac’s more discomfiting salvos are charged with sly purpose. As he explains during the show, an overriding theme of this ambitious endeavor â€" to culminate in a 24-hour concert covering all 24 decades of music, from 1776 to 2016 â€" is exploring “how communities are built through dire circumstances.â€
As before, roughly each hour of the show is devoted to a single decade â€" here the 1930s through the 1950s and directed by Mr. Mac and Niegel Smith. For the 1930s, Mr. Mac glides onstage in a tattered black dress that looks like a Bob Mackie as repurposed by Martin Margiela. Sentiment inside the shantytown is galvanized around our mutual suffering, as Mr. Mac sings heart-tugging numbers like “Soup,†a mournful ode to that minimal meal, and the classic “Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?†This segment felt somewhat less shapely than most of the others, but Mr. Mac’s performance is a nightly work in progress that makes room for improvisatory digressions, and as he cheerfully confesses, he doesn’t at all mind things that go on longer than they should.
The segment devoted to the 1940s, by contrast, was perhaps the most emotionally stirring so far. Mr. Mac, sporting a brilliant headpiece that evokes Joan Crawford’s complicated coifs of the time, rendered in what looks like a neon-colored Slinky, begins with a perky version of “The Trolley Song.†But he then segues into a subversive rendering of that inviolably upbeat song, “Accentuate the Positive.â€
The lyrics remain the same, but we have now entered the concentration camps, and the song has been eerily transmogrified into an anthem echoing the ethos of the Third Reich. (I’m not sure I’ll ever hear the line “eliminate the negative†again without feeling a distinct chill.) The lyrics to Cole Porter’s Wild West number “Don’t Fence Me In†are also cast in a ghoulishly comic light. That Mr. Mac is not afraid of bad taste is abundantly clear. He jokingly refers to the shows the prisoners put on in the camps as “out-of-town tryouts.â€
Mr. Mac returns to a recurring theme in the performances, the experience of gay men and women in a time before homosexuality was acknowledged, let alone accepted, in the final section devoted to the 1950s. Here he movingly recalls his own first discovery that there were men who felt like he did about men â€" many of them â€" when he and a friend journeyed from his hometown, Stockton, Calif., to San Francisco to watch that city’s first AIDS march. Mr. Mac’s recollection of discovering a home in the world just as it was burning down makes for a particularly piercing moment.
But much lighter passages abound, too: It was the 1950s in America, after all. Mr. Mac winks his way through the Connie Francis teenybopper anthem “Where the Boys Are.†And, in a slapstick sequence, he bounces around the audience, enacting a mad fantasy of prison as, ahem, a liberating sexual playground for a gay man of the 1950s.
Remember, those of you asked to mimic sexual play with Mr. Mac: Everything you’re feeling is appropriate.
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