Join the creators of the OBIE-winning play Three Pianos for their now-annual boozy Schubertiad with special guests, in a benefit to support JACK's artistic and community efforts, at JACK on April 3, 2017 at 8 pm.
This year, the tuneful trio of Rick Burkhardt, Dave Malloy and Alec Duffy twist and turn Schubert "greatest hits," including songs from "Schwanengesang," joined by these other musical mights, who will be offering their own interpretations of Schubert's output:
Gelsey Bell
Joseph Keckler
Brian McCorkle
James Monaco
Mary Knapp
Ian Axness
Joe White
Alaina Ferris
HeathCliff Saunders
Rick Burkhardt is an Obie-award-winning playwright, performer, composer and songwriter whose original chamber music, theater and text pieces have been performed in over 40 US cities, as well as in Europe, Mexico, Canada, Taiwan, Australia, and New Zealand. He is a founding member of the Nonsense Company, a touring experimental music/theater trio, and songwriter/accordionist for the Prince Myshkins, a political cabaret/folk duo. In 2011 he was listed as an "Off Off Broadway Innovator to Watch" by Time Out New York.
Dave Malloy is a composer/writer/performer/sound designer. He has written the music for eleven musicals, including Natasha, Pierre & The Great Comet of 1812, an electropop opera based on War & Peace, directed by frequent collaborator Rachel Chavkin, which opened on Broadway in 2016. His musical Ghost Quartet, a song cycle about love, death, and whiskey, premiered in October 2014 at the Bushwick Starr for an extended, sold-out run; in January it transferred to The McKittrick Hotel, home of Sleep No More, for a twice extended run, and is now touring the country. Other musicals include Preludes, a musical fantasia about Rachmaninoff and hypnosis at Lincoln Center Theater 3; Don't Stop Me, a dance-a-thon to the death musical for teenagers with writer Krista Knight, commissioned by Youth Musical Theater Company of Berkeley CA; Black Wizard / Blue Wizard, a philosophical musical fantasia with co-creator/performer Eliza Bent; Beowulf - A Thousand Years of Baggage, a Banana Bag & Bodice SongPlay based on the epic poem (2011 Edinburgh Herald Angel, 2008 Glickman Award); and Beardo, a Russian-ballet inspired retelling of the Rasputin myth, including a string quintet and a 40-piece choir.
Alec Duffy moved to New York in 2000 and, inspired by the work of performance artists Linda Montano and Tehching Shieh, began to create projects that blended art and life. He eventually formed a theater company, Hoi Polloi, and produced work mostly at The Ontological-Hysteric Theater, including Three Pianos, a paean to Franz Schubert's Winterreise song cycle that he created with Dave Malloy and Rick Burkhardt and which ended up winning an OBIE. In 2012, he started the performance space JACK (named after his grandfather) with his wife Mimi Lien and several co-founders, in an attempt to build a microcosm of an ideal city, with music, theater, dance and conversation serving a larger political project of putting art to work towards liberation.
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