The Town Hall Presents Taylor Mac's Holiday Sauce at The Town Hall on 12/11 at 8pm
By: Tori Hartshorn Nov. 13, 2018
Taylor Mac's Holiday Sauce, the latest installment of the artist's award-winning A 24-Decade History of Popular Music project, will return to The Town Hall in New York City for another skewering of the sacred and the secular on Tuesday, December 11th at 8pm. A follow-up to its debut at The Town Hall in December 2017, the show explores Christmas as calamity, upending our yuletide traditions and celebrating the holiday in all of its dysfunction with the families you choose to love.
For this second New York holiday installment, produced by Pomegranate Arts (Executive Producer, Linda Brumbach; Associate Producer, Alisa Regas) and Mac's company Nature's Darlings, Mac will be joined by longtime collaborators: costume designer Machine Dazzle, music director Matt Ray and a band of eight. Once again the aim is to unnerve and unleash. "My job as a theatrical artist," he told the Paris Review, "is to remind people of the things they've forgotten, dismissed or buried, or that other people have buried for them."
Conceived, written, performed, co-directed, and co-produced by Taylor Mac, the creative team for Holiday Sauce includes Matt Ray (Musical Direction and Arrangements), Niegel Smith (Co-Direction), Machine Dazzle (Set and Costumes). Special Guest Performers include Machine Dazzle, Tigger!, Glenn Marla (as Sexual Consent Santa), and the local Dandy Minions and other surprise guests.
Playwright, actor, singer-songwriter, performance artist, director and producer, Taylor Mac is a 2017 MacArthur Fellow and is the author of seventeen full-length works of theater. Mac's A 24-Decade History of Popular Music won the 2017 Edward M. Kennedy Award for Drama inspired by American History and was a 2017 Pulitzer Prize Finalist for Drama. The work also made The New York Times "Best of 2016" lists in three categories: Performance, Theater and Classical Music.
Taylor Mac's A 24-Decade History of Popular Music, a 24-hour live performance that debuted in Brooklyn in 2016, was a tectonic work. New York Times critic Wesley Morris called the show "one of the great experiences of my life". The program offered battle hymns, black spirituals, Tin Pan Alley songs, blues, Broadway musicals, reconstructions of "Yankee Doodle" and lesbian-feminist punk -- 246 songs in all, and all popular in one community or another in the United States over the last 240 years. The program has since been performed in parts and in its entirety all over the world including Melbourne, Los Angeles, London, San Francisco and Philadelphia.
Taylor Mac (who uses "judy," lowercase sic, not as a name but as a gender pronoun) is one of the world's leading theater artists. A playwright, actor, singer-songwriter, performance artist, director and producer, and "Critical darling of the New York scene" (New York magazine), judy's work has been performed in hundreds of venues including New York City's Town Hall, Lincoln Center, Celebrate Brooklyn, The Public Theatre, and Playwrights Horizons, as well as London's Hackney Empire and Barbican, Washington D.C.'s Kennedy Center, LA's Ace Theater (through UCLA's Center for the Art of Performance), Chicago's Steppenwolf Theatre, the Sydney Opera House, The Melbourne Festival (Forum Theater), Stockholm's Sodra Theatern, the Spoleto Festival, and San Francisco's Curran Theater and SF MoMA.
judy is the author of many works of theater including the soon to be produced plays, Gary, A Sequel to Titus Andronicus, Prosperous Fools, and the previously produced works, A 24-Decade History of Popular Music, Hir, The Walk Across America for Mother Earth, Comparison is Violence, The Lily's Revenge, The Young Ladies Of, Red Tide Blooming, The Be(a)st of Taylor Mac, Cardiac Arrest or Venus on a Half-Clam, The Face of Liberalism, Okay, Maurizio Pollini, A Crevice, and The Hot Month.
Sometimes Taylor acts in other people's plays (or co-creations). Notably: Shen Teh/Shui Ta in The Foundry Theater's production of Good Person of Szechwan at La Mama and the Public Theater, in the City Center's Encores production of Gone Missing, Puck/Egeus in the Classic Stage Company's A Midsummer Night's Dream, and in the two-man vaudeville, The Last Two People on Earth opposite Mandy Patinkin and directed by Susan Stroman.
Mac is a MacArthur Fellow, a Pulitzer Prize Finalist for Drama and the recipient of multiple awards including the Kennedy Prize, a NY Drama Critics Circle Award, a Doris Duke Performing Artist Award, a Guggenheim, the Herb Alpert in Theater, the Peter Zeisler Memorial Award, the Helen Merrill Playwriting Award, two Bessies, two Obies, two Helpmanns, and an Ethyl Eichelberger Award. An alumnus of New Dramatists, judy is currently a New York Theater Workshop Usual Suspect and the Resident playwright at the Here Arts Center.
Taylor Mac's Gary, A Sequel to Titus Andronicus will debut this spring on Broadway, with Nathan Lane and Andrea Martin, at Booth Theatre.
Inaugurated on January 12, 1921, The Town Hall has celebrated the diversity of New York with programs for all audiences through its own eclectic programming and by opening its doors to an unparalleled roster of independent producers. The 1,500 seat hall, with its grand feel and impeccable acoustics, has been a showcase for music from around the world and new artistic collaborations as well as a stage for public affairs and education, social progress and political discourse. Some of the figures that have appeared at Town Hall include Paul Robeson, Sergei Rachmaninoff, Pablo Casals, Andres Segovia, Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie Parker, Nina Simone, Langston Hughes, Thelonius Monk, Igor Stravinsky and Bob Dylan. Town Hall is a cultural crossroads. It was built as a forum for the people-to educate, inspire and explore. For nearly a century, Town Hall Presents has celebrated the diversity of this great city with programs for all audiences-unique voices from around the world, new collaborations, public affairs and education, social progress and political discourse. The Town Hall presents an eclectic season of events and concerts for everyone. For more information please visit the Town Hall history page.
About Pomegranate Arts:
For the past twenty years, Pomegranate Arts has worked in close collaboration with a small group of contemporary artists and arts institutions to bring bold and ambitious artistic ideas to fruition. Founder and Director Linda Brumbach, along with managing director Alisa E. Regas, produced the Olivier Award-winning revival of Einstein on the Beach, the multi-award-winning production of Taylor Mac's 24-Decade History of Popular Music, the Drama Desk Award-winning production of Charlie Victor Romeo and Available Light by John Adams, Lucinda Childs and Frank Gehry among others. Since its inception, Pomegranate Arts has produced over 30 major new performing arts productions and tours for Philip Glass, Laurie Anderson, Lucinda Childs, Dan Zanes, London's Improbable, Sankai Juku, Batsheva, and Bassem Youssef and collaborated on new productions with the Kronos Quartet, Leonard Cohen, Robert Wilson, and Frank Gehry. Together with Taylor Mac/Nature's Darlings, Pomegranate Arts produced and developed A 24-Decade History of Popular Music.
EVENT INFO:
Tuesday, December 11, 2018 at 8:00pm (doors 7:30pm)
TICKETS: $49/69/89/99
THE TOWN HALL
123 West 43rd Street (between 6th Avenue and Broadway)
New York, NY 10036
TICKETS at The Town Hall Box Office 212-997-6661
or TICKETMASTER http://www.ticketmaster.com/
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