Dorothy Danner Directs CHANTEUSE at Here Arts Center

As Pride Month celebrations unfold across the country, Chanteuse, a new solo show written and performed by Alan Palmer, is set for a limited engagement off-Broadway run July 11th - July 30th at Here Arts Center, 145 6th Ave.  

The official opening night is set for Friday, July 14th. Directed by Dorothy Danner and featuring music by David Legg, Chanteuse is the story of a gay man's struggle to avoid being sent to the concentration camps by taking on his late landlady's identity and becoming a chanteuse in the supper clubs of Berlin. Set in 1930's Berlin, the piece takes place nearly 100 years ago, but the issues of Jewish, gay, and trans persecution are disturbingly current. https://www.chanteusemusical.com

Chanteuse will infuse pop-up art gallery elements within the theatre, informing audiences of what happened to the members of the LGBTQ+ community in Europe at the time of the Nazi Party's reign. The exhibit also spotlights the current rise in vitriol directed towards the LGBTQ+ community in America and around the world. 

Very little has been written about the tens of thousands of homosexuals, who were the damnedest of the damned, the outcasts among the outcasts in the concentration camps. There are only estimates of figures. During the twelve years of Nazi rule, nearly 50,000 were convicted of the crime of homosexuality. The majority ended up in concentration camps, and virtually all of them perished.
 
“Chanteuse is a wildly theatrical retelling of a profoundly important survival story, which bears an eerie resemblance to today,” says the show's director Dorothy Danner. Banning books in America. Burning books in Germany. Don't say Gay. Anti LGBTQ hatred. Threats of arrest toward librarians. A rise in violence of hate groups. It's all about autocratic means to keep citizenry purified.  It's an old story being repeated in contemporary headlines across the country.”

In this tumultuous time of uneasiness, it would seem impossible to imagine that anything like the third Reich or imprisonment camps could happen again. However, with the anti-gay purge in Chechnya, with secret abductions, imprisonment, torture - and extrajudicial killing by authorities targeting persons based on their perceived sexual orientation, one must wonder if history can indeed repeat itself. Chanteuse was written not only to tell the story of one man's journey but also to warn us that we cannot turn a blind eye to today's climate with its alarming echoes of the past. 

Performances of Chanteuse are on Tuesdays, Wednesdays, Thursdays, Fridays, and Saturday at 7:00pm. Matinee performances are on Saturdays and Sundays at 2:00pm.

Tickets are $50 and can be ordered online at https://ci.ovationtix.com/219/production/1163291  

HERE Arts Center wants everyone to have access to groundbreaking art, so there are ten tickets priced at $10 available for each performance on a first come, first served basis.

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