I caught Taylor Mac at Celebrate Brooklyn this past Saturday (8/1) Amazing! His ’20th Century Abridged’ takes on music from the 20th century and puts his own spin on it. The songs range from Irving Berlin’s : ‘All Alone’ through Laura Brannigan’s ‘Gloria’ and all the way to Ted Nugent’s ‘Snakeskin’ but The Mac performs all of that in flamboyant and very flashy dresses designed by his long time collaborator Machine Dazzle, while wearing spike heeled shoes and elaborate and sometimes sequined makeup. I say ‘The Mac’ because it is difficult and totally unnecessary to assign a gender to this person. The Mac seems to be male but is much more comfortable wearing dresses, high hells make-up and elaborate head gear. And yet, I do not feel that the word transvestite would be any more appropriate to his persona than the word hat would be in describing the things that adorn The Mac’s head.
The songs are performed in a variety of styles that do not necessarily follow the originals and are introduces by Taylor in a fascinating and original manner. For instance, when performing all of me, Taylor walked into the audience, climbed on a chair and solicited audience participation. The crowd was split into segments each one being assigned a role in recreating the tenements’ ruckus which Berlin was presumably immersed in when he wrote ‘All Alone.’ We were in turn babies crying, grandparents complaining, annoying children and true to the spirit of the show, fathers cooking in the kitchen and mother sitting on the sofa watching a game and yelling for more beer. ‘Gloria’ was a platform for analyzing irony in music and making fun of Bono. I haven’t previously heard the story about Bono clapping and saying that each clap signifies the death of a child somewhere in the world. It was a no brainer and I would have yelled the same thing as the audience member did: ‘so stop clapping already..’ “Snakeskin’ provided a vehicle for ridiculing Ted Nugent and wishing him a speedy death. I know the guy’s music and that he likes to hunt with a bow and arrow, but not the reason that we should wish him dead. I could google him I guess, but I’m not that much into his music. Actually, I couldn’t resist and I looked up ‘Journey to the Center of the Mind’ by his first band ‘The Amboy Dukes. The most exciting thing about that song was how much they all wanted to look like the Kinks. While I kept writing, YouTube went on to play the next Amboy Dukes album ‘Migration’ – surprisingly, much better.
Other major highlights of the show:
- Gender bender role playing of audience members on the stage two of which were in the pre-teen age group.
- A group of 25 or so burlesque dancers of all sizes shaking their sometimes significant T&A’s before and after taking off their dresses to display their tasseled tits and micro bikini panties.
- The Brooklyn United Marching Band interacting amazingly well with the other musicians and providing a beautiful visual montage with their two large white tubas behind Taylor Mac himself behind 6 or so gorgeous young dancing girls shaking their one and all vigorously.
On the overall a fabulous show! Kudos to Matt Ray for amazing musical direction that had the excellent musicians play anything from swing to free jazz, hard rock all the way to deconstructed stuff that sounded like something that Tom Waits would sing to.
Bottom line, I can hardly wait for the promised 24 hour marathon that The Mac is said to perform sometime in 2016. Count me in!