A 24-Decade History of Popular Music – New York Live Arts

Taylor Mac in A 24-Decade of Popular Music: 1900-1950s at New York Live Arts. Picture: Ian Douglas

A 24-Decade History of Popular Music: 1900-1950s continues at New York Live Arts until 25 January.

“Maybe you’ve noticed that I like to make things go on longer than they should,” said Taylor Mac, as the first half of the first instalment of his epic theatre piece with the umbrella title A 24-Decade History of Popular Music moved well into its third hour. But it was doubtful that his audience would agree that Mac’s show was going on too long. The atmosphere was like a party that has all the signs of extending buoyantly until dawn, although Mac did wrap things up after some three hours and 15 minutes.

This first entry in Mac’s marathon effort covers three decades – from 1900 to 1929 – and plays the first week of the current two-week run. The second week’s performances, ending 23 January, surveys the 1930s to the 1950s, with the final evening covering all six decades. Some time in 2016, Mac says, he plans to climax the project with a 24-hour show covering popular music from 1776 to 2016.

That means that he’ll be performing songs that haven’t been written yet. And there’s little doubt in my mind that Mac will be able to pull all this off. He’s a performance artist of infectious charm, along with outlandish costumes and glittery make-up, whose reputation has been on a sharp rise during the past several years, winning him acclaim for his acting as well (most recently in an Off-Broadway production of Bertolt Brecht’s Good Person of Szechwan) and for his own playwriting.

And to be sure, his history of popular music is far from a year-by-year catalogue of songs. Judging by the performance reviewed, it’s a phantasmagorical mélange of cabaret act, drag show, ‘subjective’ history lesson, personal confession and improvisational, immersive sometimes ragtag theatre without boundaries.

In the segment dealing with the 1900s, for example, he tells the audience that they are seated in Eastern Europe, and the stage is New York, and even more specifically, the Jewish tenements. He then invites the audience, by various groups of rows, to emigrate because of pogroms and come to the stage. Eventually, nearly all of the audience is seated on the floor of the stage, crowding the space, while Mac moves among them, continuing his narrative and singing his songs. And he gets them to sing and participate in others ways as well. It is like watching a harmlessly demented and dedicated kindergarten teacher keeping her charges mesmerised with music and stories.

By the time he gets around to the 1910s and the First World War, the audience has dispersed into make-believe trenches, and some of them are designated as nurses tending to wounds. (I think you have to be there to fully comprehend this.) And then to go into the jazzy 1920s, he has balloons passed out for the audience to blow up and throw onto to the stage. Stomping on the balloons, he channels a speakeasy chanteuse with a raucous version of ‘Happy Days Are Here Again’.

There’s trenchant social commentary as well, as Mac tells us he believes the 1920s were simply people “squashing down their trauma” of the First World War and just pretending to be happy.

During the course of the evening, Mac delivers more than 30 songs, ranging from an obscure and affectingly emotional dirge in Yiddish to such standards as ‘I’m Always Chasing Rainbows’ and ‘Singin’ in the Rain’. His musical savvy comes notably to the fore in various numbers, such as plaintive versions of ‘Love Me or Leave Me’ and ‘All Alone’. Concerning the latter, he tells us that Irving Berlin wrote the ballad while surrounded by people in a tenement, and he then sings it again after having instructed the audience to supply the various tenement noises. A movingly mournful version of ‘Oh, How I Hate to Get Up in the Morning’ gives the Berlin classic a surprising dimension.

Mac’s efforts are augmented by a five-piece band, led by music director Matt Ray at the piano. There is also a back-up singer, Amber Gray. And then there are the costumes, sequins and glam aplenty: a different one for each decade, created with unfettered glee by a designer appropriately named Machine Dazzle.

Somewhere in all this, there seems to be a theme that popular music creates community along with a plea for an acceptance of ambiguity, as exemplified in Mac’s own persona. And while for some Mac may be an acquired taste, there’s no doubt that he is building his own unique universe.

Ron Cohen

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www.newyorklivearts.org/event/24-decade-history