An hour into the show they were trickling in. The first show was rows and rows and rows that were empty at the very beginning of the performance. The way that the theater had initially set it up, the rich people all got the front seats and they were the ones that came latest. The professors and university mandarins having lunch at an elegant UCLA campus restaurant the other day had no idea that seated inconspicuously among them was a cultural revolutionary.ĭo you have a memory of the Los Angeles performances? It’s saying, here’s a really close seat.Įntertainment & Arts Taylor Mac on gay history, ‘Hamilton’ and his epic 24-hour extravaganza at the Ace I don’t feel the film is saying, you missed it, too bad you weren’t there. It’s not the show, it’s a film, with its own art and beauty to it that the show could never have had. It feels very much authentically our show. It makes it feel like what it’s trying to do is win at capitalism. Often when queer work is given a larger platform, it flattens it. I feel so honored to be part of their body of work. They formed a lot of my understanding of the world. Watching their films on PBS was my only access to queerness. Rob and Jeff have this lineage of queer cinema, and I don’t think the stage show would exist without their films. How do you feel about the show getting a wide reach on HBO? We can’t change history, but we can change how we deal with it, look at it, feel about it. I’ve been working with my therapist on this, but I can see the foibles of the film and my performance and things I might want to change as entry points towards my humanity. I’m a different person, I’m older, the world has changed a lot. Watching the footage five years ago is very different from watching the footage today. What I’ve come to understand about film, which is new to me, is that it’s also ephemeral. I’ve been looking at the footage on a daily basis, so I haven’t had much distance from it to regret or want to change things. Looking back at the 24-hour show, are there things you wish you had or hadn’t done? (You’ll never hear Laura Branigan’s “Gloria” the same again.) In between, Mac and an ensemble of performers and musicians put queer spins on unfamiliar Revolutionary War ballads, racist minstrel songs, modern pop anthems and other musical styles, engaging the audience throughout in sometimes deeply intimate ways. 8 at noon when Mac transported the audience to 1776 with a racy interpretation of “Yankee Doodle Dandy” and ends 24 hours later with Mac alone on stage, voice reduced to a fatigued rasp, singing a song called “When All the Artists Leave or Die.” Ann’s Warehouse, a performance venue in Brooklyn.Ĭulled from 500 hours of filmed concert footage, the film begins on Oct. Produced and directed by the Oscar-winning filmmakers Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman, the film is an ultra-condensed look at the very queer immersive theater piece by Taylor Mac that took place over 24 hours in 2016 in front of an audience at St. There’s Anastasia Durasova’s makeup that makes a face look like that of a melting high-glam harlequin.īut what really shines is queerness. There are the sensational handcrafted costumes - festooned with fake hot dogs, gay porn, maribou - made by the designer Machine Dazzle. There’s a lot that shimmers in “ Taylor Mac’s 24-Decade History of Popular Music,” a new HBO documentary that debuts Tuesday.
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