Interludes

THE HANGOVER REPORT – After all these years, Elizabeth Swados’s quirky and compact NIGHTCLUB CANTATA remains a visceral and theatrically charged experience

• By drediman
• May 12, 2022
• No Comments

Earlier this week at Nancy Manocherian’s the cell theatre, I had a chance to catch up with a rare revival of Elizabeth Swados’s Nightclub Cantata. Ms. Swados (who sadly passed away in 2016) is perhaps best known for having penned the musical Runaways, which transferred to Broadway in 1978, where it was nominated for five Tony Awards including Best Musical. She first staged the quirky but affecting Nightclub Cantata a year earlier in 1977 at the Village Gate at the height of her influence as a theatrical innovator a driving force in New York’s avant-garde theater scene. Somewhat surprisingly, the song cycle hasn’t been revived in the city in over 40 years. That is, until now.

Even to this day, Nightclub Cantata defies easy categorization, as does Ms. Swados singular talent. Her body of work is distinctive for its adventurous musical/verbal vocabulary, which is at once disarming and disorienting (and which admittedly may not be everyone’s cup of tea). Similarly, Nightclub Cantata – which straddles genres without so much as a thought and leverages the musings of writers and poets such as Brian Avidan, Nazim Hikmet, Nancy Larrick, Isabel Leitner, Eve Merriam, Pablo Neruda, Sylvia Plath, Muriel Rukeyser, and Delmore Schwartz – is unafraid to venture out and chart its own bespoke course. In short, the piece is a compact, playful mediation on life itself. Through bursts of song and movement, Ms. Swados has created a visceral and theatrically charged experience in her obsessive quest to abstractly capture the very sensation of living, from the mundane to the cosmic. Despite its decidedly experimental bent, the piece is imminently likable, accessible even.

The current production at the cell has been fluidly and seamlessly directed and choreographed by longtime Swados devotee Bill Castellino. Ms. Swados represents music theater at its purest and most uncompromising, which Mr. Castellino has taken to heart and honors with his elegantly stripped down staging. He has also assembled an ensemble of young, idiosyncratic performers – Almeria Campbell, Victoria Casillo, Daniela Delahuerta, Jesse Manocherian, Matthew Liu, Sarah Nandola, Pearl Rhein, Noah Ruebeck, Hansel Tan, and Miles Whitaker. As conduits to a place of unfiltered emotion and feeling, they impressed me with their intense commitment and rigor.

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NIGHTCLUB CANTATA
Off-Broadway, Musical
the cell theatre
1 hour, 10 minutes (without an intermission)
Through May 22