Joey Spilberg (Translator/Composer/Performer) is a curmudgeonly old bass player who, though he’d rather be dangling from the ceiling as an aerial performance artist, is contented to express himself through composition for this year’s episode of Baudelaire In A Box. Joey is a founding member of Lamajamal, Bad Mashedi, and Schtedoidish and previously played bass for Baudelaire In A Box Episode 7: The King of Rain.

David E Smith (Performer) is a multi instrumentalist and composer living in Chicago. He studied clarinet and composition at Northwestern University where he played in many pit orchestras. He is an original member of Mucca Pazza and can also be seen with Expo 76, the J Davis Trio, Poi Dog Pondering, Anna Soltys and the Familiar, and the Renaldo Domino Experience. He will also make appearances as “Lord Hornblower” with the Soft Rock Sanctuary and the Mr & Mrs Wednesday Night Show.

Mark Messing (Composer) is a performer, composer, and collaborator in interdisciplinary arts groups. He co-founded Mucca Pazza, a performance collaborative combining music, clowning, and devised theater. He has led the group across country from performing arts venues, schools, music festivals, and community events. He has co-founded a number of artist-initiated projects including The Human Television Network, The All American Anti-War Marching Band, and commercial music and sound design company Maestro-Matic.. He is Executive Director of Opera-Matic, NFP and serves as a liaison to the artists.

T-Roy Martin (Performer) has performed around Chicago for over two decades. A founding member of The Billy Goat Experiment Theatre Company, and a member of the Curious Theatre Branch, T-Roy has strummed, sung and/or acted with Theater Oobleck, Teatro Vista, Collaboraction and numerous others. He also sings, plays ukulele, guitar, trombone or whatever’s handy in local bands such as The Crooked Mouth, 80 Foots per Minute, ElvisBride, and TunT.

Abraham Levitan (Composer) is the host of Nerds On Tour, a weekly interview podcast talking with music people about money, motivation, and the rest of life. He is currently finishing up a new solo album (but hey, who isn’t?). By day, he serves as founder and head of Piano Power, a teaching group offering at-home music lessons to over 400 students in Chicago and the northern suburbs.

Ronnie Kuller (Composer/Performer) is a composer, multi-instrumentalist, teaching artist, and the Artistic Director of Mucca Pazza. She has written music for Mucca Pazza, Theater Oobleck, The Cambrians, and the Actor’s Gym, as well as Opera-Matic, where she is an Artistic Associate. Since 2006, she’s been an Artist-in-Residence at Snow City Arts, where she teaches music to pediatric inpatients at Stroger Hospital of Cook County and Rush Children’s Hospital. Ronnie has performed in venues all over the country, including Orchestra Hall at Chicago’s Symphony Center, Mass MoCA, Pritzker Pavillion at Millennium Park, the Watermill Center, and the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. One of her compositions was recorded onto wax cylinder at Edison National Historical Park, and was also featured on the TV show Transparent. Ronnie is a 2013 3Arts Awardee and a 2015 3Arts Ragdale Fellow.

Angela James (Translator/Composer/Performer) brings to mind the rich, deep voices of artists like Patsy Cline and Rosanne Cash with the narrative sensibility of more modern female troubadours like Neko Case and Cat Power. With her first full length record, Way Down Deep (2014), James employed some of Chicago’s finest jazz improv players, incorporating them into a bold sonic tapestry that highlights both her refined ear and wide-ranging influences. Her second full length, Time Will Tell (2016), finds her exploring similar themes of love and loss but with more darkness, confidence and curiosity. Called “smoldering and gorgeous” by the Chicago Reader, Time Will Tell effortlessly bends and blends musical genres, taking James far beyond her “country” roots. Her music speaks to new horizons in progressive Americana in a way that feels both indebted and freed from the strictures of time. Accompanied live by her collaborator and husband Jordan Martins, and drummer Charles Rumback, Angela delivers a sound that is both adventurous and reverential while creating a warm palette for her thoughtful lyricism. Born and raised in Eastern TN, with sojourns in Mississippi and Brazil, Angela James calls Chicago home.

David Costanza (Translator/Composer) is a songwriter and musician, and a co-conspirator of the musical duo Art of Flying. He lives in Taos, NM, where he runs the analog side of the house at Taos Recording Studios.

Annie Higgins (Translator/Composer) started the band Singing in the Abbey a pretty long time ago. Singing in the Abbey was a Chicago all girl quartet (piano, violin, cello, upright bass) that played originals and Sound of Music covers. Annie wrote and arranged all the songs for that band. After Singing in the Abbey, she started the band Weatherman with her favorite drummer, Jason Toth. Joshua Dumas was soon recruited for Weatherman’s pop minimalism cause. Weatherman has shared the stage with Juana Molina, Wild Belle, Nathaniel Braddock, Sandro Perri, Bayonne, and many others. Annie has collaborated with Marvin Tate, sometimes sings harmonies with Angela James and started a blog called Secret Weapon, where she interviews Chicago composers. In her full-time day gig, she works with the new music sextet, Eighth Blackbird, as their Company/Operations Manager.

Jeffrey Dorchen (Translator/Composer) is an award-winning, internationally produced playwright, as well as a screenwriter, fiction writer, essayist, songwriter, and past contributor to This American Life. He is co-founder of the Chicago fringe theater troupe, Theater Oobleck, now in its 31st year of staging original work. He has written, produced and performed in numerous works for Oobleck as well as his solo theater company, Theater for the Age of Gold, which was the recipient of a MacArthur Foundation grant. His plays have been produced in Los Angeles by The Actor’s Gang, Zoo District, and Sacred Fools. He is also, since 1998, a weekly contributor to the current affairs radio program “This Is Hell” produced at WNUR FM 89.3 in Evanston, IL.

He is co-writer and co-producer of the feature film Basmati Blues, a romantic musical comedy starring Brie Larson and Donald Sutherland, set in India,scheduled for release in 2016. Jeffrey lives in Los Angeles.

Reid Coker (Translator/Composer) is a songwriter, musician and actor from Chicago. He has fronted both The Judy Green and Wilshire and co-founded with Kennedy Greenrod, Billy Blake & the Vagabonds, a group brought together by the Poetry Foundation to create songs based on the works of William Blake. Reid has played, recorded and toured with other bands such as Fruit Bats, Califone, Tijuana Hercules, The Bitter Tears and Roommate. He currently plays as a solo artist and with group The Pillowhammer. As an actor he has most recently performed in several productions at The Artistic Home and appeared in the film “All My Friends Are Funeral Singers”, an Official Selection of The Sundance Film Festival in 2010. He has written and recorded soundtrack music for the short films “Head”, “Chinese Box” and “Crows”.

Dave Buchen is a founding member of Chicago’s Theater Oobleck, for which he has written numerous plays, and San Juan’s El Teatro Bárbaro, of which his children would like to remind him that they are the bosses. His cantastoria projects include Natural History based on work by Plinius the Elder, Takes After His Father based on work by whoever wrote The Bible and John Huston, and the 8-year long Baudelaire in the Box project. As a printmaker, he has made numerous books and a yearly calendar since the previous century. He plays with La Banda Municipal de Makula-Barun. He lives with his two children in San Juan.

Emmy Bean is a singer, theater artist and teacher living in Chicago. Recent performance work includes: Alice with Upended Productions, Baudelaire in a Box: The King of Rain with Theater Oobleck, Rung with Curious Theater Branch, SOS: A Summer Clown Cruise with Theater Oobleck, The Carter Family Family Show with the Neo-Futurists, and Caught: The Woods with the Fifth House Ensemble. She writes songs and performs with Chris Schoen and T-Roy Martin in the trio 80 Foots Per Minute. Other performance work includes “Mary and Sarah and You and Me” with Naima Lowe, with appearances at the Parlor in Philadelphia and Judson Church in New York City, “The Long Christmas Ride Home” at Studio Theater in Washington DC; “The Snow Queen” at Sandglass Theater in Putney, VT; “Flood” and “Stiles Under Sky” with Company of Strangers. She has toured with Amanda Maddock’s play “Mrs. Wright’s Escape” and co-created the “Three Piggy Opera” at Links Hall in Chicago (with Barbara Whitney and Merrill Garbus). Since 2008, she has worked as an Associate Curator at the Great Small Works International Toy Theater Festival in New York City. She holds an M.A. in Interdisciplinary Arts from Columbia College Chicago and a B.A. in Religion from Vassar College, with a concentration in Music and Culture.

Martha Bayne (Lighting Design) is an Oobleck ensemble member and has designed lights for many productions, including The Strangerer, Strauss at Midnight, There Is A Happiness That Morning Is, and several installments of Baudelaire in a Box.

The critically incendiary, surreal-existentialist curiosity of the 2009 Rhinoceros Theater Festival returns as a musical sextet performing an array of speculative-musical jubilations just for you. Kurt Weill meets They Might Be Giants you say? Sure, we say.

If you like difficulty, handlessness, animals, failure, and animals who fail, we’ve covered all your bases for you. So you’re free to hang out and do whateves. And who doesn’t like whateves?

Michael Zerang was born in Chicago, Illinois and is a first generation American of Assyrian decent. He has been a professional musician, composer, and producer since 1976, focusing extensively on improvised music, free jazz, contemporary composition, puppet theater, experimental theater, and international musical forms.

He has collaborated extensively with contemporary theater, dance, and other multidisciplinary forms and has received three Joseph Jefferson Awards for Original Music Composition in Theater, in 1996, 1998, and 2000. He has over sixty titles in his discography and has toured nationally and internationally since 1981 with and ever-widening pool of collaborators. He was the artistic director of the Links Hall Performance Series from 1985-1989 where he produced over 300 concerts of jazz, traditional ethnic folk music, electronic music, and other forms of forward thinking music. He continued to produce concerts at Cafe Urbus Orbis from 1994-1996, and at his own space, The Candlestick Maker, in Chicago’s Albany Park neighborhood, from 2001 – 2005. He has taught as a guest artist at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago in performance technique, sound design, and sound/music as it relates to puppetry; rhythmic analysis for dancers at The Dance Center of Columbia College, Northwestern University, and MoMing Dance and Arts Center; courses in Composer – Choreographer Collaborations at Northwestern University; music to children at The Jane Adams Hull House. He has held workshops in improvisational music and percussion technique and teaches private lessons in rhythmic analysis, music composition, and percussion technique.

Both with her tight Naomi Ashley Band (including fiddle-virtuoso Cathie Van Wert) and as a solo artist, Naomi regularly appears at leading Chicago-area venues, including: Fitzgerald’s, SPACE, Schubas and Uncommon Ground. And at major regional venues, including the Acorn Theater in Three Oaks, Michigan.

Her popularity and breadth of great material — from double-over funny to double-bourbon heartbreak — make Naomi a versatile and sought-after opener for national acts, including Carrie Rodriguez, Fred Eaglesmith, Paul Thorn, Sarah Borges & the Broken Singles, Cheryl Wheeler and Antje Duvokot. And with the recent release of her haunting masterpiece Another Year Or So — praised by reviewers as “brilliant” and “one of the top five albums of 2007” — her profile continues to grow regionally and nationally.

Recently, Another Year Or So garnered a Best New Folk Song of 2009 nomination at the Just Plain Folks Music Awards for the heart-wrenching honky-tonk waltz Linda.

Naomi first gained notice with the release of her inaugural CD, the six-song Love and Other Crap in 2001. Recorded in a friend’s basement, are shockingly funny, tough and perceptive takes on the insanity of love. Or as one cheerfully addled stalker puts it, “Folks say I’m crazy. I say I’m crazy in love.”

In 2002, she released her first full-length album Small Town Thing with her country-rock band Naomi Ashley and County Fair. In Small Town Thing Naomi reached back to her rural roots with lyrical narratives described as “being ripped straight from the headlines of small town newspapers and barroom conversations.” Also an adept comedic performer, in 2004 Naomi began performing on Chicago’s comedy and cabaret circuits as half of the comedy-folk duo Naomi & Ben.

Recently expanding her scope to the medium of performance art, Naomi collaborates with celebrated Chicago spoken-word artists — such as poetry slams founding father Marc Smith and acclaimed writer and storyteller David Kodeski — both in the recording studio and in performance.

Naomi currently resides on Chicago’s northside with husband, bluegrass musician Ben Benedict and their two cats.

Diana Slickman has been involved with a number of Chicago theatre companies as a performer, producer, director, writer, and administrator, sometimes all at the same time. A longtime member of the Neo-Futurists, she performed in their signature show “Too Much Light Makes the Baby Go Blind” for eight years and contributed to many of their “prime time” productions, including Drinking & Writing, You Are Not Here, and The Sycamore Story. She is currently a member of Theatre Oobleck’s artistic ensemble, having appeared in their productions of The Trojan Candidate, Spirits to Enforce, The Passion of the Bush, The Book of Grendel, Letter Purloined and Spukt.

Diana’s performance work has included all manner of things, from the plays of Shakespeare to standup comedy to a staged chronicle of the evolution of American obscenity law. She is the sometime associate publisher for Hope & Nonthings and full-time associate publisher for Agate Publishing. Diana prefers summer to winter, baseball to football, scotch whisky to beer, and the mountains to the seaside.

John Szymanski is excited to be performing for Cabaret Oobleck. He has been playing guitar since the age of five, and is also proficient on several other instruments, including drums, bass guitar, keyboards, ukulele, mandolin, and banjo. John is currently performing with indie-pop band My My My, the cover band Sidecar, and a rockabilly-Irish music ensemble called Margo Jean and the Rubes. In addition, he is an elementary school music teacher, is the sound designer for the Neo Futurists’ current production Fear, and also works as a recording engineer, composer and video editor. This is his first solo musical performance in ages.