We had a chance to sit down with Tony Sarabia of WBEZ’s Morning Shift to discuss and perform excerpts from the upcoming episode of Baudelaire In A Box (opening next Wednesday at Links Hall)

Oobleck Regulars Chris Schoen and Mickle Maher spoke with Tony about the history of the show, and the creation process, punctuated by performances by two songs from the show by Emmy Bean, Annie Higgins, Troy Martin, and Dave Smith. The whole segment is archived on the Morning Shift website. Have a listen! Then come see the whole shebang, crankies and all, at Links Hall, October 5-16.

The Chicago Reader has listed Our top five theater picks for fall, including Baudelaire in A Box, Episode 3: Death and Other Excitements.

Tony Adler reports:

Buchen and Schoen plan to have all 126 poems boxed and ready by 2017, the sesquicentennial anniversary of Baudelaire’s death. You can gauge their progress this fall when they present cantastoria performances of the six poems that make up the “Death” section of Les Fleurs plus the magnificent “Anywhere Out of This World.”

Full article from the Reader

On Monday, July 25th, 2011, Theater Oobleck will be holding a fund-raising event unlike any we’ve held before, to support a work unlike any we’ve ever created in our long, unlikely history:

THE HUNCHBACK VARIATIONS OPERA.

That’s right, not kidding, an opera.

The libretto’s from The Hunchback Variations by company playwright Mickle Maher (The Strangerer, There Is a Happiness That Morning Is, etc), and the music — being penned even as you read this! — is by Mark Messing, the genius behind the scores of numerous Redmoon Theatre productions, and co-founder of that mad, brilliant marching band, Mucca Pazza.

It will be a strange and hilarious and moving thing, this opera.

And on Monday, July 25th, at 7:30 PM, Mr. Messing will be finished with exactly 67.3% of its composition.

Oobleck will be presenting that 67.3% to a select audience, in a special workshop presentation, at a super secret as yet undisclosed secret presentation hideout.

And you can be a part of that audience, and hear that 67.3%.

All of it sung by people with strange, hilarious, moving and incredible voices.

But here’s the deal:

Mark Messing’s composition—as imaginative, wild, and fun as it is—is enormously demanding, and requires highly trained singers and instrumentalists to pull it off. It’s OPERA, see? To realize it fully, to bring this new, beautiful creation into the world, and to debut it before the end of this year, we require your support. After all these years (23 and counting!) of offering low cost, pay-what-you-can tickets, we need to sell you just one at the downtown fancy-pants, operatic price of $50.00.

With your ticket you’ll be there at the beginning, a beginning that you helped make possible.

There will be wine, there will be cheese. And many fascinating eaters of cheese and drinkers of wine. There will be a discussion with the composer and playwright. There will be an atmosphere traced through with that ineffable sense of Oobleckian wonder. And also cheese.

But primarily, a bringing of the New.

Please come.

THEATER OOBLECK/HUNCHBACK VARIATIONS OPERA workshop presentation.

Click here for tickets and info.

Only 60 tickets will be sold, so click now!

p.s.
If you’re unfamiliar with The Hunchback Variations (the original play), you can take a look at a couple of scenes from it here.

In December, we presented the first couple “variations” of our work-in-progress: The Hunchback Variations Opera.

Venus Zarris of the Chicago Stage Review was there, and submitted this glowing report:

“This is NOT the stuff of standard theater, MUCH LESS standard opera. It IS the stuff of an absurdist masterpiece. Maher’s writing is cerebral and acerbic. Little to nothing about this script lends itself to music, much less the constructs of opera, but Messing takes the traditional framework of operatic composition and applies a musical quantum physics to perfectly meet The Hunchback Variations somewhere in the midst of the its unreal realm. We heard only a handful of movements to the opera. That was more than enough to know that we were in the audience of something extraordinary.”

See her full report here.

Theater Oobleck makes its Indiana debut, with this one-night-only performance of The Hysterical Alphabet.

The details: The University of Notre Dame (co-sponsored by Gender Studies Program) presents The Hysterical Alphabet, Wednesday, February 16, 2011, 8 pm, at Browning Cinema, DeBartolo Performing Arts Center.

It is free, but is a ticketed event. For tickets phone 574-631-2800 or visit performingarts.nd.edu.

More details are at the Gender Studies website

This hit show — a collaboration between author Terri Kapsalis, video-collagist Danny Thompson, and sound artist John Corbett — is currently touring American campuses. So far it has been seen at Bates College, the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, Clark University, the Rhode Island School of Design, and Emory College.

An appreciation of the performance at Emory is here … to quote:

“In a refreshingly non-didactic, yet pedagogical performance, Theater Oobleck’s The Hysterical Alphabet, is an example of what a 21st-century hybrid of art and scholarship might be.”

In addition, following its Chicago premiere, the work was reviewed in Newcity.

“Theatre Oobleck’s “The Hysterical Alphabet” is a beautifully nuanced mixture of historical treatise, medical discourse and poetic archive, chronicling the sometimes hilarious, often horrifying saga of the “female malady” that is hysteria throughout the centuries. Oobleck has remounted their inspired multimedia presentation at the Chopin Theatre, after premiering last fall in a one-night-only showing at the Gene Siskel Film Center. Terry Kapsalis’s remarkable text, an ABC’s of women and their wily wombs (now available in book form with fantastic drawings by Gina Litherland), is the axis material, but accompanied by Danny Thompson’s stunning video “documentary,” and John Corbett’s gratifying sound design, the sum transforms into something greater than its (private) parts. The three artists enter quietly, without fanfare, and take seats at a long table before a large projection screen. Aided by microphones, a computer/projector, record player and numerous sound folio devises, the performance/lecture takes off, with Kapsalis reading matter-of-factly, almost demurely, her lyrical chronology of ailment, while Thompson frenzy of found and original video images unfurl to the tunes (and crackles, cries and whistles) of Corbett’s manic soundscape. The trio packs an astounding amount of information into little more than an hour’s time—delivering a lesson that is wickedly funny, surprisingly heart-wrenching and not to be missed. (Valerie Jean Johnson)”

You can see an video excerpt of the play here and can order the book version here

Theater Oobleck is engaged in our most ambitious project to date: Baudelaire in a Box, a cantastoria of the entire contents of “Les Fleurs du mal,” to be completed by 2017, the 150th anniversary of Baudelaire’s death.

The first installment was performed at the HideOut in April. The next installment will be performed January 26-30 in Puerto Rico, as part of The Festival Vititiri. And the third installment will be back here in Chicago and at the Banners and Cranks festival in New York City this summer

Here’s the skinny on this weekend: The Festival Vitititiri presents four different nights of puppets, circus, music, cantastoria and wine.

Wednesday January 26th at 8:00, at the Nuyorican Cafe in Old San Juan. Theater Oobleck, Clare Dolan, The Dolly Wagglers, Circo Nacional de Puerto Rico, Y No Había Luz, María de Azúa and Eden Cruz perform.

Friday and Saturday January 28 & 29th, the festival travels to south west coast in Guanica at La Bodega Andreu Solé with Theater Oobleck, Clare Dolan, The Dolly Wagglers, Circo Nacional de Puerto Rico and Y No Había Luz.

And Sunday afternoon at 5 they are back in San Juan at the Abracadabra Café in Santutrce with Theater Oobleck, Clare Dolan, The Dolly Wagglers and Eden Cruz.

Theater Oobleck will be performing three new cantastorias from the Baudelaire in a Box project. Chris Schoen will sing his adaptations in English and Eden Cruz will sing his in Spanish of The Giantess, The Sick Muse and Hymn to Beauty with scrolling artwork by Dave Buchen.

(And what is a cantastoria, you might ask? Cantastoria is the Italian word for a performance form originating in 6th Century India involving the display of representational paintings accompanied by sung narration. It traveled the world and has taken on many forms, from Indian religious Par scrolls to the Indonesian Wayang-Beber, to Persian Parda-dar entertainers, to itinerant European street performers selling broadsides, to the German banklesanger in Weimar cabarets to the present day revival.)

Theater Oobleck, along with our pals the Neo-Futurists, are really excited to bring back, for ONE SHOW ONLY, one of our biggest hits ever: The Complete Lost Works Of Samuel Beckett As Found In An Envelope (partially burned) In A Dustbin In Paris Labeled “Never to be performed. Never. Ever. EVER! Or I’ll Sue! I’LL SUE FROM THE GRAVE!”

It is this Saturday, May 29, at the Steppenwolf Garage, 1624 N. Halsted Street, in Chicago, at 5pm.

Here’s a sampling of what the press has said: “Howlingly on target!” – New York Times. “I fell off my chair laughing” – The Guardian. “Hilariously liberating” – The London Times. “The performances are sharp, the wit sharper; it had audiences in screams and tears” – Village Voice

After eleven international runs including the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, London’s Riverside Theater, a three-month UK tour, a production touring Europe in German, and three sold-out runs in New York City, this Theater Oobleck/Neo-Futurist collaboration returns to Chicago for the first time since it premiered in the Rhino Festival in a decade ago.

Featuring Neo-Futurist Founder Greg Allen, Oobleck Founder Danny Thompson, and the amazing John Jughead Pierson as “the actor”, this is a one-shot opportunity to see this award-winning show before we tour again.

Tickets are $15. More if you’ve got it! FREE if you’re broke!
No reservations accepted. Just show up at the Steppenwolf Garage on Saturday (May 29th) before 5pm, give us a donation and you’re in!

We will be filming the show so bring your friends!

Theater Oobleck is heading to the Hideout for “The Wine Cycle,” an evening of music+image with Dave Buchen and Chris Schoen. They will be scrolling and singing through the works of Baudelaire, Moses, Pliny the Elder, and more. It’s one night only, Monday, April 26th, 9pm at The Hideout, 1354 West Wabansia. $5 cover, free if you’re broke, more if you’ve got it. Tickets at door only.

The evening is presented in conjunction with the Banners & Cranks Festival of Cantastoria at Links Hall (performances April 23-May 9th) and Packer Schopf Gallery (April 16th-May 8th).