A huge THANK YOU to all the dedicated artists, performers, composers, volunteers, donors, and audience members who made Closed Casket an unbelievable… we’ll leave it right there. An Unbelievable!

It exceeded even our foolhardy dreams for it. We even found our way onto a segment on NPR’s All Things Considered!

We’ve turned our last crank. The scrolls of artwork have been cut into sections and given to our collaborators and supporters. But the project lives on in photos and videos (stay tuned for updates), as well as studio albums and EPs of music from the series, with more on the way:

We also have some leftover merch from the show—artwork, mugs, totes— for sale here.

Breaking News: Half-day ticketing options are now available for the Saturday, August 5, mega-performance: Afternoon (w/ lunch) & Evening (w/ dinner). That’s right: delicious food is INCLUDED. Click for tix.

Chris Schoen and Emmy Bean preview musical selections from Theater Oobleck’s upcoming Closed Casket: The Complete, Final and Absolutely Last Baudelaire In A Box, a project setting all of Charles Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du mal to music and performing it in tandem with scrolling illustrations. Following a brief presentation, the performers will be joined in discussion by Ira S. Murfin, on the experience of adapting, commenting on and annotating Baudelaire’s 150 year-old work through music, translation, and visual media.

Slow down with Theater Oobleck and Snail Band, together at Weegee’s Lounge for one night only!

The show is a benefit for Theater Oobleck’s upcoming CLOSED CASKET: THE COMPLETE, FINAL, AND ABSOLUTELY LAST BAUDELAIRE IN A BOX — a festival of music and poetry August 4, 5, and 6 at Constellation in which all members of Snail Band are participating.

At this very special air-conditioned performance, the band will perform a few songs from Baudelaire in a Box as well as other slow and gentle songs, and we will raffle off TWO FESTIVAL PASSES — each an $85 value. Plus a preview of some Baudelaire merch, conviviality, and more. Our travel expenses for Closed Casket went well over budget so any additional monies will go to offset these unexpected costs.

Snail Band came into being in May of 2016 as part of Opera-Matic’s Joyful Passage: A Serenade to Humboldt Park, singing serenades of snails and slowness to a very secretive snail sculpture near the Humboldt Park Lagoon, with lovely lyrics by Cin Salach set to music by Ronnie Kuller as leisurely waltzes and unhurried tangos. Since then, Snail Band has slowed down various other Opera-Matic events in neighborhood parks, singing snail songs and performing instant odes generated by community event participants. Weegee’s Lounge is Snail Band’s first indoor venue, which is fitting, as snails are extremely photogenic and also very good at lounging.

Snail Band is Emmy Bean (Eighty Foots) on singing, Ronnie Kuller (Mucca Pazza, Mister Tom Musick) on accordion, piano, and singing, Julie Pomerleau (Bobby Conn) on violin and singing, and Joey Spilberg (Lamajamal, Schtedoidish) on double bass.

We sometimes talk about crankies being a kind of low-tech proto music video. And that’s true! But sadly you can’t share them very easily on social media. So, please to enjoy this newfangled Official Music Video from our latest Baudelaire In Box album, Unquenched, available now at our Bandcamp site!

The Drag (Official Music Video)

From Unquenched: Music From Baudelaire In A Box Episode 9
Available at: theateroobleck.bandcamp.com

“The Drag” was composed by Ronnie Kuller, setting Mickle Maher’s translation of “L’avertisseur,” by Charles Baudelaire.

Videography by Cat Jarboe.

Snake images used with kind permission of Joseph Farah. See more of his beautiful reptile and amphibian photos at: reptilesofcolorado.com/about-me.html

One of several gorgeous scroll segments you can claim as a reward at the $200 level (first-come/first-served).

See more pieces available at the $100, $200, and $400 donation levels.

Visit the kickstarter for Closed Casket here.

To celebrate the 150th anniversary of the death of the great poet Charles Baudelaire, Oobleck is bringing 50 performers, composers, & musicians together from all over the world for a gigantic festival of song & image. But we need your help!

KICKSTARTER for CLOSED CASKET: The Complete, Final And Absolutely Last Baudelaire In A Box

Theater Oobleck is pleased to announce its first album of original music with The King Of Rain, featuring music from Baudelaire In A Box Episode 7: The King Of Rain.

The album features all 15 songs from the original 2014 show, recorded by all six original musicians: Emmy Bean, Ronnie Kuller, T-Roy Martin, Chris Schoen, Sad Brad Smith and Joey Spilberg.

“The tunes borrow indiscriminately from Tin Pan Alley pop, vintage country, and coffeehouse folk … and they often feel self-consciously maudlin or perversely jaunty, as though they’re tweaking the turbid angst of Baudelaire’s poetry” —Chicago Reader

The King Of Rain is available now as a digital download ($9) or CD ($12) at our Oobleck Bandcamp store. CDs come with a 20-page booklet featuring song lyrics and original illustrations by Oobleck founding member Dave Buchen.

For more information about our Baudelaire In A Box project, please visit baudelaireinabox.wordpress.com

From Philip Montoro in The Chicago Reader.

This seventh episode of Theater Oobleck’s Baudelaire in a Box sets lively new English translations of poems from the 1861 edition of Charles Baudelaire’s The Flowers of Evil to witty acoustic songs played by a six-piece ensemble…

The translations can be playful too—somehow I doubt Baudelaire’s original text uses “hummus” for a rhyme. Only once, on Sad Brad Smith’s rendition of “Grieving and Wandering,” does the troupe match bleak music to bleak verses, and the effect is so wrenchingly mournful it’s almost startling.

Full review here.

Baxter Barrowcliff of The Columbia Chronicle previews Episode 7: The King of Rain.

We thank the Chicago Arts Journal for consistently covering Theater Oobleck.

The Spring 2014 edition features both Ira Murfin (on page 16) and Carine Loewi (on page 21) ruminating on Baudelaire in a Box Episode 6, and an interview with our own Guy Massey on page 40.

The Summer 2014 edition has a review of Jewboy and Grosbeck (part of the Oobleck Residency at the Hideout) on page 41.

Gapers Block came out to the Hideout Inn to catch our Baudelaire in a Box “Episode 5” reprise. They said:

Like Baudelaire’s poems, which connect profound urban ennui to sometimes bawdy, sometimes gory imagery, the illustrations linked one non-sequitur to the next with sometimes humorous, sometimes distressing strokes.

Although the French read Baudelaire with great seriousness, one can only imagine that the poet himself meant for them to be read — or sung — as they were last night

The full review is here.

We had a great night. We thank 80 Foots Per Minute for warming up, the incredible Ronnie Kuller for making us a part of her month-long musical residency, and the Hideout for hosting.

Episode 4 of Baudelaire in a Box featured this song — “Le Guignon” — by The New Town Drunks. They have now released it on digital CD.

You can purchase the entire album from their website.

We got great press for Baudelaire in a Box, Episode 4: Bad Luck, which premiered in North Carolina. Here’s links to the previews, with some choice quotes:

From INDYWEEK.COM
“You get handed a whole book of poems, of beautiful poetry about bars and opium and prostitutes and all the sins and beauties of life,” says Roberto Confresi of the New Town Drunks about adapting Baudelaire’s odes. “Each one is more incredible than the last.”

From The Herald Sun
“The illustration is all in my little world. The music is in their world, and they all meet.”

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

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 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.

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).