Studio Theater on 14th st, has an awesome re-created musical murder-mystrey going on called POP! Everyone knows I love Andy Warhol. Pretty excited to see this!
REVIEW
The FactoryWarhol’s first studio space, called the Factory, was founded in January of 1964 in the fifth floor of an abandoned hat shop at 231 East 47th Street, between 2nd and 3rd Avenue, in New York City. Billy Name, a sometimes lover of Warhol’s and an artist and designer at the Judson Church (an experimental performance spaced used by performance artists and dancers), was determined to give Andy a fabulous work space, and painted the entire interior of the Factory silver, right down to the toilet bowl. The Factory was decorated with discarded furniture found on the streets; the most famous discovery was the circular furry red couch featured in many of Warhol’s films. The “Silver Factory” was home to many of Warhol’s films and screen tests, as well as Andy’s three-dimensional, photorealistic reproductions of boxes of Heinz Tomato Ketchup, Kellogg’s Corn Flakes, Brillo Pads, and Mott’s Apple Sauce. This factory was known for its orgies, parties, and excessive drug use. It was here that Edie Sedgwick, Joe Dallesandro, and most of Warhol’s entourage first stumbled into his films.
In the winter of 1968 Andy moved the Factory to the sixth floor of 33 Union Square West. This Factory would be home to Warhol’s Christmas parties, many new films made on and off site, as well as a new series of commissioned pop-art portraits. This factory, though painted white, remained a safe-haven for Warhol’s superstars: artists, intellectuals, models, and druggies of importance. Warhol’s gang included Nico and Lou Reed of the Velvet Underground; Ultra Violet, a performance artist and patron of the arts; International Velvet, a teen-age model; and Paul Morrissey, Andy’s manager and film director. Other famous visitors included Bob Dylan, model Jane Forth, and Jack Kerouac. In the 1980’s Warhol moved his Factory to Madison Avenue between 32nd and 33rd Street. Today, 33 Union Square West is home to a sneaker retailer and office space.
In the winter of 1968 Andy moved the Factory to the sixth floor of 33 Union Square West. This Factory would be home to Warhol’s Christmas parties, many new films made on and off site, as well as a new series of commissioned pop-art portraits. This factory, though painted white, remained a safe-haven for Warhol’s superstars: artists, intellectuals, models, and druggies of importance. Warhol’s gang included Nico and Lou Reed of the Velvet Underground; Ultra Violet, a performance artist and patron of the arts; International Velvet, a teen-age model; and Paul Morrissey, Andy’s manager and film director. Other famous visitors included Bob Dylan, model Jane Forth, and Jack Kerouac. In the 1980’s Warhol moved his Factory to Madison Avenue between 32nd and 33rd Street. Today, 33 Union Square West is home to a sneaker retailer and office space.
The Washington PostTheater review: ‘Pop!’ paints bold portrait of Warhol and his inner circle
By Peter Marks, Published: July 19
Absence is a tough concept to cover in a musical. We are far more conditioned for characters to sing to fill a void than for their melodic personalities to hover, enigmatically, in a theater’s negative space.
So for its novelty alone, Maggie-Kate Coleman and Anna K. Jacobs’s “Pop!” — a 90-minute musical tumble down the curious rabbit hole of artist Andy Warhol — is an intriguing and on occasion rousing evening, a bold and inventive attempt to give tuneful form to Warhol’s obsessive pursuit of the mundane.
.“Nothing gets noticed. Nothing is a story,” Warhol sings late in the proceedings at Studio Theatre, in the guise of actor Tom Story, his hair bleached and parted in trademark Warhol fashion. The idea that nothing is everything and everything is nothing is reinforced from the start of Studio’s 2ndStage production — skillfully assembled by director Keith Alan Baker — when Story, languorously examining a brown paper lunch bag, sings of its magical properties:
“If you have a paper bag / An empty paper bag / You can sell it for money / You can hang it on the wall / And people will love you.”
For this idiosyncratic investigation to have meaning, do you have to be on intimate terms with pop art? No, but a healthy intellectual interest in the roots of modern celebrity culture and one of its high priests would be very useful. The show is not so much biography as impressionistic social history, and, as a result, the format becomes a bit scattershot. Though it conjures figures from Warhol’s famous Manhattan studio, the Factory, such as Viva (Deborah Lubega) and Edie Sedgwick (Marylee Adams), “Pop!” tends to present them as exactly the sorts of crazy, 15-minutes-of-fame junkies you’d imagine. Their stories become redundant.
But Warhol is such a theatrically accommodating puzzle that the show locates its entertainingly eccentric pulse anytime it tries to offer insight into his persona. In “Pop!,” the songwriters posit that persona, which was also an aspect of his art, almost killed him. His habit of filling his own paper bag with the needy outcasts whom he turned into ’60s underground celebrities was a careless flirtation with disaster; the musical’s historical centerpiece is the night in June 1968 when he was shot and seriously wounded by one of his more psychotic hangers-on.
Presided over by the character of transsexual Warhol superstar Candy Darling (Matthew Delorenzo, in a remarkable transformation), the musical unfolds as a pseudo-detective story, the members of the Factory “family” being the prime suspects. The regulars embodied here also include Ondine (Sean Maurice Lynch) and Gerard Malanga (Luke Tudball). Like the volatile gallery of presidential hit people of Stephen Sondheim’s “Assassins,” the Factory stars over the course of the evening reveal most of the desperate depths of their narcissism.
The nuttiest character is Valerie Solanas, a hyper-militant feminist and leader of the Society for Cutting Up Men, who wants Warhol to publish her play, the elegantly titled “Up Your [Expletive].” In her portrayal of the embittered Valerie, Rachel Zampelli establishes herself as a force: It’s a riveting, utterly convincing turn. Scowling under her newsboy’s cap, Zampelli’s Valerie becomes an inferno of entitlement, expressed blazingly in the rocking, anti-patriarchal “Big Gun,” the evening’s strongest number. You understand completely where imbalance will lead her.
As the submissive-seeming Warhol, the talented Story takes full advantage of his best role in a long time. The surface meekness, the voice reeking of mild disinterest here mask a far more determined and insecure creature whom Story expertly connotes. Barging in on a trio of abstract expressionists — the celebrated postwar art movement that pop art upended — Story stares one of them up and down. “I’m a huge fan of your work,” he declares. “It looks so easy and fun.”
It’s a great line, delivered with deadly sweetness, a moment that exposes a crack in the facade. The idea of a fissure also serves to illuminate Warhol’s relationships in “Pop!” with Edie, Candy and company, for what he wants from them is diametrically opposed to their desire to milk Warhol for material comfort and lasting renown. “Do I look like a silk screen to you?” Candy exclaims, indignantly, in response to Warhol’s plaintive refrain: “But I made you art.”
The art itself is in evidence on a set by Giorgos Tsappas that includes a red sofa like the secondhand one that famously adorned Warhol’s studio. It is dramatically lighted by Colin K. Bills and dominated by large screens, on which Erik Trester’s images of Warhol’s works are projected. (The audience enters through an art-strewn vestibule that seems to be modeled on the Factory.)
Costume designer Ivania Stack gives us a go-go fashion show, doling out dazzling miniskirts and hot pants, for instance, to Adams’s Edie and Lubega’s Viva. While Jacobs’s conventional music is not particularly evocative of the period, it has the required sass, and Adams and Lubega contribute vivaciously to the score’s effectiveness.
“Pop!” loses some of its, er, pop, when it lingers for too long on the least interesting question it asks: Who shot Andy Warhol? When it’s engaged in the more challenging task of sorting out Warhol’s motivations, the enterprise becomes more than easy and fun. It becomes significant.
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