UTR Day 3: the motown project and How Technology Failed Me
I spent this entire morning recapping four festival shows and the draft didn’t save properly. I have no idea what happened.
No one reads this so it’s not really a big deal, but I promised myself that I would write about arts and culture every day for 90 days. I did, technically, write something, but it’s gone now.
Instead of rewriting about all four shows, I’m gonna speed write about one and I’ll save the other three for tomorrow morning. Here goes nothing!
In a normal year, Alicia Hall Moran’s the motown project would have been presented at Joe’s Pub, The Public Theater’s cabaret venue. Joe’s Pub is one of the most fun venues in the city, in my opinion. They do at least one show every single night and often two, and it’s a great place to get a bite to eat, a drink, and take in something new in the worlds of music, theatre, comedy, dance… anything goes really! It's so much fun.
Of course, this year, the motown project made its way online. The cabaret is a marriage of two musical styles- opera and Motown- and through song Moran explores the supposedly disparate art forms and unpacks the divide between the two, encompassing race, class, and national culture.
That being said, you don’t have to think too deeply about it or know anything about either style of music to enjoy the show. Moran and her collaborators, especially baritone Barrington Lee and guitarist Thomas Flippin, all create beautiful music, and Moran’s soulful mezzo-soprano moves between more operatic arias and her unique renditions of Motown hits with ease and grace.
I don’t consider myself well-versed in opera or Motown, albeit many of the Motown hits are absolute classics, such as The Supremes’ “You Keep Me Hangin’ On (Set Me Free)” or Stevie Wonder’s “Signed, Sealed Delivered,” but I think in some ways that further emphasized the point that there is no inherent disparity between white-dominated classical music world and music with direct ties to Black culture. As Moran moved between sections, I often didn’t immediately recognize what she was singing. It could have been an aria or a Motown bop, but it didn’t matter because it was beautiful and made me feel something.
That being said, I think a fan of either opera or Motown or both would also enjoy Moran’s playful pairings. One moment that absolutely delighted me was her mashup of the Four Tops’ “Sugarpie, Honeybunch (I Can’t Help Myself)'“ and “Non so piu cosa son, cosa faccio” from Mozart’s Le Nozze di Figaro. I actually know both of those songs, and I never in a million years would have thought about hearing them in the same concert, nonetheless as a mashup.
Of course, like any other online endeavor that was meant to be part of a live theatre festival, there were things I felt were missing from the motown project. While all the performers involved are very talented, there’s really nothing like live music, and I can only imagine the kinetic energy between the audience and the performers if we all could have been in the same space. Additionally, and this is more nit-picky, I think the piece would have benefited by taking a cue from the cabaret world and incorporating banter or small monologues between movements. I would have enjoyed to hear Moran and her fellow musicians discuss their personal connections to the songs they chose and how they felt about the combinations they came up with. Of course, forgoing this leads the audience to come to their own conclusions and allows the music to speak for itself, so I understand the choice. Lastly, and this is very unimportant, props were incorporated very weirdly. During some of the songs, Moran was just holding things, and I had no idea way. I don’t think it added anything.
Anyway, I’m starving and frustrated that this isn’t my original post, which was much better. Hopefully tomorrow morning I will not have the same problems.