Truth and Tinsel

 - By Tom Phillips

If you want to test the authenticity of a performing artist, a good place to look is the cutting room floor — in the outtakes. There you see how an artist works, and what they're aiming for.  Outtakes are the raw material for a deep and funny dive into he world of performance, about to disappear from view at the tiny Tank theater in midtown Manhattan.   

Two women, creator-director Soomi Kim and choreographer Laura Peterson, mime the male ego as they lip-synch the recording sessions of some very big names in the music industry, while dancing around, under and through two huge tangles of plastic tape. One is tinsel, and the other something like mylar audiotape. This is the cutting room floor of the recording studio, the trash that gets swept up and thrown away.  

Photo by Mari Eimas-Diertrich

And it’s a gold mine. Just listen as a big-name singer explains why he and his long-time collaborator — an even bigger name — are going their separate ways. Their closeness and mutual respect has never been so unctuously faked. Then listen to an excruciating monologue by the same guy, careful not to blow his trademark cool as he excoriates a producer for questioning the way he phrased a lyric. Not satisfied with dressing down the control room, he then insults his own song, with exquisite “distaste.” 

Next a famous disk jockey with a voice smooth as butter flings a screaming shitstorm at his staff, over the sequencing of songs and patter in his hit parade. Who hired these f#@&ing idiots? (You did, sir.) 

Just when you think this is all about men behaving badly, a Beatle speaks from beyond the grave, a meditation on peace and mutual love.  Then two female superstars at work, one a pure singer and the other not, each striving for perfection, one take after another, fretting over musical details. .   

This show will test your powers of discerning. It does not ring a bell when the tone shifts — it’s up to you to detect irony, sincerity, professionalism, perfectionism, or bullshit. The dancers help out. In the end they are pulling individual strands of tape from the tinsel pile, carefully laying them out in a radiating circle, then gathering up the whole mess of tape, lifting and carrying it high.. This is the primordial mass from which art is made, the weeds it has to wade through.  A famous poet once told a young poet not to throw anything away. A bad poem, he said, is the larval form of a good poem. 

This is a smart and entertaining show, but probably fated to die in larval form.  Its unauthorized content would be anathema to Broadway, a horror to Hollywood. It’s not just non-commercial but anti-commercial, self-immolating. So quick, get online to the Tank for tickets. Testing2 closes December 15. 

-- Copyright 2024 by Tom Phillips