My overall impression
Art is beautiful, and frequently, good art is exhausting. After I left Charivari in Voyeurville, I was certainly exhausted, but in the exhilerated and tremendously satisfied way that only art and a few other worthwhile activites can promise.
The premise of the show by itself is a little dizzying: I’ve described it as what would happen if The Decemberists had really, really rough sex with System of a Down and the child produced from this union studied under Cirque Du Soliel, which I think gets across the aesthetic, if nothing else. It’s a carnival, a cabaret, a vaudevillian exploration of some pretty profound ideas about sex, society, and the way the world works at it’s best and it’s worst.
Yes, there’s more going on here than it appears when you first take your seat. While I would have been perfectly happy with a well-done cabaret that awed me with it’s skilled acrobatics and clever presentation, there’s a lot more going on here. Subtle, but not too subtle bits of staging that comment on things like surveillance, privacy, racial injustice, social brutality, slut-shaming and sexual flexibility and freedom provide something to think about as much as gawk over.
All this and I absolutely can’t leave out the giddiness of the performers or the terrific music. While the lead of House of Rabbits’ vocals don’t always seem to match the scene as well as they could, that’s an exception rather than a rule, and when they hit they’re downright perfect, giving an unusual and refreshing edge of bombastic strangeness to the theatrics that works wonders. What’s more, every actor involves seems as though they’re having a great time, diving into the melodrama that so excellently sets the scene with total relish. The actors faces, when not covered with the excellent masques used through the show, brim over at times with expression that still, in a show like this, never seems remotely over the top. Particularly great, Cara Manuele sinks her teeth into the petty cruelty of her scorned villianess with turns that go from amusing to vile to tragic in the one-hour run of this show.
It would be hard for me to recommend this show enough, and I very much hope that the end of the Fringe does not come to the same thing as the end of Charivari in Voyeurville. It was as beautiful and exhausting as good art, good sex, or good work done by skilled people can be, and it deserves to be seen by as many people as possible.
