Susan Campanaro: Where Alt-Cabaret turns Renegade Theatre

 Susan Campanaro: Where Alt-Cabaret turns Renegade Theatre

By John Pietaro

“Why are you screening your calls?! Walter, I know that I’m unmanageable, but I have to drink (gasp); I’m an artist!...               ...ummmmm, It’s Walter, my manager. Excuse me, officers: do you have a call-number here?”

Such a harried message on a lost New York night is but one example of Lavinia Draper’s sordid stage life. Sometimes things open in a jail cell or a notorious night on the town. The fictional but increasingly renown creation of actor/vocalist Susan Campanaro, the bedraggled, hysterical, often seductive and always powerful characterization is nothing if not shape-shifting. For Campanaro, a performance mainstay at the Stonewall Inn and throughout the circuit, here and abroad, Lavinia is simply a counterpart. And with each successive performance including theaters in London and Brighton, followed by 24 performances in Scotland’s Edinburgh Fringe Festival, the character, and her presence grows. This month, Campanaro/Lavinia and the show’s composer-pianist Lynn Portas storm the 17^th annual United Solo Theatre Festival, September 25. You’ve been warned.

***

Susan Campanaro carries bits of downtown grunge in every fiber, though formal arrival to this city occurred after formative years in Connecticut and Florida where her father ran a Palm Beach clothing store and managed nightclubs. Campanaro began studying dance at age 12 and then attended the local performing arts high school, majoring in theatre and endeavoring in performance wherever possible. Upon graduation, she came to know members of the Blacklight Theatre of Prague who’d defected to the US and, as Ta Fantastika, began playing West Palm Beach. Campanaro was among the young artists who’d joined the troupe and were given the opportunity to travel with them to Asia instead of attending college. The decision was not a difficult one.

After returning from the road, Campanaro attended Palm Beach Junior College (now Fla State), but left for New York the summer before graduation. It was June 1988. “My brother was a hairdresser living on 48^th between 8^th and 9^th Avenues and I was temporarily staying with him”, she explained. “One day I was up on his rooftop praying over how I can get this done”, to remain here, working in the arts, and not return to school. “I was a club kid, 22- years-old, hanging out and dancing, and then my photo was published”, and the extra attention found the budding performer in multiple music and karaoke videos. “I began working at the Slide and met people who guided me toward relevant career moves”. Soon, a role in the off-Broadway production of John Patrick Shanley’s Danny and the Deep Blue Sea followed.

In this period, Campanaro also worked Trixie’s on 45^th St. “It was an entertainment bar. I was a host, but also singing”, and it was in this venue that she first endeavored into performance art: “I created a style blending singing and comedy”, bending, transforming these into the still developing genre. And then, one night in 1991, she was introduced to the director of Tony and Tina’s Wedding, the off-off Broadway smash that would ultimately run for decades. “At 24 years old, I was playing ‘Nancy Marsala’, the singer in the band. I met such amazing artists at this mock Italian wedding. One of course and most important, musical director Lynn Portas; the other was vocalist and actress Maria Gentile, whom I’ve worked with, side by side, for many years”. MAC Award-winner Gentile both performs and bartends at the Stonewall and the Duplex, among others.

Campanaro then began working with Road Recovery (she currently serves as Creative Director), a music industry-driven non-profit dedicated to helping young people battling addictions. “We had a comedy show with performances at the Stonewall, and at the Center on 13th Street”. Encouraged to work in cabaret by the award-wining artist Nancy Timpanaro-Hogan, and noted vocalist Lina Koutrakos, Campanaro was moved to work in this intimate discipline.

“Lina is my mentor. I took her class and after the showcase, the owner of 88’s Piano Bar, Era Rable asked me if I wanted to do a show, so I created The Actress, my first cabaret, in 1993. It was so much fun. Super silly and people loved it.” And the cabarets kept coming, with Susan both performing and directing: “Don’t Tell Mama, the Triad Theatre, and the Duplex with very successful Happy Hour shows, daytime sing-alongs and on Monday nights we had an amazing line up of Broadway talent.” This lasted through the ‘90s.

Campanaro returned to the cast of Tony and Tina’s Wedding, holding the starring role as Tina, twice touring Japan, where she met dancer/choreographer Janine Molinari with whom she co-founded Theatre for Young Audiences. And in this milieu, ‘Lavinia’ was developed. “I came up with this 29-year-old kind of hard-edged Broadway boozy, Lavinia Draper. And the character stuck. I just kept doing her. My friend Poppi Kramer, the comic--she is no longer with us but she was my girl--and she told me, ‘Keep doing Lavinia’. Over years, Lavinia grew older and more stories of her life on Broadway (including as the reported understudy to Betty Buckley in Cats) became part of her history.”

Campanaro brought the Lavinia act to her variety shows at the Duplex, growing the concept with pianist Darius Frowner. The notorious Ms. Draper then moved to the now-defunct Therapy Bar, where Campanaro thrived for a decade. “Then I started to go out to Cherry Grove on Fire island and do spots as Lavinia with Brandon Cutrell’s Broadways at the Beach. I would kill!”, she offered, still glowing with enthusiasm. Campanaro’s act gained headline status and has since been a regular at the Ice Palace. When not tearing up these venues, the Lavinia character has been at the helm of the NYC Pride Parade.

Doing Time with Lavinia, the musical (“an exploration of Lavinia’s life”) truly came to be when Campanaro asked Lynn Portas to write the show’s songs and background music. The current pairing has been a highlight of both women’s careers. “Lynn is a genius so all I had to do was write a monologue about some horrible situation either I or Lavinia had gotten into, and she’d write a song. So eventually we came to this beautiful, heartwarming tale of Lavinia Draper, a woman always in a vulnerable and compromised situation, but still finding the glimmer of hope.” In 2022 Campanaro and Portas brought Doing Time with Lavinia to the United Solo Theatre Festival, and it took home two esteemed awards: Best Composer and Best Musical.

With a few moments’ spare time, Campanaro in 2023 went to the UK to direct Tony and Tina’s Wedding, and also filled several nights performing as Lavinia at a south London comedy club. Doing Time with Lavinia came to play two theaters in London as well as spots throughout London and Brighton, leading to the Edinburgh Fringe Festival whirlwind. “I did 24 performances in 22 days”, Campanaro stated. “They loved singing Lynn’s music and inspirational lyrics. The thing about this musical is that you are uplifted. We need that in this crazy world we live in.”

Storybook-like, the pair received news while I Scotland that United Solo asked them to bring Doing Time with Lavinia back to open its 2024 season, Wednesday September 25, 7pm, right on Theatre Row. It’s been one helluva ride.

 https://unitedsolo.org/nyc-spring-2024/

https://roadrecovery.org/

 

EP review: The Ruminators with Patti Rothberg, It's You

 It’s You, the Ruminators with Patti Rothberg (EP, independent)

--originally published in The Village Sun--

The boundaries that once doggedly confined Downtown below East 14^th have faded like myth, but even as artists sought out points north, west and out, that worn strip of rich cultural past remains spiritually vital. In the mid-90s, as gentrification encroached without mercy, singer-songwriter Patti Rothberg was signed by a major record label and began touring the world. It was one hell of a ride.

While studying at the Parsons School of Design, Rothberg thrust herself into the Anti-Folk scene, aligning with punk-damaged protest singers bearing acoustic guitars as proper weaponry. Soon after, while performing in the Union Square subway station, she was encountered by an EMI A&R man (“EMI and Sony were fighting over me”, she has said), and was soon in the studio and then on the road pushing her debut album Between the One and Nine. Alternative hits like “Inside” and “Treat Me Like Dirt” made for important statements as well as damned good rock n roll.

In the years since, Rothberg’s projects have included the all-female Ramones trib, Rockaway Bitch, but it’s only within the Ruminators, her duet with vocalist/bassist/guitarist known as Just Jill which offers the listener a raging glimpse into the Anti-Folk days of yore. Armed consistently with an acoustic guitar, Rothberg’s voice blends tightly with Jill’s, casting strains of Cindy Lee Berryhill, the Washington Squares and Michelle Shocked through their new, outspoken repertoire. As expected, the songs are bitterly, wonderfully spiced with ironic tales of life, relationships, and society, but as both women are skillful songwriters, each came to this duo with quiversful of material. Jill’s long been a constant of song circles downtown and up, as well as in Brooklyn, pouring out warmly emoted titles (and solo albums), and Patti’s career has been nothing if not prolific. The pairing maintains the essence of each, albeit threaded through a blast of post-punk folksay, highly harmonic British invasion pop, and a vital dosage of feminism, seemingly custom fit to Little Steven’s Underground Garage.

The Ruminators with Patti Rothenberg released their EP It’s You earlier this year, and it’s been making the rounds of radio and podcasts that thrive on such sounds (including this writer’s Beneath the Underground streaming weekly on WFMU). The first cut of the set, “Love Shrine”, driven by a thicket of acoustic guitars, features Patti’s moving vocal and a carefully placed electronic keyboard line. Jill’s harmonies at times encase the lead vocal, moving along in thirds, but at other points leaping up into a new range, closing out on a dramatic low. Following this is “Emo Man”, a highly unique bit of new wave with an 80s-rich swirling synthesizer, electronic drums, and Jill’s probing bass are arranged just behind Patti’s acoustic guitar. Their voices here are closely knit, more reminiscent of actual folkies but the Everly Brothers creep in there, too, as well as underground sardonic pairings like the Sugar Twins.

The breakout cut seems to be “Manwhore” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-NQCFfY6FTU  , riddled with straight-faced sarcasm and backbeat handclaps, the duo’s traded vocal lines and call-and-response chorus reel the ear in without effort. The lyrical snarl (there’s plenty room for more/when you’re a manwhore) is relentless, as we like it. But closing number “Fuck the Penises”, while needing no explanation, wins the medal for acid humor through ersatz vocal harmony crashing into unisons, oddly calling on visions of childhood songs that girls coming of age might have sang while playing the hand-jive of Miss Mary Mack on a much more feminist planet.

Find the Ruminators with Patti Rothberg here:

https://www.instagram.com/ruminatorswithpattirothberg/

https://www.facebook.com/theRuminatorsOfficial

https://www.tiktok.com/@ruminatorswpattirothberg

https://justjillandpattirothberg.hearnow.com/

 

Remembering Pete Seeger During Labor History Month

 

Recalling Pete Seeger This Labor History Month

--Originally published in Allegro magazine, May 2024--

Pete Seeger spent the better part of his life performing topical songs and championing social justice. A tireless activist for the rights of the underdog, toward global peace, and for the sanctity of the environment, Pete was also a major proponent of folklore in all its forms. A constant presence within the labor movement, he wasn’t only a member of Local 802 but also a founder of AFM Local 1000 and any number of other organizations on behalf of working musicians.

As a Marxist and follower of Rosa Luxemberg, Pete wouldn’t have given credence to the concept of predestiny, but it seems about right that his would be a May birth (May 3, 1919). Another deciding factor for this month’s member profile is that 2024 marked the tenth anniversary of his passing.

The son of leftist musicologist Charles Lewis Seeger, founder of the decidedly radical Composers Collective of New York (with Aaron Copland, Henry Cowell, Ruth Crawford, Marc Blitzstein, and Conlon Nancarrow), and Constance de Clyver Seeger, concert violinist and Julliard faculty member, Pete almost singlehandedly resurrected, of all things, the 5-string banjo. Introducing its application as an American instrument of African origin, developed through the sweat and blood of the oppressed, in Seeger’s wake, the banjo – or at least his banjo – symbolized the power of song as an icon of more than one ‘folk revival’. His hand carved long-neck instrument bearing the slogan “This Machine Surrounds Hate and Forces It to Surrender”, sang with pride over decades … even through Bob Dylan’s decision to go electric. For the many of us raised with the sound of his split-tenor vocals, Pete was larger than life.

During the Great Depression, the teenaged Pete Seeger took to collecting folk songs in the rural south with his father. The elder Seeger foresaw the need to replace the modernist, experimental track of American composers with one imbedded in traditional music after recognizing its revolutionary potential. American workers suffering economic disaster needed radical content, but within a music immediately accessible; he never looked back and clearly neither did Pete.

The 1930s were desperate years, utterly brutal for people already in the throes of poverty. Daily Worker columnist Mike Gold wrote of the need for “a communist Joe Hill” (referring to the IWW labor martyr) to offer musical organizing on the front lines: a few years later Woody Guthrie came to prominence on the political Left. Guthrie, a firestorm of creative energy and radical philosophy was introduced, in 1940, to Pete Seeger by folk archivist Alan Lomax. The two became inseparable. Once Woody had taken up Pete’s offer to join his group the Almanac Singers, they wrote and performed music together, and Seeger, through musical and political osmosis, rapidly morphed into a new kind of cultural force.

Early on Pete developed a strong kinship within the West Village’s brimming radicalism and quickly became a first call for rallies, May Day parades, and militant unions here and across the country.

He joined forces with progressive cultural organizations, anti-fascist collectives and was featured at American Labor Party actions throughout the 1940s and into the ‘50s, even as the specter of the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) haunted his musical groups, the Almanac Singers, then the Weavers, as well as his organization, People’s Songs. Later, he would be subpoenaed by the “House Un-Americans” when, riddled with accusations questioning his patriotism and the many he’d associated with, Seeger refused to name names, but offered instead to sing for the HUAC inquisitors. They refused his overture and called it Contempt of Congress.

A victim of the same tenacious Blacklist that had torn apart Hollywood and the CIO in the post-war period, Pete sang for college students and children, when no one else cared to listen … or, rather, when no one else could hear. And when he could not sing for them, he sang for the trees and forest life about him. Seeger was hell-bent on allowing music to touch deep, whether as a weapon or a healing force. Uniquely, he achieved both in tandem.

Seeger’s recordings with the Almanac Singers easily demonstrate the revolutionary fervor of the mean Depression years, as well as the fight against the fascism. Toward the latter, the Almanacs’ 1942 recording “Round and Round Hitler’s Grave”, composed by Seeger, Hays and playwright Millard Lampell, was a rousing vehicle against Hitler and Mussolini which remains a firestorm of radicalism. The original trio by then had expanded to include Guthrie, and accordionist Agnes “Sis” Cunningham (later the founder of Broadside magazine, with some financial help from Pete and his wife Toshi). Similarly, the group’s labor songs album of the year prior featured the debut recording of Woody Guthrie’s “Union Maid”, a stalwart of the movement bearing a percussively structured chorus:

Oh, you can’t scare me/I’m stickin’ to the union/stickin’ to the union/ stickin’ to the union/

Oh, you can’t scare me/I’m stickin’ to the union/till the day I die

The Almanac Singers campaigned for Progressive Party presidential candidate Henry Wallace in the election of 1948, a seminal year in which the political right-wing gained major footing in Congress and began the dissolution of many of President Roosevelt’s liberal reforms. The witch hunt by right-wing activists against workers in government, education, social work, and the arts immediately overturned whole professions and ultimately ruined lives. The Almanac Singers were among the casualties of McCarthy’s Senate investigations as well as HUAC’s show trials. But only months later, Seeger, along with Hays, Ronnie Gilbert, and Fred Hellerman, banded together for an outdoor performance in Peekskill NY where the guest of honor was Paul Robeson. A Klan-inflected police department stood idle as fascistic stone-throwing civilians turned the gathering into a violent, racist, anti-Semitic, red-baiting riot.

Moved by the need for a new progressive folk music ensemble, the four remained together and as the Weavers initially scored major hits with Leadbelly’s “Goodnight Irene”, and classics “The Midnight Special”, “The Rock Island Line”, “On Top of Old Smokey”, South African traditional song “Wimoweh” (later known as “The Lion Sleeps Tonight”), Woody’s “So Long It’s Been Good to Know Yuh”, Hebrew work song “Tzena, Tzena, Tzena”, and an assortment of others. Signed to Decca Records, the Weavers were renowned---right up to the point of FBI investigations and a vicious hatchet job by the right-wing press. Seeger and Hays were called to testify under the hot HUAC lights, and while the group carried on for some time, by ’53 it lost the major label deal, and became subject to the blacklist and a barrage of flag-waving protestors.

In the later 1950s, Pete began performing his “peoples songs” in liberal colleges and left-wing summer camps across the country, and theatres around the world, but was blacklisted from major performances, let alone lofty recording sessions or television appearances, at home. The Hollywood blacklist was finally severed with the 1960 film Spartacus’s win at the Academy Awards, but not so for radical folkies; the inclusion of Seeger performing “Waist Deep in the Big Muddy” on the Smothers Brothers television show in 1968, only achieved by the Brothers’ threats to walk out if the singer was not aired, finally did it.

In a prodigious career, some of his noted compositions including “Turn, Turn, Turn”, a number one for the Byrds in ‘65, “Where Have All the Flowers Gone?”, “If I Had a Hammer”, co-written with Lee Hays (a smash for both Peter, Paul and Mary, and Trini Lopez), and “Kisses Sweeter Than Wine” remain immortal. Pete was also one of the authors of civil rights anthem “We Shall Overcome”, a song born of the gospel tradition and fully developed in protest demonstrations.

While Pete became a beloved figure with the passage of time and was awarded the National Medal of Arts in 1994, he never ceased outspoken participation at rallies, bridging the 1940s and 2000s with demonstrations for civil rights, the labor movement, the environment, women, immigrants and free speech, and against fascism, imperialism, war, and nuclear weaponry.

Even in his final years, most Saturday afternoons Pete stood at a busy crossroads not far from Poughkeepsie, waving a large peace flag and leading a small group in song. This writer came to know Pete to some degree over years, most pridefully performing as part of his back-up band for a 1999 concert entitled Music in the History of Struggle at Local 1199’s midtown auditorium. And then between 2005 and ’10, when my wife Laurie Towers (also an 802 member) and I resided in Beacon, the opportunity to join Pete at the peace vigil was an immediate draw and we did so many times. Further, we shared the stage with him on other occasions in area venues, not the least of which was the inaugural Dissident Arts Festival.

Pete Seeger was the embodiment of the cultural worker, dedicating his music and tireless activism to the peoples’ and the planet’s cause. Taking the distant advice of Joe Hill, he recognized long ago that more can be said in one topical song than in a hundred pamphlets. But, even in silence, Pete’s philosophy of an art of empowerment rings eternal.

Book Review: STEVE CANNON, Groove, Bang and Jive Around

 Steve Cannon, Groove, Bang and Jive Around  (Blank Forms Editions, 2023)

--Originally published in an overly-edited version in The NYC Jazz Record, 7/1/24--

Steve Cannon was a revolutionary poet many saw as the cultural heart of Black Liberation in another period when the struggle was a matter of life and death. This founder of Gathering of the Tribes was a mentor to countless New York poets, particularly the downtown contingent, starting with his days in the Society of Umbra alongside luminaries Akia Toure, Ishmael Reed, Calvin Hernton, Tom Dent and David Henderson, as well as free jazz leaders Sun Ra, Cecil Taylor and Archie Shepp. By the 1980s, his failing vision deteriorating to blindness, Cannon and his Tribes performance space and magazine remained a major underground voice of East Village poetry. His passing in July 2019 resulted in countless tributes including one at the Clemente Soto Center which this writer covered in the pages of this paper. One would be hard-pressed to find naysayers to Cannon’s vast inspiration; his legacy is profound. And yet, this review of his only novel was difficult in the writing.

Groove, Bang and Jive Around was published by the Parisian Ophelia Press in 1969, and largely lost since its original printing. Of its age, the story is filled with psychedelic, indeed, hallucinatory imagery within the context of the fight for Black power. Unfortunately, social justice drowns under the carnal imagery, and while the sexual revolution was a vital part of the day (and of women’s liberation), this series of prurient adventures reaches further than Lolita or Carnal Knowledge would have dared. To refer to Groove, Bang and Jive Around as “notorious” is an understatement. The brutally raw depiction of African American culture in the south is somewhat reminiscent of the protagonist in recent film American Fiction; told by his literary agent that he must “write more Black”, Jeffrey Wright’s character reluctantly complies with impassioned jailhouse zealousness. Some hardcore sections seem to be competing with Burroughs’ Naked Lunch, but what’s missing here is the legacy (Burroughs remained a novelist).

The story of fourteen-year-old Annette’s explicit coming of age starts with a shockingly graphic scene in an outhouse with a man twice her age, goes through exploits with the guy she believes to be her father, has a threesome with her boyfriend and an obese older woman, engages in ritualistic orgies, and is the main course in a violent mass gang bang. Related visions of her mother and brother’s lurid relations, as well as flashbacks of Annette’s first time, age 10, with her brother and his friend, do little to accent the politics Cannon held so dear.

Yet, the larger story carries Annette through an odyssey to a Black nirvana, Ooh-bla-dee, where people of color hold power and take vengeance on corrupt officials and their wives via public humiliation and bestiality. Along the way, a wonderful variety of jazz artists make cameos, Dizzy Gillespie presides over Ooh-bla-dee, and Count Basie’s band plays uproariously for the victors.

Though Cannon’s eyesight was intact in 1969, the work plays out more as classic storytelling than any of his literary work. A New Orleans native who moved to the Lower East Side in 1962, he carried the southern tradition of tall tales into the fertile mix of radical downtown and it’s easy to imagine the book as a series of spoken presentations. Groove is the motherlode of all chin music and this re-publication may just mark it as an invaluable vision of cruel, imposed poverty and the dissonant journey north. Tragically, Cannon never found his Ooh-bla-dee.