Martyn Jacques, The Tiger Lillies - Shockheaded Peter: A Junk Opera (1998 Original London Cast)
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Music CD Cover
Artist: Martyn Jacques, The Tiger LilliesEdition: Music CD
Format: Cast Recording
CD Release Date: 1999-09-14
Music Label: Elektra / Wea
Product features:
- Shockheaded Peter:
- A Junk Opera (1998 Original London Cast)
- The Struwwelpeter Overture
- The Story of Cruel Frederick
- The Dreadful Story About Harriet and the Matches
- Bully Boys
- The Story of the Man That Went Out Shooting
- Snip Snip
- Augustus and the Soup
- Fidgety Phil
- Johnny Head-in-Air
- Flying Robert
- Shockheaded Peter
Free Music Notes for Shockheaded Peter: A Junk Opera (1998 Original London Cast)
Free Music Review: a magnificent tour de force
Hit: 5 Stars
i saw this show in los angeles and was blown away. the translations of the original german stories - these are real bedtime stories, and they are still popular in germany - are spot on and sparkling. the lyrics included in the liner notes are in both english and german. it's no surprise that the tiger lillies were drawn to these twisted cautionary tales that germans have used for over a century to scare their kids from naughty into nice. it's an interesting cultural choice to mold your children's behavior by insisting that they will end up dead if they don't listen to you. and that is the moral of each of the stories: they're a veritable catalogue of german favorites meant to tell children precisely what will go wrong if they don't behave and listen to mummy and daddy - a sort of dante's inferno of children's bedtime stories. the pearl of a translation conveys the meaning of these horrific stories, but the cultural channel does not get crossed, ripping the stories from their german context. this leaves the stories in a kind of limbo that forces the audience to pause over them one by one - something that the one act opera uses to maximum and relentless effect. this is not the suspension of disbelief of typical theatre stock, rather it is the out and out production of disbelief. it's not therapy, but it certainly is shock: the audience was galvanized and mesmerized by the crossed wires of horror and humor. this is far beyond brecht's bending of the rules to make social commentary: shockheaded peter is electric and ambiguous - and that is one hell of a combination to pull off. together with the mind-blowing artistry of the puppeteers, the tiger lillies accompanied these twisted stories and pushed the audience's horror into hilarity - and then back again. this is andy kaufmann-quality stuff - that edge where you don't know what to believe. imagine you were five years old and heard these stories: an unwanted malformed baby is buried beneath the floorboards of the stage in the first scene, only to return at the end of the opera as a life-size puppet with seven-foot fingernails, a girl who plays with matches catches her dress on fire and burns up on stage; a boy who goes out in a storm is carried off by the wind, never to be seen again. and then there's the showstopper, literally, where the omnipresent accordion-toting cabaret MC, Martyn Jacques, won't let the opera continue until the entire audience has sung "fred ... was ... dead" at least three times at the top of their lungs together with him. the trio seems to know no musical limits and the puppeteers keep moving the limits of their craft, inventing ever new props and puppet types to tell the twisted stories that are sung by the MC. i was lucky enough to see this show at its musical height: the high c note being constantly hit by Martyn Jacques whenever he felt like it. clearly, the stagecraft was so honed that he had the freedom to punctuate different aspects of the stories as he saw fit to at the moment, and the trio never failed to accomodate his choices. if this is "junk", then everyone in the audience clearly became a collector: the line to buy this CD after the show was as long as the line was to get in to see it. this was quite simply a virtuoso stage performance. two things are therefore lacking from the CD. first, it really deserved to be a DVD, as this brilliant one act show certainly deserves to be seen more than once (and not only heard), and by more people than were able to see it on tour. second, the CD does not show the same vocal range as was evidenced by the show that i was lucky enough to see. gone are the proliferation of high c's that so stunned the audience, and in their place there is a more moderated and raspy quality to Martyn Jacques' voice. so be it - it is still excellent, and if anything, this is just one more reason to make sure you see the tiger lillies live in whatever they are doing. in the case of shockheaded peter, seeing is disbelieving. a CD, even one as brilliant as this one is, cannot do justice to an art form that really has no proper name aside from "stunning".
Shockheaded Peter: A Junk Opera (1998 Original London Cast) Poster
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