ONE NIGHT ONLY!!
PRESS RELEASE:
ROBERT ASHLEY’S VIDAS PERFECTAS
A Spanish-language version of the television opera "Perfect Lives" (1983)
Starring Ned Sublette as "R" or "Raoul de Noget"
Produced and Directed by Alex Waterman
Music Produced by Peter Gordon
Co-starring Elio Villafranca as "Buddy, The World's Greatest Piano Player"
Introducing Elisa Santiago and Abraham Gomez-Delgado
VIDAS PERFECTAS, the all-new Spanish-language production of Robert Ashley’s opera "Perfect Lives", returns to New York on March 25th at Le Poisson Rouge. This one night only performance features the first and final episodes of the opera, El Parque (The Park) and El Patio De Atras (The Backyard), in partial staging. For all who missed the December 2011 premiere, this is a show not to be missed.
The great singer and writer Ned Sublette stars as the narrator Raoul De Noget, “an incredible creature, a lounge lizard dressed in black...casting a large shadow with his physical presence and his voice” (Augusta Palmer). Playing with him is “Buddy, The World’s Greatest Piano Player,” a unique all-piano role for Cuban virtuoso Elio Villafranca. Composer Peter Gordon, Ashley’s collaborator on the original incarnation of "Perfect Lives", returns as music producer, playing live electronics and mixing. Elisa Santiago and Abraham Gomez-Delgado join in chorus roles.
This powerful reinterpretation of Ashley’s now-classic text, “embraces conversation, improvisation and process to tint and colour the production in new ways,” writes Frieze magazine; “Waterman and his collaborators delicately transform Ashley’s music; it remains unmistakably Ashley, but Latin influences are teased out and foregrounded, by both Villafranca’s piano and by new shifts of rhythmic emphasis in the pre-recorded drum patterns.”
"Perfect Lives" was originally commissioned for television by The Kitchen (NY) in 1979 and was completed in 1983, co-produced by The Kitchen and Channel Four in Great Britain. It was aired on Channel Four in 1983 and in 1984, and subsequently on German, Austrian and Spanish television. "Perfect Lives’" innovative combination of chanting, storytelling, meditation and ecstatic revelation, challenges the ways in which we perceive the relationship between language and music. It has almost singlehandedly changed the way we think about opera, television, and performance.
