From June 16-18, 2022, RealTime’s hit concert cabaret ANGELMAKERS: Songs for Female Serial Killers will be re-imagined at Pittsburgh Winery in the historic Strip District. This brand new iteration of one of RealTime’s anchoring productions will feature beloved original lead performer Milia Ayache from Beirut, Lebanon, and the voices of eight other utterly unique Pittsburgh-based female-identifying vocalists, including Vietnamese pop star, asylee, and activist Mai Khôi and Pittsburgh theater favorite Hazel LeRoy. Accompanied by original ANGELMAKERS musicians Zorahna and Michele Dunlap and directed by Cynthia Croot, the cast also includes the talents of Angela George, Angela Hsu, Julianna Austin, Linette Taylor, Meg Booth, and Samantha A. Camp. With the expanded cast, RealTime seeks to amplify Pittsburgh’s diverse voices, echoing the show’s theme: “everyone deserves one song.”
ANGELMAKERS is happening concurrently with the Theatre Communications Group Conference, one of the country’s largest annual gatherings of not-for-profit professional theater professionals, occurring in Pittsburgh this year.
The show is a chance to share with theater-makers everywhere the incredible talent we have here in the city. RealTime is showcasing its internationally diverse cast in the most hyper-local of businesses: Pittsburgh Winery, an urban, boutique winery located in the Strip District. The Winery has been home to over 500 musical shows and performances. ANGELMAKERS will be their first theatrical cabaret in the space.
The show, first performed in a crumbling Slavic dancehall in Lawrenceville in 2017, explores the moments and motives of female serial killers throughout history, from the 1500s to the present. The songs are as diverse in content as in style, ranging from rock to post-punk to 80s pop to country.
The response to the 2017 Pittsburgh production Pittsburgh Magazine’s Sean Collier wrote, ANGELMAKERS: Songs for Female Serial Killers is no dinner-theater hokum, nor is it a theater-of-cruelty thriller. It’s thoughtful, careful, restrained and — surprisingly — beautiful.” Bill O’Driscoll called the show “engrossing” and “lyrical”. George Hoover of On Stage Pittsburgh the Round said of the company, “Theatre is a constantly evolving art form; Pittsburgh is fortunate to have companies like RealTime Interventions…to push that evolution ahead.”
The show went on to be produced at New York City’s 54 Below in 2018, and it was then developed off-Broadway by WP Theater.
Why are female serial killers the focus of a concert musical? RealTime’s co-Artistic Directors (and Angelmakers conceivers) Rice and Thelin respond:
Our culture is fascinated with true crime, but women aren’t usually at the center of the story unless they’re victims of male killers. Angelmakers asks: how do murderous obsessions exist differently in women than in men, and does our fascination with violence change when a woman commits it? What iniquities influence the making of these “monsters”? And how different are they from ourselves?
Angelmakers is an exploration of both rage and empathy. This piece uses the power of music and steeped-in notions of women as the more sympathetic (and empathetic) gender to ask audiences to simultaneously hold both their righteous anger at destructive behavior and their awareness of the humanity inside each of us. “We hope this piece will evoke responses of discomfort, fascination, distance, and compassion– responses that, in a larger sense, we all need to learn to negotiate if we hope to understand those who are fundamentally different from us,” Rice says.
ANGELMAKERS: Songs for Female Serial Killers at the Pittsburgh Winery. Concept, Lyrics & Music by Molly Rice, Co-conceived by Rusty Thelin, Directed by Cynthia Croot.
For tickets (on sale starting June 1 and more information: www.realtimeinterventions.org.
Categories: Show Previews
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