By GUILHERME MELETTI YAZBEK
Walking into the Kelly Strayhorn Theater’s Alloy Studios on Saturday night, I was met with something unexpected: the lobby itself had become part of the performance. Photographs, notebooks, handwritten notes from school friends—ephemera from lys scott’s life arranged as if in a small gallery, inviting the audience to begin the journey before the show formally started. Inside, the stage was visible and open to explore: a table with two chairs, placards bearing protest slogans, and a panel covered in scott’s own poems formed the backdrop. But what caught my eye most immediately were two handmade cardboard props, painted white and drawn over in Sharpie. One was a stove—four burners, an oven, a spatula sketched on the backsplash. The other was a work desk, its cardboard bulletin board pinned with a calendar labeled “INFINITY”—every day marked “Today,” every week stretching into the next with no end in sight. The image was striking: an endless loop of productivity, every day indistinguishable from the next, with no apparent exit. Part of Bianca’s scenic design, the objects were simultaneously earnest and absurd, domestic and institutional—and they would soon prove central to the evening’s most powerful sequence.
The evening opened with a provocation. A pre-recorded video played on the large screen—a fake news broadcast, slick and satirical, its tone unmistakably critical of the shrinking space for free expression in contemporary life. Then the performance proper began, and what followed was one of the most fully realized sequences of the evening. Bella Figlia, upstage in the musicians’ corner, delivered a relentless loop of workplace demands: “Did you read my email? Did you see the meeting we have in a little while? Can you do extra hours?” Scott shuttled between the stove and the work desk—domestic labor and wage labor bleeding into each other—while Ariel Xiu and Billy Blades pulled at her, trying to draw her away from both stations. She returned each time with a fixed smile: a pointed critique not only of capitalist extraction but of the demand that workers remain cheerful, accommodating, and productive even under duress. The projection behind them shifted to archival footage of women working on factory assembly lines. The lighting flickered, accelerating the sensation of speed, evoking the rhythm of silent cinema. It was Chaplin’s Modern Times reimagined as a queer, multidisciplinary fever dream: capitalism as choreography, the body as its most exhausted instrument. Music, movement, theater, and projection were in full conversation here. I left this sequence wanting more—and that wanting stayed with me for the rest of the evening.
chronicles of a crazy girl is structured as a staged album—each song a chapter, each chapter a layer of scott’s inner world. The format is deceptively simple: songs provide the structure, while everything else expands their expressive possibilities. Between numbers, a delicate instrumental bed by Skyler Brimmeier and Figlia’s vocalizations keep the evening breathing, giving the transitions continuity rather than allowing them to collapse into silence. The collaboration between scott, Figlia, and Brimmeier is genuinely musical—not a lead performer with accompanists, but a collective sound that shifts register, texture, and energy from track to track. Some numbers lean into rap and rhythm; others are more melodic and introspective. Some deploy video projections; others work through shadow, through fabric, through the body alone.
Among the visual highlights: a shadow sequence deployed both for its poetic potential and, at moments, with deliberate irony—in one instance, scott sings while Xiu and Blades form a heart shape with their hands behind a backlit screen, the silhouettes tender and self-aware in equal measure. Another sequence involves a pair of oversized jeans, each leg stretching nearly ten feet across the stage. scott is literally swallowed by the garment as Xiu and Blades manipulate the fabric around her, turning it into a device for choreographing constriction and resistance. The physical struggle visibly alters the quality and intensity of scott’s voice and movement. Later in the evening, scott appears framed by a projection screen, wearing a kilt and a golden crown—a visually striking, funny, and irreverent image.
scott’s stage presence is one of the evening’s most consistent pleasures—genuine, unaffected, and fully present without ever overplaying it. Whether rapping, singing, or moving, scott inhabits each register with an ease that makes every shift feel natural and fully earned. Xiu and Blades bring a beautiful synergy to their collaborative role, and their physical attentiveness to scott is palpable in the moments they share the stage. In those moments, one occasionally senses that there is more to be discovered—that the dialogue between their bodies and scott’s music could go deeper, could risk more. The shadow sequences, too, feel underdeveloped; their dramaturgical possibilities seem to extend well beyond what the production currently explores. These are not criticisms of what the performance is, but observations about where it might yet go—and that distinction matters in a work this alive to its own possibilities.
During the talk-back, Figlia described the evening as “genre fluid”—and that phrase captures something essential about what chronicles of a crazy girl is reaching for. This is not a concert with theatrical elements, nor a theater piece with a live band. It is something more genuinely hybrid: a form in which music, movement, image, and presence negotiate with each other in real time, each one changing what the others can do. The evening offers many moments of genuine pleasure and invention—and its opening sequence reveals what the work can achieve when all its elements are in full conversation. That glimpse stays with you, as does the sense that scott is an artist with something to say, a stage presence that holds the room, and a creative circle generous and skilled enough to build a world around her. chronicles of a crazy girl is already a strong piece of work. It is also, clearly, still becoming—and that becoming is exciting to witness.
chronicles of a crazy girl at KST’s Alloy Studios had performances on November 6 & 7, 2026.
Guilherme is a Brazilian theater and dance critic, practitioner, and scholar whose practice moves between criticism, performance studies, and contemporary artistic practices. He is a PhD student in Theatre and Performance Studies at the University of Pittsburgh. www.guilhermeyazbek.com
Categories: Arts and Ideas, Reviews
Leave a Reply Cancel reply