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Lauren Fox and Ritt Henn
March 17, 2014
The idea of building a cabaret show around music from the eerie and surreal filmography of David Lynch would not likely be a good one for many in New York’s cabaret community. It takes a certain kind of grit and a love of risk that many performers simply lack. Luckily, Lauren Fox and Ritt Henn appear to be among the select few with the audacity to raise the idea and not wind up giggling over it and quickly scrapping it. The challenging but largely successful show they’ve fashioned, “Ghosts of Love – Songs from the Reel World of David Lynch,” stays true to the spooky and inscrutable Lynch sensibility. The performers take the darkness seriously and offer few if any moments of comic relief (not, that is, until the encore, which breaks their dark spell).
Fox and Henn use songs and fragments of dialog from Lynch’s oeuvres (including Eraserhead, Blue Velvet, Wild at Heart, and Mulholland Drive) to help create the semblance of a story for their show. The tale they spin concerns some sort of doomed love affair between two lost souls, but who can say for sure? When you’re moving through a Lynch-ian dreamscape, it’s probably appropriate not to worry too much about Aristotelian plot points and character arcs. We don’t really know who these characters are, in part because the dialogue is too vague to ground them in any specific reality. But suffice it to say they are not a jolly pair.
Playing an electrified bass guitar (and, at one point, a Fluke ukulele) instead of his usual double bass, Henn begins the program with Chris Isaak’s “Wicked Game.” He stands onstage above a cluster of flickering votive candles. A strand of “heavenly bells” jangles. Henn whistles a few notes, and from offstage another whistle—rather weak and dull-sounding—is heard. What ensues is like a duet for mourning doves. We soon see that the second whistler is Fox. She staggers toward the stage wearing (what else?) blue velvet. Imagine Morticia Addams with bright ginger tresses and you’ll get the picture. “I don’t want to fall in love,” she sings. Soon her pitch rises effectively to her upper register, and she keens. Finally, she and Henn bring themselves to look at one another, as the song arrives at its melancholy thesis: “Nobody loves no one.”
The songs in “Ghosts of Love” were sung in Lynch’s films by everyone from Connie Stevens to Nine Inch Nails, so Fox and Henn’s material is actually fairly eclectic. One song will sound a bit bluesy (Screamin’ Jay Hawkins’s “I Put a Spell on You”) while another will come off as slightly country (Lieber & Stoller’s “Love Me”). There is some variety in the pair’s vocal approaches as well. For instance, on “Sixteen Reasons (Why I Love You)” (Doree and Bill Post) Henn rasps while Fox assumes a heavy whisper. Nevertheless, everything is filtered through the personalities of the troubled and self-involved characters being portrayed. So it all starts to seem a bit monotonous after a while.
Fortunately, there are compensations. We have Fox’s beauty of a voice on display—clear, true, and haunting. Henn makes bold vocal choices. He’s almost cartoonishly macho at times, like some crusty, desert-dwelling hipster in a Sam Shepard play. His musical arrangements, studded with unpleasant yet somehow pleasing dissonances, are appropriate for the material. And Shannon Epstein’s lighting effects—sometimes rippling, sometimes flickering, sometimes tingeing the stage with a bloody red—add nicely to the overall effect.
Also, the show incorporates at least one piece of unforgettable staging. During a medley of “Blue Velvet” (Lee Morris, Bernie Wayne) and “Blue Star” (Angela Badalamenti, Lynch), Fox somnambulates out among the audience members and sidles up to particular individuals, staring into their eyes and gently touching a face or caressing a shoulder. It’s as though she’s a beautiful zombie trying out a cheesy lounge act in a haunted roadhouse. I happened to be one of the chosen participants, and I found the interaction to be both discomfiting and mesmerizing—adjectives that, used together, pretty much describe the art of David Lynch at its best.
“Ghosts of Love – Songs from the Reel World of David Lynch
Stage 72 at the Triad – January 9, 18, 23, 24, February 20, March 12
Mark Dundas Wood is an arts/entertainment journalist and dramaturg. He began writing reviews for BistroAwards.com in 2011. More recently he has contributed "Cabaret Setlist" articles about cabaret repertoire. Other reviews and articles have appeared in theaterscene.net and clydefitchreport.com, as well as in American Theatre and Back Stage. As a dramaturg, he has worked with New Professional Theatre and the New York Musical Theatre Festival. He is currently literary manager for Broad Horizons Theatre Company.
The idea of building a cabaret show around music from the eerie and surreal filmography of David Lynch would not likely be a good one for many in New York’s cabaret community. It takes a certain kind of grit and a love of risk that many performers simply lack. Luckily, Lauren Fox and Ritt Henn appear to be among the select few with the audacity to raise the idea and not wind up giggling over it and quickly scrapping it. The challenging but largely successful show they’ve fashioned, “Ghosts of Love – Songs from the Reel World of David Lynch,” stays true to the spooky and inscrutable Lynch sensibility. The performers take the darkness seriously and offer few if any moments of comic relief (not, that is, until the encore, which breaks their dark spell).