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CurtainUp Review
NONE OF IT:More or less Hudson's Bay, again. by Les Gutman
Explaining what Radiohole does has always been a problem for me, and still is. Yet it's consistently interesting, entertaining, fun and all those other things we always want a performance to be. The group seems to have an innate ability to tap into that which is theatrical, to a degree that seems to evade many others. The trick is to learn to relax and go for the ride they have concocted, notwithstanding the frontal assault on the senses they mount. I've never found much future in trying to catalogue the content of a Radiohole show in too much detail, but here are some of the larger shards which, for the record, are often interrupted by something that might be called a series of dance routines and a ballad sung by Scott Gillette while accompanying himself on the guitar: an investigation of a murder case involving the Inuit community, a fundamentalist gathering at which much hoopla is made about the "dead devil" and a woman is shot and a story about a pair of identical twins who would only speak to each other and were eventually institutionalized as insane. (As to the latter, there is apparently a book written, although it's not available on Amazon and the only information on it I could find on the internet was at a website called Asylum Eclectica, on a page entitled Morbid Fact Du Jour.) The motif for None of It includes the usual assortment of ice country fashions, augmented by a pair of rotating Murphy beds (the frames only), something approximately suggesting a house trailer avec DJ booth, a number of gas canisters (the kind in which one might find oxygen but might also find helium as well as the kind of carbon dioxide cannister one might use for do-it-yourself club soda), snow skis (which loom overhead as a part of the theatrical grid) and, let me not forget, a Pepsi machine which figures prominently. On the night I saw the show, an audience member decided to buy a can of soda from the machine, and apparently screwed it up, forcing the cast to improvise (or so I think) with cans of beer retrieved from the tub which is a Radiohole staple. But with Radiohole, one never knows... LINKS TO OTHER REVIEWS OF RADIOHOLE WORKS A History of Heen (Not Francis E. Dec, Esq.) Bend Your Mind Off (co-production with Collapsable Giraffe) Wurst [a brief revival of this show will take place January 22-25, 2003 at GAle GAtes, 37 Main St. in DUMBO. Phone 718-522-4596 for information/tickets.]
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