The Canterbury Tales Remixed is now up and running off-Broadway after a very frenetic period of writing and re-writing and rehearsing, and ten days of previews concluded with our official opening on Sunday. Here’s our first review from TheaterMania.com which gives an excellent overview of the show, including one of my favourite review quotes of all time: “Not only audacious, but also astute.” Put that on my tombstone please.
The backstory on how this show came together is also interesting, so I’ll take a moment to regale you. The Rap Guide to Evolution closed on November 6th, after 123 off-Broadway performances (we started in mid-June). Rap Guide played to 6,824 people during its New York run, and there’s more to come when we tour in 2012.*
Another nice result of the Rap Guide run was a recent feature in the December edition of WIRED magazine, including a swanky video clip. The Canterbury Tales Remixed had its first preview on November 23rd, so we had just over two weeks to get the show up and running, which was a piece of cake since it was all pre-written anyway. Or so I thought.
Many of you will have seen my original one-man show The Rap Canterbury Tales, which I performed hundreds of times between 2003 and 2008, but which had been semi-retired for a while since I was focussing on evolution and science rap. Well, I committed to the off-Broadway run (with its ridiculously short turn-around time) thinking I could stitch together the best parts from Rap Canterbury Tales and my other storytelling show, Rapconteur, but when I went back to the original Chaucer/Rap adaptations I wrote in 2003 and 2004, the style felt stale to me somehow, so I scrapped them and started fresh.
The upshot is that The Canterbury Tales Remixed contains zero percent recycled content from The Rap Canterbury Tales. It’s still me rapping medieval stories, but the music is new (thanks to Jamie Simmonds’ excellence), the framing content is new, and 60% of the script was written in the past month. The only previously-aired sections are the stories I wrote last year for Rapconteur, including Gilgamesh, Beowulf, and the Merchant’s Tale. The Pardoner’s Tale and the Wife of Bath’s Tale I rewrote entirely from scratch for this production, and the new versions are… sparkling, especially with the visual projection design by Erik Pearson and the new directing by Soho Playhouse capo Darren Lee Cole.
We are now settling into the groove of once-again performing six shows per week, having been given a new lease on our off-Broadway life, and I’m feeling good about it, if a bit fried. We’re scheduled to run until January 8th, but if the show is popular this could once again be open-ended. Here are two other positive reviews, one from Backstage.com, and today’s review from Theatre Is Easy.
Please tell your friends in New York to come see us! Here’s the link to buy tickets.
Oh yeah, and The Canterbury Tales Remixed will be available soon as an album as well, featuring all of Mr. Simmonds’ amazing new music. It’s in the editing/mixing/mastering phase right now, so realistically we’re looking at a release date of roughly December 20 (hopefully!). This record was supposed to be finished weeks ago, but then I re-wrote those two Tales, and then we decided to bring in live cello, violin, flute, and add a Prologue, Epilogue, etc, all of which is making it an amazing record, and causing delays.
Can’t wait to share the final result!
*By the way, some people got an email from me saying the audience for Rap Guide was over 10,000 after 145 shows, but that was me quoting a box office error that included cancelled shows. 6,824 people in 123 shows, I’m assured, is the correct total.
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