About This Show

Written by Eszter Balint
Songs by Eszter Balint & Stew
Featuring: The Musicians
Directed by Lucy Sexton
Media Design: Tal Yarden
Musical director: David Nagler

An anti-musical co-starring the Streets of New York and the Late 20th Century, the show features appearances by family, film, fame, immigration, joy, theater, shame, dance floors, open doors, papaya ice cream, and the Shah of Iran’s wife. This reluctant memoir is served on a bed of song and dirt, with a punk aperitif and Jimmy Carter for dessert. 

The architecture of the piece is a set of songs tracing Eszter’s journey from communist Hungary to ’70s NYC by way of her parents’ radical theater group, and winding its way through a lower east side mofongo of glamour, poverty, sex, drugs, and… The show digs fearlessly into oppression, freedom, the possibilities in chaos, the dreams and lost dreams of America, and the battles with memory when you are most invested in the now.

 

This Dixon Place commission is made possible, in part, with public funding from the NYC Department of Cultural Affairs with the City Council and NY State Council on the Arts with the support of Gov Andrew Cuomo and the NY State Legislature.