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By the end of Gob Squad's take on Andy Warhol's film Kitchen, it's as if the cast of four have – like Andy – left the building. Instead four members of the audience have been lured into playing them on the huge, tri-partite screen that has been relaying events to us in grainy black and white. And it's just such a mischievous, cleverly appropriate conclusion: one that acknowledges Gob Squad's penchant for dissolving the dividing line between spectator and performer, alongside Warhol's fascination with making everyday reality into art-house movies (albeit with an amateurish aesthetic) and the way both these processes reflect upheavals in the way we see and define theatre and visual art.
That we can engage with this freedom, can mull over the nature of reality and illusion – we are, after all, watching a screen full of real-time actuality – then head off to access all manner of personal high-tech image-capturing devices could well explain the work's subtitle, You've Never Had It So Good. For sure, we don't often get it as profoundly intellectual or as funny in the same frame. There's such disarming charm in having the actors play themselves, goofing about in a kitchen – dancing, eating cake in Warhol mode – before they decide they don't want to do the static screen test or the durational Sleep movie that were made at his Factory lab. And there's unpredictable comedy when the audience recruits replace them, and unstintingly enter into the sixties spirit of letting personal stuff hang out. But by the end, your thoughts are buzzing with what Warhol may (or may not) have intended as a radical legacy – and how so much of his subversive influence is still with us.
Behold, then, the walking, talking, singing, slinking subversion that is Taylor Mac. Dressed, almost, in a shimmer of large paillettes – look closely, you'll see they're printed coinage – Mac sashays on in archly knowing drag mode and proceeds to deliver a series of political songs from the 20th century. You didn't know Tea For Two was political? Or You Are My Sunshine? Only You? After Mac has picked over the bones of the lyrics, razzed them up with his own nuances of phrasing and across-octaves delivery and then swung off into pungent, hilariously barbed riffs on the 20th century legacy of racism, gender discrimination and bigotry that we need to discard, even Jingle Bells would sound political and you'd be asking: "Who's doing the jingling?"
His wit is as sharp as his fabulous cheekbones. His flair for drawing us into his orbit – with men, as well as women, willing to be on-stage foils for his repartee – is, ultimately, rooted in his own immersion in his on-stage personna. Warhol would have adored how Taylor lives, IS, his art. His backing band of local musicians did him – and us – proud.
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