Singing Trails

I recently returned home from a mini-tour with my friends and collaborators, director Darren Lynn Bousman and composer Saar Hendelman. On this mini-tour, we visited eight North American cities over the course of two weekends, hosting double feature screenings of our films Repo! The Genetic Opera and The Devil’s Carnival. I say mini-tour because in comparison to the size and expansiveness of previous tours with these two musical movie projects, eight cities seemed like a cakewalk. But size doesn’t matter, right?

To make this petite touring experience as exciting as former ones—as well as give audiences something chewy, veiny, and new—we added the component of live music to the lineup: nightly, Saar and I sat down at a keyboard and sang a song live from the upcoming The Devil’s Carnival: Episode Two. We also demonstrated some of our songwriting process. In other words, in addition to screening our films, the tour also included a very stripped-down, exposed, and personal performance for our fans.

Prior to this mini-tour, the last time I’d really sung for an audience was in 2005 during Repo! The Genetic Opera‘s off-off Broadway summer production. Even then, my singing self was masked behind the make-up and costume of the GraveRobber character. On the set of T.D.C: Episode One, I was even more concealed, buried behind pounds of horns and prosthetics as Lucifer… so this singing live as Terrance The Songwriter, as opposed to Terrance The Actor, was more than a little intimidating. This, coupled with the fact that the majority of movie theatre venues we’d booked weren’t set up for live performances, made the whole affair complicated as well as nerve-wracking.

At all eight cities, a keyboard needed to be rented and delivered to the theatre, amplified through a PA system, and then sound-checked with us upon arrival. This all needed to occur during a travel schedule that typically had us arriving in each city with zero time to spare.

 

At a Boston airport, for example, en route to Toronto for an evening screening at the Rio Theatre, we were on our cell phones, frantically trying to secure a car to pick us up when we landed. We needed this vehicle to transport us to a local music store to rent a keyboard, then to the Rio to set up (during a narrow window between screenings of an existing film), and then deliver us to our hotel rooms to freshen up before the actual show.

We were just about to board our flight. Our phone calls were hitting dead ends. When, suddenly, a stranger—a woman who had overheard our panic—offered to drive us. While this proposition seemed a dream come true, I couldn’t help but blurt at this Samaritan stranger, “You’re either really crazy, or really cool.” When she responded with “A little of both”, we knew we’d just met a likeminded soul. We didn’t know at the time, however, that we’d also just made acquaintances with one of the most fascinating individuals we’d ever crossed paths with: Rita Leistner.

Through conversations at the airport, and then over dinner that night, we shared stories with Rita and learned that she was a well-published photojournalist whose work had appeared in Time, Newsweek, and Rolling Stone. Perhaps most interestingly, Rita spent years in Iraq covering the war. She worked “unembedded”—outside of the U.S. Military’s official program. This meant that Rita, without protection, experienced and documented some of the most horrifying, beautiful, devastating, dangerous, and primal human stories of a war-torn country. Imagine a situation where bullets are flying into a crowd and everyone is fleeing for their lives. Then imagine a slight woman with a camera running towards the barrels to get better photographs. That is Rita. She wasn’t lying when she said that she was both crazy and cool.

She gave us a copy of a book that featured her work during the war to peruse during the flight. Midair, thumbing through the shocking and touching images, I found myself evaluating my entire existence as an artist, and a human.

The most sobering aspect of the encounter with Rita was the realization that most of the time, most of us are so closed off that we fail to investigate how remarkable—cool, scary, or otherwise—the stranger sitting next to us may be…. at the airport, on an airplane, or even at a late-night double bill of a cult movie musical. I’m happy to share that Rita was in attendance at our Toronto screening of The Devil’s Carnival and Repo! The Genetic Opera, and seemed to enjoy herself.

In the spirt of running into the cannon fire, Darren, Saar, and I have decided to add two additional stops to our mini-tour this weekend: Portland and Los Angeles. At these engagements, Saar and I will not only be performing a song from Episode Two, but I’ll be singing “In All My Dreams I Drown” live.

So grab your tickets while they last, and come meet us, and hopefully a few marvelous strangers, on the road: http://thedevilscarnivaltour.eventbrite.com