THREE FROM THE WILD SIDE OF WEIRD
A Little Help From My Fiends: The “Apple Corpse” that is The ZomBeatles lurches into Long Branch for a live/undead gig at the Brighton Bar on Sunday night.
“I Want to Eat Your Hand.” “Eight Brains a Week.” “Dead Prudence.” All in a night’s work for The Zombeatles — the Beatle tribute band that puts a “Paul is Undead” spin to the catalog of the Lads from Pool of Liver. Hailing from the graveyards of Madison, Wisconsin, the “Fab Gore” make their first lurch eastward with a show at The Brighton Bar in Long Branch on Sunday night. Booked by City Gardens legend and radio personality Randy “Now” Ellis (who’s got the cannibal combo set up for a personal appearance at The Record Collector in Bordentown next day), the show further features the delightfully named Biff Blumfumgagnge and The Gomers, a group of fellow Madison musicians who by some strange coincidence seem to show up everywhere the Zombeatles do (can’t quite put our finger on it…). Then there’s Middletown’s own The Wag, the self-described “happy poppy band” whose cheery-aid flavor and sunshiney posi-attitude may be all that’s needed to keep those flesh-eating fiends at bay. Admission’s ten bucks at the door; the CD release Meat the Zombeatles and the DVD mockumentary All You Need is Brains are promised to be laid out, nice and natural, on the Brighton merch table.
999 Tears: The cast of what’s being billed as The Last Human Freak Show in the World flips, flops ‘n flies into the Asbury Lanes on Saturday.
The boards of Asbury Park may have been a family-friendly place in the city’s golden-age heyday, but for us the allure of our region’s amusement-park towns was the sinister-seedy edge that lurked behind the peeling paint and the arcane old arcade games — the swirl of an out-of-tune carousel calliope hinting of freaky things around the next corner. Over at the Asbury Lanes, Juicy Jenn and her crew definitely get this — and as that atom-age alterna-arts odditorium continues to transform itself from a quirky rock club to a far-outpost of burlesque, performance art and wild-west snake oil, just to step through its doors sometimes is to immerse yourself in a scene straight out of Fellini, by way of Tod Browning.
Maybe never more so than this Saturday, when the Lanes sets the pins for the arrival of the 999 Eyes Authentic Vaudevillian Freakshow, a troupe of performers whom no less than National Geographic confirmed as the last authentic human oddities show on the planet. With star attractions like Jennifer the Bearded Lady, The Lobster Boy, and “world’s smallest escape artist” Nic Sin doing their stuff, and the added diversions of live seven-piece circus combo That Damned Band and “an authentic traveling dime museum that magically transports you into a carnival midway,” the gypsy-caravan show endeavors to evoke ” a time when the differently formed were glamorized,” and townsfolk were reminded of the power of magic and imagination to transform lives. Tix are 12 bucks in advance, $15 at the door.
P ‘n V at the B: Marjorie Conn brings the latest in her very intimate guerrilla-theater experiences to Restaurant Plan B in Asbury Park on alternate Sundays from April 5 to May 31.
When we last we looked in on Marjorie Conn here in oRBit, the actor-director-playwright and leading light of local underground theater was setting up at Asbury’s Restaurant Plan B with a presentation based on The Letters of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg. This Sunday (and every other Sunday through May 31), the artist that Plan B owner Jeffrey Haveson playfully calls “Asbury Park’s oldest living lesbian” returns to the Cookman Avenue bistro with an all-original show called Mr. P and Ms. V — a performance piece in which an ever-changing set of actors portray those most obsessed-over body parts, in sketches penned largely by local writers. That first night stars Conn herself (in male drag) as Mr. P, with Plan B chef Matt Levine (in female drag) playing the part of Ms. V. As Haverson maintains, “This will be a vision to behold…this can only happen in Asbury Park.” The 5pm show includes a four course (BYOB) dinner for $35 per person. Seating is limited, so reserve space by calling 732.807.4710.
Posted
April 03, 2009
in
under
