Theater: Ars Nova / 511 West 54th Street, New York, NY, 10019
Synopsis:
In a blood-and-whiskey-soaked world of shoot 'em ups, stolen brides and kazoo-wielding villains, a rogue musician with a killer guitar is out to set things right. Trust your gut and hold your liquor‒this rocked out spaghetti western is the wildest funeral in town.
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April 16, 2010: A little more garlic in the Bolognese would be a definite boon to “Bloodsong of Love,” a new musical subtitled “The Rock ’n’ Roll Spaghetti Western.” This small-scaled show at Ars Nova, with book, music and lyrics by Joe Iconis, isn’t as pungent as its ripe title would suggest, and can’t seem to decide whether to favor sincere homage or flippant parody.
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April 16, 2010: Joe Iconis keeps almost breaking out. Producing theater Ars Nova has given the writer-composer, his regular director John Simpkins and their designers plenty of room to breathe on Western-themed tuner "Bloodsong of Love." But the rowdy hipster cowboy rock show needs a firm hand more than it needs apparently unlimited subsidies for fake blood. Venue has a rep for backing offbeat material by and for ultrahip youngsters, but "Bloodsong" doesn't have the unity of purpose of Peter Sinn Nachtrieb's "Boom" and it doesn't have the frantic energy that drove Nick Jones' "Jollyship the Whiz-Bang," both also Ars Nova alums.
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April 16, 2010: Joe Iconis's new chamber musical, Bloodsong of Love: The Rock 'n' Roll Spaghetti Western, now playing at Ars Nova, has its charms, but the two-act piece simply runs overlong for so slim a conceit.
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April 16, 2010: By the time, late in Bloodsong of Love, that a footless prostitute transforms into a giraffe (metaphysically speaking) at the behest of a man named Banana and the uncanonized Saint Violetta who used to sell herself (in angel wings) when not selling fish at a general store, you’ll have long stopped expecting the expected. This “rock ‘n’ roll spaghetti western” breaks so many rules, and so warmly embraces the stupid that by any sensible standards it would bomb from the instant its first twangs sound. But because the author of this new musical at Ars Nova is Joe Iconis, you’re better off not expecting that, either.
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April 16, 2010: As book writer, Joe Iconis has devised a clever premise for the potentially hilarious musical "Bloodsong of Love," commissioned from him by Ars Nova, which also produces. Riffing on spaghetti westerns, Iconis tells the tale of a Don Quixote–like man called the Musician (the appealingly stalwart Eric William Morris), whose true love, Santa Violetta (played with fiery imperiousness and a thick Spanish-Italian accent by MK Lawson), is abducted by Lo Cocodrillo (a captivating, giggle-inducing Jeremy Morse), a smarmy musical star of the Old West. That Lo Cocodrillo's instrument of choice is a kazoo and that the Musician and Violetta meet after smearing themselves with blood from a fish she's just gutted says everything about the tenor of the show, which invites theatergoers to laugh heartily as a revenge drama unfolds.
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