R-E-S-P-E-C-T
When I was a boy, I used to visit an elderly neighbor to keep her company. She liked to listen to a radio station that played what I would come to know as “oldies” — Frank Sinatra, Perry Como, etc. The station’s tagline, repeated ad infinitum, was “The Music of Your Life.” This was baffling to me, until I got a little older and figured out it was The Music of Her Life. The music she had grown up with, swooned over, fallen in love to, and wept along with, and which now took her back to those halcyon days, so long ago and far away.
I thought of her as I soaked in the sonic memory machine that is R-E-S-P-E-C-T: six women taking the audience back, back, way back to songs of the ‘60s, with a little help from the band. Every now and then, we heard a bit of biography or a dollop of history: Buffy Sainte-Marie’s “Universal Soldier” even gotsome politically-tinged backstory. (Who sends the soldiers to do their killing? The politicians. And who elects the politicians? Why, we do!)But for the most part, there wasno story at work, just time passing, from Lesley Gore and “Teen-Pan Alley” up through Joni Mitchell’s “Woodstock,” with chronological detours here and there to highlight particular artists (The Supremes, Dionne Warwick, songwriter Laura Nyro). And as the title might indicate, Aretha gotto close the show with “the #1 song of all time as ranked by Rolling Stone.”
The theatrical magic camefrom the performers’ embodiment of so many different artists — not just the vocal invocations, though they wereimpressive, but hair, makeup, movement, manner. They gothelp from the artists themselves, whose images wereprojected bigly on the beaded backdrop.
It probably helps if you know most of the songs, since very few of them are presented in toto. It probably helps even more if you lived with them, if they were The Music of Your Life.
When
Ongoing until Sunday, April 9, 2023
Hours
| Sundays, 2pm-3:30pm |
| Wednesdays, 2pm-3:30pm & 7pm-8:30pm |
| Thursdays, 7pm-8:30pm |
| Fridays, 7pm-8:30pm |
| Saturdays, 2pm-3:30pm & 7pm-8:30pm |