travsd

Patti Smith on SNL

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A lot of music in the air today (and a couple of more posts after this!). Today is also the birthday of holy-punk-poet-saint Patti Smith. I first saw her/ heard her during her performance on Saturday Night Live in April 1976. Being ten, I was too young to recognize how remarkable the performance was, but going back and watching it now — holy crap! (This was two years before she crossed over with the hit single “Because the Night”)

To find out more about the variety arts past and present, consult No Applause, Just Throw Money: The Book That Made Vaudeville Famous, available at Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and wherever nutty books are sold. 

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And don’t  miss my new book Chain of Fools: Silent Comedy and Its Legacies from Nickelodeons to Youtube, just released by Bear Manor Media, also available from amazon.com etc etc etc

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Published by travsd

Writer and performer Trav S.D. (www.travsd.com) is best known for his books "No Applause, Just Throw Money: The Book That Made Vaudeville Famous" (2005) and "Chain of Fools: Silent Comedy and Its Legacies from Nickelodeons to Youtube" (2013). He has written for the NY Times, the Village Voice, American Theatre, Time Out NY, Reason, the Villager and numerous other publications. Trav has been in the vanguard of New York’s vaudeville and burlesque scenes since 1995 when he launched his company Mountebanks, presenting hundreds of acts ranging from Todd Robbins to Dirty Martini to Tammy Faye Starlite to the Flying Karamazov Brothers. He has directed his own plays, revues and solo pieces at such venues as Joe’s Pub, La Mama, HERE, Dixon Place, Theater for the New City, the Ohio Theatre, the Brick, and 6 separate shows in the NY International Fringe Festival. In 2014 he produced and directed the smash-hit "I’ll Say She Is", the first ever revival of the Marx Brothers hit 1924 Broadway show in the NY International Fringe Festival.

2 comments

  1. Trav, your blog has turned into a multimedia variety show that is invaluable to any student of the form, which, like its cousins in the ‘illegitimate” theater crafts, have not been as deeply documented as they deserve to be, which may be one of the reasons God gave us you. A big fan.

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