Echo Waifer
Cf. in-studio performance on podcast with John Schaefer at WNYC-FM
At The Club at La MaMa, NYC, through April 29:
“I am a fan of POOR BABY BREE. I love her.” — Lou Reed
“A haunting, deeply touching, spot-on evocation of a moment in the distant theatrical past, yet with a very cool and effortless post-modernist twist. It is also profoundly funny.” — Charles Busch
“Astounding …When I first saw Bree it was like being transported into another era...Her voice, her songs about things people just don’t sing about anymore, her sadness and cleverness — it made me laugh and cry at the same time. What an amazing performer!” — Laurie Anderson
“The most magnificent cabaret act I have ever seen. Submit to the exquisite musical tragedy that is Poor Baby Bree.” — Paul Shaffer
“A peculiar thing of beauty; like being inside a music box from the turn of the last century. Haunting, hip, and unusual.” — Jackie Hoffman
Built around creator Bree Benton’s portrayal of Poor Baby Bree, an archetypal waif, I Am Going to Run Away weaves a tragicomic narrative of innocence and loss around seventeen obscure vaudeville and parlor songs (dating from the 1890s -1930s), collected through archival research into period sheet music, along with Victorian-era sentimental poetry and Benton’s original writing. Songs in the show include: “I’m Just a Rose (in the Devil’s Garden),” “I’ll Pin Another Petal on the Daisy,” and “Soap, the Oppressor.”
The models for Benton’s alter ego include icons of silent and early sound cinema (Mary Pickford, Lillian Gish, The Little Rascals, The Bowery Boys), filmed documents of forgotten vaudeville comedians (the Foy family, Joe Frisco), and vocalists from Eddie Cantor to Ruby Keeler. Writing inTime Out New York, critic and music historian James Gavin (Intimate Nights, Stormy Weather) asks, “What led her to adopt this antique persona? So hauntingly does she inhabit it that you may conclude that Bree Benton is not of this time, nor even this world.”
Scott Brown, Vulture:
I’d recommend a nighttime performance of Poor Baby Bree in I Am Going to Run Away, a dark and quietly demented cabaret of obscure vaudeville songs unearthed and performed, in pitch-perfect periodese, by downtown chanteuse Bree Benton. In fifteen insidious little ditties, Benton — whose voice quivers spectrally across time, like a singing saw captured on a wax cylinder, and whose unsettlingly iron-eyed waif routine combines the creepiest aspects of Garland, Temple, and Helen Kane — explores the tender darkness of turn-of-the-century America: a little bit Meet Me in St. Louis, a little bit Devil in the White City. Benton does absolutely no hand-holding, and Baby Bree, the character, never winks at us: She may sound like a cartoon, but Goddamn it, she really, really, sincerely wants to run away with the circus. This is itself off-putting for modern audiences, and those expecting either broad comedy or strutting cabaret camp will be sorely disappointed. Benton is casting a subtler but stronger spell, one best appreciated in the dead of night, after the circus has left town and all that’s left are snatches of half-forgotten songs on the wind.
David Hajdu, TNR:
I’ve never seen anything like it, as people have been saying on the way out of LaMama for 50 years now. In this case, though, the work is startling not for its radicalism, but for its cheeky, intentional archaism. The show is a gingerly stylized but loving—no, adoring—evocation of a Vaudeville performance from the turn of the last century.
I should emphasize evocation, as opposed to replication, because Baby Bree is a fictive conceit whose power lies in her seeming authenticity. The star of “I’m Going Away,” Bree Benton, performs here (as she has in various settings for at least five years) in the guise of a singing urchin from the cusp of the Victorian and modern eras. She talks and sings in a tough-goil patois that sounds like nothing other than the voice we imagine hearing when we watch the shoeless little roustabouts in silent movies.
At The Club at La MaMa, NYC, through April 29:
“I am a fan of POOR BABY BREE. I love her.” — Lou Reed
“A haunting, deeply touching, spot-on evocation of a moment in the distant theatrical past, yet with a very cool and effortless post-modernist twist. It is also profoundly funny.” — Charles Busch
“Astounding …When I first saw Bree it was like being transported into another era...Her voice, her songs about things people just don’t sing about anymore, her sadness and cleverness — it made me laugh and cry at the same time. What an amazing performer!” — Laurie Anderson
“The most magnificent cabaret act I have ever seen. Submit to the exquisite musical tragedy that is Poor Baby Bree.” — Paul Shaffer
“A peculiar thing of beauty; like being inside a music box from the turn of the last century. Haunting, hip, and unusual.” — Jackie Hoffman
Built around creator Bree Benton’s portrayal of Poor Baby Bree, an archetypal waif, I Am Going to Run Away weaves a tragicomic narrative of innocence and loss around seventeen obscure vaudeville and parlor songs (dating from the 1890s -1930s), collected through archival research into period sheet music, along with Victorian-era sentimental poetry and Benton’s original writing. Songs in the show include: “I’m Just a Rose (in the Devil’s Garden),” “I’ll Pin Another Petal on the Daisy,” and “Soap, the Oppressor.”
The models for Benton’s alter ego include icons of silent and early sound cinema (Mary Pickford, Lillian Gish, The Little Rascals, The Bowery Boys), filmed documents of forgotten vaudeville comedians (the Foy family, Joe Frisco), and vocalists from Eddie Cantor to Ruby Keeler. Writing inTime Out New York, critic and music historian James Gavin (Intimate Nights, Stormy Weather) asks, “What led her to adopt this antique persona? So hauntingly does she inhabit it that you may conclude that Bree Benton is not of this time, nor even this world.”
Scott Brown, Vulture:
I’d recommend a nighttime performance of Poor Baby Bree in I Am Going to Run Away, a dark and quietly demented cabaret of obscure vaudeville songs unearthed and performed, in pitch-perfect periodese, by downtown chanteuse Bree Benton. In fifteen insidious little ditties, Benton — whose voice quivers spectrally across time, like a singing saw captured on a wax cylinder, and whose unsettlingly iron-eyed waif routine combines the creepiest aspects of Garland, Temple, and Helen Kane — explores the tender darkness of turn-of-the-century America: a little bit Meet Me in St. Louis, a little bit Devil in the White City. Benton does absolutely no hand-holding, and Baby Bree, the character, never winks at us: She may sound like a cartoon, but Goddamn it, she really, really, sincerely wants to run away with the circus. This is itself off-putting for modern audiences, and those expecting either broad comedy or strutting cabaret camp will be sorely disappointed. Benton is casting a subtler but stronger spell, one best appreciated in the dead of night, after the circus has left town and all that’s left are snatches of half-forgotten songs on the wind.
David Hajdu, TNR:
I’ve never seen anything like it, as people have been saying on the way out of LaMama for 50 years now. In this case, though, the work is startling not for its radicalism, but for its cheeky, intentional archaism. The show is a gingerly stylized but loving—no, adoring—evocation of a Vaudeville performance from the turn of the last century.
I should emphasize evocation, as opposed to replication, because Baby Bree is a fictive conceit whose power lies in her seeming authenticity. The star of “I’m Going Away,” Bree Benton, performs here (as she has in various settings for at least five years) in the guise of a singing urchin from the cusp of the Victorian and modern eras. She talks and sings in a tough-goil patois that sounds like nothing other than the voice we imagine hearing when we watch the shoeless little roustabouts in silent movies.
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