For those who have asked: the lyrics to the theme from the Under the Poppy trailer, “In the Dark.” [Watch it with a click on the right.]

If it’s fun you’re after, companionship and laughter, you can always find it in the dark!

Days are long in earthly life, what with the lucre, war, and wife,

So men must seek their pleasures in the dark.

A bit of smoke

A bit of drink

A slippery bit

Of something pink …

You’ll find what you are after in the dark.

For who’s to judge and who’s to see what’s fun for you or fun for me

As we mingle our pleasures in the dark?

For life’s a show that can be cruel

And passion often plays the fool

Together, we will break the rules!

And love what we are given in the dark.

[Music, composition and performance: Joe Stacey.  Lyrics: KK.]

Trying to decide what to read at the Under the Poppy events-to-be is difficult, but fun, but difficult.  But … fun.  Do you know that game, the monkeys-in-the-barrel game, where one monkey links to the next in a rising, whorling chain (not unlike human DNA, come to think of it. Discuss)?  This story is like that, one event spooling and curling into the next, so as to make it a bit of a challenge to pick a stand-alone segment that can be heard with pleasure (I hope!).

I love going to readings, love being read to: that primal nourishment of the transmitted word.  Why is it, once we grow up, we so seldom have the opportunity to hear words read aloud, to lose ourselves in a story told?

Let’s do it.  Wear your lacy veil, or your top hat; I’ll wear mine.  Bring your receptive ears and warm imagination, and I’ll give you my very best. Let’s make a world together in the lamplight glow.

Excellent salon discussion led by gallery director Monica Bowman at the Butcher’s Daughter yesterday, where what makes a man a man – what signifies as masculinity; how one becomes (or remains) a man in both art and life; MC Hammer and those balloon pants – and Grace Jones! – was the topic. If art is, or can be, an external organ of perception, both visual and emotional, shaping what it sees and presents – represents, in that sense – then a depiction of a man with a beard, a man in a dress, carries that doubled influence.

And afterward, Cynthia Grieg and I talked about women in pants, another kind of representation. To become something, do we dress the part first? To try on identity and see how closely the mask becomes us?

Theatre has always known this, of course, intuitively and externally. So on to Don Giovanni.

… and Don Giovanni, and me, happily, this Sunday.  Lyrical, lurid, lush, and wrapped like the best bonbon ever in the gorgeous Detroit Opera House: this is going to be wonderful research.

One thing theatre can do so well was well done at Planet Ant the other night: a table, a tablecloth, a man who knows exactly how a bird moves, a face so expressive it is a world unto itself — voila, you are there, in another person’s life.

And well done, too, with wit and zesty abundance: I can’t wait to see what Monika Essen has done with Audrey II and that wild little shop. EncoreMichigan says that “Milarch and Essen have taken a different approach to the character that will have theater and Little Shop fans talking (and taking sides) for years to come,” and I have no doubt of that at all. See you in the dark.

(I know; I’m sorry, I just couldn’t help it.)  Watched Lovesick last night, an interesting doc about Cirque du Soleil’s smoldering Vegas extravaganza, Zumanity. The backstage angst and drama, the director’s mounting pique and fatigue, the costumes, oh baby, the costumes!  A nod is as good as a wink, unless you prefer your eyes wide open.

We are over the moon to announce that Under the Poppy has found its theatrical home: the Chrysler Black Box Theatre in the Detroit Opera House, home of the Michigan Opera Theatre, in Detroit.

Presenting our show in this venue – the main theatre is host to, oh, Tosca, Don Giovanni, Ballet Hispanico, Pilobolus, among many many others – is beyond exciting  The Chrysler Black Box Theatre sits atop the Opera House, looking at Broadway below with the splendid gaze of a sleek downtown beauty, which she is.  And now she’s ours.

The show is slated for February 2011.  Stay tuned for a great many more details, and start lacing up that corset now ….

… like Mr. Punch and Mr. Loudermilk, who keep tipping the top hat, leaping off into the void, loving “free freedom” (thank you, M. Rimbaud), tossing that love into the air with a juggler’s brio and catching it on the fly.  Do something mad today, go play, in honor of yourself and of all the sweet, sly, fierce, ungovernable April fools.