Chanteuse, drag artist, and masterful performer Taylor Mac returned to the Bay Area for a pair of shows, one at Stanford last week, and a new concert event at the Curran on Friday.
Almost a decade ago, Taylor Mac brought his brilliantly epic 24-Decade History of Popular Music to the Curran, wowing the limited audience that had the privilege of seeing it. Spread over four days on two weekends (the show has only been performed once in a single 24-hour stretch in Brooklyn in 2016), the show devotes an hour to each decade between 1776 and 2016, with Mac weaving in historical storytelling and context with popular music from each decade, and often centering the experiences of minorities or the oppressed in each time period.
The show involved a significant amount of audience participation, from cartoonish war reenactments to revolutionary act in which the rear three rows of the balcony got to trade places with the front three rows of the theater. Mac referred to the piece as "A Radical Faerie Realness Ritual Sacrifice," and discussed the metaphor of experiencing something exhausting and cathartic, collectively, to marches and fundraisers like the AIDS Walk.
After receiving a MacArthur "genius" grant, Mac went on to perform the 24-Decade History in Los Angeles, Melbourne, and elsewhere with the help of music director Matt Ray and costume designer and dresser Machine Dazzle. Mac then took his play Gary: A Sequel to Titus Andronicus, starring Nathan Lane, to Broadway in the spring of 2019.
He returned to SF (just a note: I'm aware that Mac prefers the pronoun "judy" and says his gender is "performer," but as Mac explained to the Washington Post in 2018, especially for journalism clarity's sake, he's "fine with he" and he was just "putting judy out there.") with a Christmas-themed show called Holiday Sauce in 2018, and was back again in February 2024 with his devotional, queer-centric song cycle Bark of Millions — which, unlike his previous work, was performed by a troupe of performers, not just by him.
Like much of his previous work, it was also epic in scale and went on for four hours. He refers to Bark of Millions as, "A Parade Trance Extravaganza for the Living Library of the Deviant Theme."
On Friday, Mac brings the new concert/performance event Tender Heart Revolution to the Curran stage — and tickets are still available.
From the sounds of it, this will be another epic song cycle on historical themes. As Mac tells the Chronicle this week, "I’m moved by the idea that no matter how much they oppress us — how much they try to eliminate us, censor us — we still will arrive victorious every single morning over millions of years and millions of battles. I think of the battles as songs. That’s why I call it ‘Tender Heart Revolution,’ because it’s about bringing your tender heart to this too-tough world.”
And referring to the long history of the Curran — whose backstage and stage door were used in shooting the film All About Eve — Mac tells the Chronicle that in addition to the memories of audiences there from "some of the best shows of my life" he feels connected to the space. "I do believe the stories and the atoms seep into the walls. I feel Judy Garland in here, Tallulah Bankhead, Carol Channing and All About Eve."
Mac donned a suit and tie and woke up early last week to appear on KTVU's morning program, on which he talked about the show he was participating in at Stanford on October 30, which was a 100th birthday celebration for the late queer poet Allen Ginsburg as well as a 90th birthday celebration for the composer Philip Glass.
He also promoted the publication of the book he's made from Bark of Millions and its songs, saying, "Curiosity is the means to liberation. When I think, 'Oh, I want to learn about something' then I just dive into it. I wanted to learn about queer history, so I wrote 50 songs about queer people throughout history."
He adds, "The universe is always singing, and it's our purpose on earth to harmonize with the universe."
Tender Heart Revolution is also being performed Sunday at Seattle's Moore Theater.
