The Moondog Madrigal Puppet Show

Back by popular demand!

The Charlestown Working Theater presents the musical collaborative An Exciting Event and their wacky puppet musical.

An Exciting Event interweaves the late Louis "Moondog" Hardin's catchy and complex madrigal rounds with their own dazzling menagerie of musical instruments, rhyming couplets, projections, and rowdy crew of recycled-garbage puppets to tell a story of love, education, and a Giant Earthworm.

New: At each show, An Exciting Event will be selling illustrated, limited edition books of the Moondog Madrigal Puppet Show script!

This show performed for a sold-out weekend of performances at the Charlestown Working Theater, February 19-21st, 2010. The premiere of this show occurred in May 2009 at the San Francisco Community Music Center. A performance of the Moondog Madrigal Mini-Puppet Show Teaser was presented at the NYC Moondog Rising Festival in November 2007, where An Exciting Event was joined by Stefan Lakatos, the lone heir to Moondog’s invented instrument: the trimba.

An Exciting Event

An Exciting Event is a band of composer-performers who come together from Boston, MA; New York, NY; St. Paul, MN; Urbana, IL; Mt. Shasta, CA; and Seattle, WA to create, explore and celebrate music and puppetry, employing overlooked materials such as glass bottles, plastic milk jugs, and yard waste; vintage forms such as rounds, iambic couplets, cumulative sentences, and themes and variations; and unconventional systems of tuning, rhythm and communication. The ensemble takes its name from a set of complex and humorous paintings by late Alabama painter, Bill Traylor. Learn more about this group and their projects at www.anexcitingevent.org.

Moondog

American composer, musician, poet, and instrument inventor Moondog was born Louis Hardin in Marysville, Kansas, in 1916. Blind from age 16, he lived for about twenty years (between the late 1940's and mid 1970's) on the streets of Manhattan, dressed in Viking garb and known as "The Viking of 6th Avenue." He composed his upbeat, melodic, contrapuntal, and rhythmically intricate music in Braille, and recorded a series of albums during the 1950's and 1960's for the Prestige and Columbia record labels. His sold and performed his music in the street, along with his whimsical, philosophical rhymed couplets. He lived the last 25 years of his life in Germany, where he wrote and recorded a vast amount of music, much of which still has yet to be transcribed from Braille. He died in 1999.

January 13 - 16, 2011 Thursday at 7pm Friday & Saturday at 8pm Sunday at 2pm $15.00 Thursday and Sunday performances $18.00 Friday and Saturday performances Children under 12: $10.00 for all performances Students and Seniors: $15.00 for all performances Buy tickets online!