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Image by Martin de Arriba

WHAT'S NEW IN CREATIVE

Saundra Lezzenbaum (@saundralezzenbaum) just debuted her one-woman spectacular "Love in Concert" at the Jolly Farmers, Oxford!

 

I am currently workshopping a new play based on my PhD research, titled "Songbird." Here's a short summary.

Inspired by their research on Theater in the Soviet Gulag, Oxford historian J Robertson’s new play "Songbird" weaves together the present-day story of a drag performer facing imprisonment in Putin’s Russia with the fascinating biography of queer Soviet cabaret icon Vadim Kozin, whose tumultuous life took him from the height of stardom in 1930s Moscow to the darkest depths of Stalin’s Gulag in Siberia. Spanning nearly a century and infused with Kozin’s timeless music (in Robertson’s translation), Songbird explores the precarity of queer life as it crashes against the waves of history. At its core, the play confronts us with an important question for our divided and disheartened world: is art — whether it’s spellbinding love songs or “sickening” drag — meant to help us escape our dark realities or can it reveal who we really are?
 

My experience in the performing arts has been an eclectic mix of soul-wrenching dramatic challenges and uproarious comedic joy. 

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From performing my solo show Off-Broadway, to playing Shylock on the boards of Shakespeare's Globe, to improvising full musical comedies, to hosting a love advice show as a middle-aged woman, my creative endeavors have taken me to places beyond even my own wild imagination.

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And I can't wait to see what comes next!

© 2024 by Jake Robertson

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