OZ Arts Nashville

Taylor Mac's Holiday Sauce... Pandemic!

Rent On Demand through January 2, 2021

Purchase an on-demand ticket to receive your exclusive watch link in your OvationTix email confirmation. For assistance, please email info@ozartsnashville.org.

Join the most subversive event of the yuletide season! Holiday Sauce… Pandemic! blends music, film, burlesque, and random acts of fabulousness to reframe the songs you love and the holidays you hate. 2020 Ibsen Award winner and MacArthur Fellow Taylor Mac (who uses “judy” as a gender pronoun) joins longtime collaborators — designer Machine Dazzle, music director Matt Ray, and producers Pomegranate Arts — to create a virtual experience celebrating the holidays in all of their dysfunction. There is more to the holidays than rampant capitalism and gift giving, and in Taylor’s world, creativity and imagination are their own spirituality. Judy’s cathartic spell ultimately reminds us of the collective power of our chosen families — a message that rings true in such a bittersweet holiday season. This dazzling, and at times shocking, takedown of the sentimentality of the holidays celebrates and rails against Christmas as calamity.

This presentation is recommended for ages 16+ due to profanity and sexual content.

Conceived and Performed by

TAYLOR MAC

Executive Producer

LINDA BRUMBACH

Associate Producer

ALISA E. REGAS

Co-Produced by

POMEGRANATE ARTS and NATURE’S DARLINGS

Music Director / Arranger

MATT RAY

Set and Costume Design by

MACHINE DAZZLE

Production Director

JEREMY LYDIC

Make Up Design by

ANASTASIA DURASOVA

Taylor Mac’s Holiday Sauce…Pandemic! was commissioned by The International Ibsen Festival, The Norwegian Ministry of Culture, and The National Theatre of Oslo with additional support from OZ Arts Nashville, Artpark-Lewiston, NY, ASU Gammage at Arizona State University, Berliner Festspiele, UCLA’s Center for the Art of Performance, Curran San Francisco, Firstworks/Brown Arts Initiative, The Guthrie Theater, The Hopkins Center for the Arts at Dartmouth, Live Arts Miami, Park Avenue Armory, Seattle Theatre Group and On The Boards, Stanford Live at Stanford University, Teatros del Canal Madrid, TO Live, UtahPresents, and Wexner Center of the Arts at the Ohio State University.

Jaidynn-Fierce-Christmas

SPECIAL THANKS

OZ Arts would like to give a standing ovation to local Queen and RuPaul’s Drag Race alumna Jaidynn Fierce for hosting our premiere afterparty on Zoom. We would also like to thank Wratchet Wreaths for providing our “Holiday Lewk” contest grand prize. Congratulations to our winners!

 

ABOUT TAYLOR MAC

Taylor Mac—who uses “judy” (lowercase sic unless at the start of a sentence, just like a regular pronoun), not as a name but as a gender pronoun—is a playwright, actor, singer-songwriter, performance artist, director and producer. Judy’s work has been performed in hundreds venues including on Broadway and at New York’s Town Hall, Lincoln Center, Celebrate Brooklyn, and Playwrights Horizons, as well as London’s Hackney Empire and The Barbican, D.C.’s Kennedy Center, Los Angeles’s Royce Hall and Theater at the Ace Hotel (through UCLA’s Center for the Art of Performance), Chicago’s Steppenwolf Theatre, the Sydney Opera House, The Melbourne Festival (Forum Theater), Stockholm’s Sodra Theatern, Spoleto Festival, and San Francisco’s Curran Theater and MOMA. Judy is the author of many works of theater including, Gary, A Sequel to Titus Andronicus, The Fre, A 24-Decade History of Popular Music, Hir, The Walk Across America for Mother Earth, Comparison is Violence, The Lily’s Revenge, The Young Ladies Of, Red Tide Blooming, The Be(a)st of Taylor Mac, Cardiac Arrest or Venus on a Half-Clam, The Face of Liberalism, Okay, Maurizio Pollini, A Crevice, and The Hot Month and the soon to be premiered play, Prosperous Fools and The Hang. Sometimes Taylor acts in other people’s plays (or co-creations). Notably: Shen Teh/Shui Ta in The Foundry Theater’s production of Good Person of Szechwan at La Mama and the Public Theater, in the City Center’s Encores production of Gone Missing, Puck/Egeus in the Classic Stage Company’s A Midsummer’s Night Dream, and in the two-man vaudeville, The Last Two People On Earth opposite Mandy Patinkin and directed by Susan Stroman. 

Mac is the 2020 Ibsen Award winner, a MacArthur Fellow, a Pulitzer Prize Finalist for Drama, a Tony Award® nominated playwright, and the recipient of multiple awards including the Kennedy Prize for Drama Inspired by American History, a NY Drama Critics Circle Award, a Doris Duke Performing Artist Award, a Guggenheim, the Herb Alpert in Theater, the Peter Zeisler Memorial Award, the Helen Merrill Playwriting Award, 2 Bessies, 2 Obies, a Helpmann, and an Ethyl Eichelberger Award.  An alumnus of New Dramatists, judy is currently a New York Theater Workshop Usual Suspect and the Resident playwright at the Here Arts Center.

ABOUT MACHINE DAZZLE

Machine Dazzle has been dazzling stages via costumes, sets, and performances since his arrival in New York in 1994. Credits include Julie Atlas Muz’s I Am The Moon And and You Are The Man On Me (2004), Big Art Group’s House Of No More (2006), Justin Vivian Bond’s Lustre (2008) and Re:Galli Blonde (2011), Chris Tanner’s Football Head (2014), Soomi Kim’s Change (2015), Pig Iron Theater’s I Promised Myself To Live Faster (2015), Bombay Ricky (Prototype Festival 2016), Opera Philadelphia’s Dito and Aeneus (2017) and Spiegleworld’s Opium (Las Vegas 2018). With Taylor Mac, Machine has collaborated on several projects including The Lily’s Revenge (2009), Walk Across America For Mother Earth (2012) and the Pulitzer Prize-Nominated A 24-Decade History of Popular Music (2016-Present). Conceptualist-as-artist meets DIY meets “glitter rhymes with litter,” Machine was a co-recipient the 2017Bessie Award for Outstanding Visual Design and the winner of a 2017 Henry Hewes Design Award.

HONOR YOUR ELDER

Part of the mission of Taylor Mac’s Holiday Sauce, the Honor Your Elder initiative shines a spotlight on LGBTQ Elders who have impacted their communities. OZ Arts is proud to honor legendary leader Joseph Interrante, who will join the ranks of Holiday Sauce royalty during the December 12 livestream. Do you have a special LGBTQ Elder in your life? Share their photo and story on social media, tag producer @pomegranatearts, and use hashtag #HonorYourElder to take part!
ABOUT JOSEPH INTERRANTE
Joseph Interrante has been active in progressive LGBTQ and HIV/AIDS issues and programs for more than 40 years, in Boston, MA, Cleveland, OH, and Nashville, TN. In 1994, Interrante became the first openly gay director of a non-profit organization in Nashville and the first HIV-positive Director of an HIV/AIDS Organization in Tennessee.  During his 25-year tenure with Nashville CARES, the agency created Brothers United, the first HIV prevention program designed by and for Black same gender-loving men, and My House, a one-stop health and wellness center serving gay, bisexual and queer men regardless of HIV status. Interrante also advocated for changes in federal HIV policy that increased resources to end the HIV epidemic in Tennessee and the South as a whole.  For these and other efforts, Interrante received the HRC Nashville Equality Award in 2014. Since his retirement from CARES in 2019, Interrante has worked to increase the visibility of and support for older (50+) LGBTQ adults in Middle Tennessee, most recently through Nashville Pride’s “Community Visioning” project.

PRESS

“Mac casts a cathartic spell…for all those who find caroling, eggnog and enforced family visits destabilizing.” — LA Times

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