The Tiger Lillies Freakshow is a mixture of concert and circus and music theater, directed by Sebastiano Toma.

Plot:
The Tiger Lillies perform songs about a Victorian Freakshow while we see acts from said Freakshow – a snake woman, “Siamese twins”, a juggler, etc. The songs are sometimes thoughtful meditation about human nature – as Toma puts it very nicely:

“Where is the freak in us? How big or how small does one have to be to  understand this world and be part of it? Are six arms enough to comfort someone? How many hearts must a woman have to fulfil her destiny? Is our palm big enough to hold everything we want? How many red ball noses does one have to wear to be funny?”

But sometimes they’re also very funny hymns to Lobotomy.

I liked the show, the music was great and they really captured the aesthetics of the time. Unfortunately the venue (the Gasometer in Vienna) was catastrophic.

The music really was wonderful. I didn’t know it before (though I did love their album with Leningrad), but I liked discovering it in this setting. Unfortunately the sound at the Gasometer is very bad, which made understanding the lyrics a little hard sometimes, but that’s okay – it would have been a bit much to take it all in at once anyway.

What was catastrophic though was the seating arrangement. Usually, the Gasometer is a concert venue where people are standing. For this show, they just put chairs into the hall. Unfortunately, they did not factor in the changed height and now the stage wasn’t high enough or the seats were too low to actually see everything happening on stage, which was especially bad for everything happening below the hip. I practically only ever saw the toes of the contortionist.

But apart from the venue, the show was great. I loved the design of the stage and the costumes. Sebastiano Toma really knows how to set the mood; the acts and the songs go together nicely and the show never lags.

The acts were also very nice, especially the dancing and the trapeze number. The juggling was fine, just not very exciting. [Not that I could do any better but you know what I mean.]

After the whole Evelyn&Evelyn story, I wanna say something about the political part of the show. Of course, 19th century freakshows are exercises in exploitation and you can hardly direct a show that uses these aesthetics that doesn’t somehow touch on these topics. That said, I didn’t feel that the subject was really broached here – neither for better, nor for worse.

Summarising: Very worth seeing, just not at the Gasometer.