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THE UP STAIRS LOUNGE FIRE Royd Anderson’s documentary about the fire at the Up Stairs Lounge premieres on Cox Cable channel 4.
The 27-minute film reviews the fire, reexamines the arson investigation and includes interviews with eyewitnesses.
The documentary airs at 8 p.m. and 10 p.m. Monday, June 24; 1 p.m. Tuesday, June 25; and 6 p.m. Wednesday, June 27.
40TH ANNIVERSARY UP STAIRS LOUNGE MEMORIAL The City of New Orleans has recognized Monday, June 24 as the 40th anniversary of the Up Stairs Lounge fire. Events include a lecture by artist Skylar Fein and author Clayton Delery at the Williams Research Center at 3 p.m., a jazz funeral at 4:15 p.m., a blessing at St. Anna’s Episcopal Church at 4:30 p.m. and a cocktail party at Cafe Lafitte in Exile at 5 p.m. Visit www.nolapride.org for details.
people expect when they walk in,” Self adds. “There are things left unresolved. There are things left unsaid. It’s going to be provocative to some people. If people are expecting a pageant of a memorial service essentially done on stage, that’s not what this is. It will be challenging. But finally, people will understand why I wrote it the way I did and what it’s calling for, what it’s hoping for.” Self, who lives outside Los Angeles, cast actors there for three workshop productions held in February in the San Francisco area. “I would send out the hardest piece in the show,” he says. “Half of my people who were interested disappeared. ‘Sanctuary’ has got weird harmonies, it’s atonal. The rest of the songs are these nice ballads. I figured I could find good actors; I wanted to find singers who could handle the material.” In the workshop version, some characters played multiple roles. All those actors will perform in the New Orleans premiere, but there are no doubled roles. The rest of the cast includes several Los Angeles actors and New Orleanian Jeffery Roberson (aka Varla Jean Merman). The live band features New Orleans musicians, and Self is working with local technical staff as well. Following the opening run, there will be a benefit performance on June 29 in Los Angeles. Where it goes from there is yet to be determined. Asked if he sees it in the same vein as other dramas created in response to crises — such as Larry Kramer’s The Normal Heart, about the early lack of response in New York to the HIV epidemic, or The Laramie Project, a play about the murder of Matthew Shepard, a young gay man — Self offers a different vision. “I was very compelled by Corpus Christi,” he says. “It’s a play about the life of Jesus, but it is set in Corpus Christi, Texas. This was in the 1990s and it was protested. People wouldn’t put it on, but it still has a life, and it would go from town to town, and church to church – very, very progressive churches. People wouldn’t put it on because it can be very irreverent. I was inspired by the activism and just the existence of a piece like that and its continuing life. My prayer for Upstairs — my hope — is that it will have a similar life. “Everyone is like, ‘Oh, Wayne, we’ll see you on Broadway,’” he says. “I am like, ‘No. Have you been to Broadway?’ But to have a life where it can go from community theater to community theater and have the story continually told — that would be a great way to live up to the mission that I have set out for myself.”
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in the musical, which blends fact and fiction. Self uses several actual names; some characters are composites that incorporate information from multiple victims and survivors; others are fictional. The songs are mostly ballads sung by the ensemble, which suits the Up Stairs well, since it was popular as a place to sing and dance, where some patrons staged short farcical dramas and drag performances. “When I first heard about the fire … songs started to come,” Self says. “Songs started to come pretty quickly, at least initially. I started writing them down. But I didn’t think I was ready to take on the material. The time wasn’t ripe yet.” Self wrote a musical that was performed at the San Francisco chapter of the MCC. Wise Up! is a show-tunesy version of the Christmas story told by three drag queens, Gold, Frankincense and Myrrh. But Self knew he needed more experience to handle the Up Stairs lounge story. He entered a masters program in musical composition and theater. There, he wrote another musical before finishing Upstairs. Cadillac is a country- and Western-accented musical about coming out in a small town in the South. It’s a serious drama about a complicated relationship, but not as somber as what lies at the heart of his new project. Upstairs has strong religious imagery, and the work deals with complicated people and internalized homophobia. Redemption is an issue for one character conflicted about his identity, having grown up gay in the Bible Belt. “There is stuff that’s gay-specific in the play,” Self says. “But it’s about people who are told that redemption is not possible for them. Or that it would mean changing their sexuality — how they struggle for redemption. How does a person who is told, ‘Well, no, you can’t. You are broken. You are not OK in the sight of God’ — how does that person struggle for redemption if they receive those messages enough? But gay people aren’t the only people who are told that. “The narrative I put forth is not necessarily the narrative
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