Life Jacket Theatre Company presents this one-night-only concert of songs showcasing the vibrancy of NYC’s hidden LBGTQ+ community in the 1920s-1930s. With infinite heart, surprising joy, and breathtaking pride, these songs reflect the diverse flourishing queer communities that pulsed beneath the surface of NYC between the two world wars. Pulling from music written over 30 years before Stonewall, this cabaret revives a long-lost songbook of LGBTQ+ voices, many of which have been forgotten or intentionally erased from history.
These songs provide a sneak preview of Life Jacket’s upcoming production of The Gorgeous Nothings, an investigative play that tells the real-life stories of a group of gay men quarantined in the infamous homosexual wing of the city’s former prison on Roosevelt Island.
“The gay world that flourished before World War II has been almost entirely forgotten in popular memory and overlooked by professional historians; it is not supposed to have existed.” – George Chauncey, Gay New York
Directed by Travis Russ, Music Directed by Joe Kinosian, Developed and Presented by Life Jacket Theatre Company, with Performances by Nick Cearley, Kevin Smith Kirkwood, Stephen DeRosa, Devin Ilaw, James Jackson, Jr., Aaron Kaburick, Seth Sikes, Mac Dassatti, Kyle Price, and Benjamin Walker. Beth Kirkpatrick will serve as the Emcee.