Playwright Richard Foreman’s theatrical adaptation of John Zorn’s original Astronome score comes over like a surrealist synthesis of the videos for New Order’s True Faith and Dimmu Borgir’s The Sacrilegious Scorn if they were directed by David Lynch circa Dune. It’s a wild trip, eschewing any narrative for a hazy reverie full of cryptic pseudo-sexual gestures and Gnostic ritual, performed by a hellion brood of bizarre, but wonderfully costumed, players.
Zorn’s splatter-core opera – belched out in a venomous gush by the trio of Mike Patton, Trevor Dunn and Joey Baron – is only occasionally interrupted, by an eerily omniscient voice (the voice of these people’s God?) urging “stage fright”. Such jarring scenarios allow Foreman to offer up covert statements about the precarious nature of everyday life; vulnerable to the unforeseeable.
As a bonus, we get the mini-biopic King Richard, providing insight into Foreman’s delicately unhinged fantasies as he’s interviewed by pre-teen protagonist Emma Bernstein, while filmmaker Henry Hills pitches in some rhythmic, almost trancelike, footage from Foreman’s elaborate 2004 production, King Cowboy Rufus Rules The Universe. Mid-conversation, Foreman embarks upon a strange slow-motion tango that encapsulates the extraordinary essence at his work’s mystical core.
