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Austin360 blogs > Austin Arts: Seeing Things > Archives > 2010 > May > 04 > Entry
Fusebox 2010: John Kelly’s Paved Paradise Redux
There is sweet pleasure in watching one person love another. That’s what watching John Kelly performing as Joni Mitchell feels like: watching a great fan honor a great woman.
Kelly’s “Paved Paradise Redux,” the latest incarnation of the New York-based artist’s drag show about Joni Mitchell, is an always sensitive, sometimes hauntingly dark tribute to Mitchell and fandom. The piece, seen this weekend at the Long Center’s Rollins Theatre, felt like a perfect ending to the ten-day Fusebox Festival.
Kelly’s creates Mitchell from precise attention to quirky details. As he moves through about sixteen of Mitchell’s songs, Kelly mirrors Mitchell’s incredible range, shifting from high-pitch trills to her soothing alto. He wears diaphanous dresses—first white, then blue velvet—that hang from stooped shoulders and trail behind as he meanders in wandering pathways atop leopard-print high heels. These details contribute to a sense his Mitchell is both in the theatre and not. The music and often-hilarious musings between songs often feel poignant, but Kelly has perfected a paradoxical stare for his Mitchell. She gazes past the horizon with such intensity, her gaze turns back on itself, ably reflecting the retrospection and longing in Mitchell’s music.
For all of the love in the show, Kelly traffics in Mitchell’s darkness a great deal, too. Even when Mitchell’s lines (many of them drawn from live concert recordings) could be funny, Kelly cuts off the end of the sentence. His refusal of comedic timing pushes the Mitchell character in a very different direction than the male-to-female drag common in mainstream media today, which so often makes fun of female figures.
Familiarity with Mitchell’s work would be a bonus at the show, but Kelly has developed such a full character that owning the albums isn’t required. Regardless of the size of one’s Mitchell CD library, “Paved Paradise Redux” offers many of the joys of live concert going. “Case of You” is probably one of Mitchell’s best-known songs. Seeing Kelly play it—after he hilariously riffs on the genealogy of the odd instrument—brings out the song’s sexy percussion.
Seeing Kelly as Mitchell also brings out Mitchell’s lyrics differently. “Paved Paradise Redux” illustrates how her poetic words are not just descriptions of the relationships of others, but are about the relationship between a musician and her listeners. Kelly and Mitchell are now friends (the dulcimer he plays in the show was a gift from Mitchell), but as Kelly performs it’s obvious that the lyric he sings early in the show “she comforts him sometimes” describes a much longer relationship between Mitchell and this adoring fan.
Songs come to life in one body,
but they often gain their fullest expression when they come to live in the bodies
and lives of others.
Clare Croft is an American-Statesman freelance arts critic.
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