The music of Antony and the Johnsons has been known to reduce grown men to tears — men who have done hard time, including former MC5 tough guy Wayne Kramer, have sobbed in Antony’s presence. An audience of work-release prisoners on the set of Steve Buscemi’s recent film Animal Factory was mesmerized by Antony’s performance of his song "Rapture." Women love him too: Laurie Anderson has said of him, "Two words and he has broken your heart." (Her very good friend Lou Reed has performed with Antony, and he in turn can be heard on Lou’s forthcoming solo album Poetry.) Diamanda Galás has pledged her love. Perhaps even more astonishing, both Magnetic Fields co-conspirator LD Beghtol and the underground metal ’zine Terrorizer have basked in Antony’s glory.
The group, who open the Market Theater’s chic "Music at the Market" series this weekend, are a small chamber-pop cabaret act with their own sideshow-like ambiance — their coterie includes the performance artist Johanna Constantine, who looks like Edward Scissorhands’ mutant sister, and Dr. Julia Yasuda, a female-identifying hermaphrodite mathematician. Antony, whom Anderson describes as a "chubby drag queen who wears the most ridiculous flouncy dresses," made the jump from East Village club-kid performance provocateur to torch-song sensation with the help of a New York Festival for the Arts fellowship. He has a hair-raising operatic voice indebted to Lotte Lenya and Nina Simone and a batch of tunes collected on an album, Antony and the Johnsons, and an EP, I Fell in Love with a Dead Boy, both on Brit-goth David Tibet’s Dutro label. The Johnsons include former Dambuilders violinist Joan Wasser; founding Rasputina cellist Julia Kent; drummer Todd Cohen, who plays in the Pink Floyd tribute band the Machine; and bassist Jeff Langton, a veteran of the American Repertory Theatre’s production of Ubu Rock. Like a production of Hedwig and the Angry Inch come to life, Antony’s "Cripple and the Starfish" sounds as if Nick Cave’s Bad Seeds had been hijacked by the spirit of the masochistic love songs written in the early ’60s for the Crystals by Gerry Goffin and Carole King — "I am very happy/So please hit me/I am very happy/So please hurt me."
Slow, deathly somber, blissfully morbid, and beautifully melodramatic, Antony and the Johnsons kick off a month of art song at the Market. Next Thursday, March 28, and Saturday, March 30, poet (and Pulitzer-winning Phoenix classical music editor) Lloyd Schwartz teams up with mezzo-soprano Lynn Torgove for "The Song That Is Irresistible," a program in which Torgove sings the poetry of Elizabeth Bishop set to the music of John Harbison, Margaret Atwood to Andrew Vores, and Emily Dickinson to Aaron Copland, while Schwartz reads poems by Atwood and Bishop. On April 2, actors Alvin Epstein and Beth Anne Cole reprise a program they presented during the Market’s inaugural season last year, "Songs Degenerate and Otherwise," a cabaret featuring works by Kurt Weill, Bertolt Brecht, Hanns Eisler, and Kurt Tucholsky.
In the midst of the Epstein/Cole program, which runs through April 14, the Market will swing to the outer limits for an April 7 program entitled "Noise: The Newest of New Music." Although it’s not necessarily all that new — Throbbing Gristle were doing this when Antony was still in diapers — "Noise" is nonetheless the highest-profile concert yet for an art form whose audiences can usually be measured in the dozens. The headliner is Ron Lessard, who goes by the name Emil Beaulieu and bills himself as the "world’s greatest living noise artist." Which isn’t far off: in the mid ’90s, opening for the Japanese legends Masonna and Merzbow on Lansdowne Street, he stole the show with his signature act, a turntable modified with two extra tonearms that makes an unspeakably brutal racket.
Antony and the Johnsons perform this Friday, March 22, at 10 p.m. and this Saturday, March 23, at 7 and 10 p.m. at the Market Theater, One Winthrop Square in Harvard Square. Tickets are $25. Call (617) 576-0808.
