Wild Songs & Naked Souls (An Evening of Music & Poetic License)

Actress and director Gloria Gifford is a genius. She delivers a night filled with romance offering the most tender, affectionate and saucy poetry on love throughout the ages.  Every actor in her company shone brightly in his/her light emitting the words written by the great wordsmiths. It’s wonderful to imagine Lord Byron and John Keats exchanging words with Gone with the Wind writer Margaret Mitchell (Leana Chavez) and Voltaire (Bell Stevenson). It would be a literary explosion if anyone of them met.

A little bit of Cole Porter, Napoleon and Simone De Beauvoir adds some more excitement to the mix. A mini soap opera ensues with writer Edmond Rostand’s magnum opus Cyrano de Bergerac with Billy Budinich and Chris Jones act as the love-hungry Christian, respectively, with Bill Stevenson as Cyrano  and Lucy Walsh as the hard-to-get Roxanne. She becomes disappointed that Christian can’t convey his passion in person as he does in his letters. With help from Cyrano, Christian seduces Roxanne by the window and his words cause her to pass out.

Even God’s pride and joy, Adam (wonderfully played by Jeffrey Casciano) is perplexed as to why and how Eve was made from his rib. Clad in nothing but a yellow strategically placed, a tattoo of the crucifix on his arm, Adam describes how the snake was actual Eve. That’s a very interesting theory!

The rest of the evening introduces George Sand, Franz Kafka, Isadora Duncan and much more with the power to seduce, embrace and share a memorable evening that will continue long after the curtain closes.

Wild Songs & Naked Souls (An Evening of Music & Poetic License) plays until Sunday, May 18th.  Saturdays at 8 p.m. and Sundays at 7:30 p.m., T.U. Studios located at 10943 Camarillo Street in North Hollywood.  For tickets, call (310) 366-5505 or reserve online at www.tix.com