The Park

Robert Ashley

Cathode Cinema joins 2220 Arts + Archives to present a special Friday night screening of the full run of Robert Ashley's classic TV opera, Perfect Lives! 

Three hours in duration (a typical opera length!), we are making it highly digestible with two intermissions across the seven acts, with the bar open, popcorn popping, and snacks!

Mimi Johnson of Lovely Music, and Robert Ashely's partner, has given permission to Cathode to screen this marvelous, innovative epic of American theater and cinema, once called "the most influential music/theater/literary work of the 1980s."

**Description**

"At the center of <i>Perfect Lives</i> is the hypnotic voice of Robert Ashley. His continuous song narrates the events of the story and describes a 1980's update of the mythology of small town America. Perfect Lives is populated with myriad characters revolving around two musicians — "R", the singer of myth and legend, and his friend, Buddy, "The World's Greatest Piano Player". They have come to a small town in the Midwest to entertain at the Perfect Lives Lounge. As Robert Ashley describes in the opera synopsis, "they fall in with two locals to commit the perfect crime, a metaphor for something philosophical: in this case, to remove a sizable about of money from The Bank for one day (and one day only) and let the whole world know that it was missing."

The eloping couple, Ed and Gwyn, the old people at the home, the sheriff and his wife (Will and Ida) who finally unravel the mystery, and Isolde who watches the celebration of the changing of the light at sundown from the doorway of her mother's house are some of the characters who journey through the seven episodes of the opera.

Derived from a colloquial idiom, Perfect Lives transforms familiar material into an elaborate metaphor for the rebirth of the human soul. It has been called a comic opera about reincarnation."  (Lovely Music)



This is an age 21+ event

Artist

Robert Ashley

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