2013/2014 SEASON

8 PM, Sat. Sept 21
Raconteurs & Roustabouts: Where Culture & Carnival Collide!
UCPAC's Hamilton Stage, 360 Hamilton St. Rahway, NJ

Tickets: $20.00 general; $15 students. Call 732-499-8226 for tix!
Questions? E-mail raconteurbooks@gmail.com.



R&R 2012; Honor Amongst Thieves.

 

What is R&R? It's folk noir, mad science, southern gothic, luscious lounge, campfire fiction, and circus side show. It's Prairie Home Companion by way of David Lynch and NPR by way of Coney Island. It's a vaudevillean variety show that puts acclaimed writers together with celebrated musicians, award-winning film shorts, and astonishing side show acts. It is, simply put, a night you will never forget!

Featuring the critically acclaimed singer/songwriter Wesley Stace (formerly John Wesley Harding; Self-titled); freakcentric fabulist and macabre monologuist, Clay McLeod Chapman (The Pumpkin Pie Show); artist, writer, and “modern day Moreau,” E.B. Hudspeth (a.k.a. Dr. Spencer Black; The Resurrectionist); Asbury Park folk rocker Arlan Feiles (Weeds Kill the Wild Flowers); kittenish lounge singer Danielle Illario (think twenty-something Eartha); and The Amazing Traveling Circus Side Show with Daniel Danson Hanson (recently featured on the Discovery Channel’s Oddities) and his crew of curiosities. Plus a surprise award-winning international film short. Hosted by Alex Dawson, resident ringmaster for the late and legendary Raconteur (labeled "an avant garde, guerrilla street theater emporium" by The New York Times); Dawson will also be spinning a peculiar piece of Southern cotton set in the sanguinary subculture of rabbit fighting (!).

Wesley Stace (FKA John Wesley Harding)

Books & CDs on sale at event. Additional guests may be added; line-up subject to change.

“With the trembling voice of Vincent Price and the sinister presence of Boris Karloff, Clay McLeod Chapman uses the macabre to explore the humanity of his characters and reveal an almost spiritual side to the horrific." The New York Times

“Disturbingly lovely . . . The Resurrectionist is itself a cabinet of curiosities, stitching history and mythology and sideshow into an altogether different creature. Deliciously macabre and beautifully grotesque.”—Erin Morgenstern, author of The Night Circus

"John Wesley Harding [a.k.a. Wesley Stace] is an Elvis Costello-like singer-songwriter and folk rocker who has released more than a dozen records and is cool enough to have enlisted most of the Decemberists as the backup band on a forthcoming album." The New York Times. "[John Wesley Harding a.k.a. Wesley Stace is] one of the great rock artists of the 90s!" The Los Angeles Times

Note: R&R 2012 photos by Charles Laskowski.

ATCS's Daniel Danson Hanson & his "Big Balls"