Elegies For Angels, Punks and Raging Queens
Elegies For Angels, Punks and Raging Queens is a music cycle. The music was written by Janet Hood, the lyrics and intermediate texts were written by Bill Russell. The piece consists of songs and monologues that deal with AIDS and HIV. It tell relatives, friends and the victims themselves on how to deal with their illness. The songs and monologues dealing with love, death, despair and joy of life, the stories are told in different styles of music. The entire piece was inspired by the NAMES Project AIDS Memorial Quilt and Edgar Lee Masters.
The musical was written in the late 80s and was originally referred to as " The Quilt ". It was first listed in the 1989 Ohio Theatre in Soho in New York City. There it was first presented with the new title. As of February 1990, it ran off- off- Broadway in the East Village. In 1992, it was listed for a few months at the King's Head Theatre in London. In June 1993, then moved to the Criterion Theatre in London's West End to, but remained there only a little over a month.
" Elegies " was then performed again in New York City on 2 April 2001 in the prison Theatre of Fashion Institute of Technology as a benefit event for the Momentum AIDS Project. The cast for this event consisted of various well-known artists, such as Alice Ripley, Emily Skinner, Brian d' Arcy James, Christopher Durang, Mario Cantone, Joe Piscopo and Norm Lewis. The concert was recorded and released as a soundtrack of Fynsworth Alley in 2001.
In addition to performances in New York and London, the piece including in Australia, Germany and Israel was performed. In Germany, the musical was brought in 2007, in many places on the stage, for example, on 26 February 2007 with the participation of many well-known musical performers in the Hamburg Schmidt Theater. These included Ethan Freeman, Charlotte Heinke, Nik Breidenbach, Valerie Link, Susi Banzhaf, Monika Julia Dehnert, Volkan Baydar, Jörg Neubauer and Marc Seitz. Also on 28 October of the same year was listed Elegies: As part of a fundraising event for AIDS Help Ethan Freeman, Christian Alexander Müller, Volkan Baydar and Bernie Blanks played.