There’s an old chant from protests and Pride marches: “We’re here, we’re queer, get used to it.”
Taylor Mac’s new show “Bark of Millions,” coming to UC Berkeley’s Zellerbach Hall courtesy of Cal Performances, illustrates that LGBTQ+ people have always been here and always will.
“It’s reverse conversion therapy,” Mac says. “We’re trying to make the audience more queer, not less queer.”
Subtitled “A Parade Trance Extravaganza for the Living Library of the Deviant Theme,” the four-hour show consists of one song for every year since the very first Pride March in 1970.
“I say from the First Pride March, but people started saying since Stonewall because they’re so close to each other,” Mac says. “It’s 54 years since the very first Pride March, and so we have 55 songs, because you gotta have a cherry on top.”
Each inspired by different queer figures in history and mythology, the all-new songs in a multiplicity of styles all have lyrics by Mac and music by longtime collaborator Matt Ray.
“I would describe it as a gathering of queer people on a stage, expressing ourselves in the presence of an audience which we hope will feel part of the show, and singing about our queer forebears,” Ray says.
A dazzlingly inventive New York-based performance artist, playwright and MacArthur “Genius” grantee who uses “judy” as a pronoun, Mac is a frequent visitor to the Bay Area and grew up not far away in Stockton.
Mac’s epic theater piece “The Lily’s Revenge” and world premiere drama “Hir” played the Magic Theatre, and other shows such as the more cabaret-style “Taylor Mac’s Holiday Sauce” and “A 24-Decade History of Popular Music” have come to the Curran.
The mammoth “A 24-Decade History of Popular Music” saw Mac performing American popular songs from 1776 to the present over the course of 24 hours in an amazing array of drag costumery by designer Machine Dazzle. Ray was the show’s musical director and created bold new arrangements for its 246 songs.
Performed nonstop in 2016 at St. Ann’s Warehouse in Brooklyn, the original production become a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and was immortalized in a two-hour HBO documentary. In 2017 Mac performed it at the Curran broken up into four six-hour shows.
Unlike that earlier show, Mac doesn’t sing all the songs in “Bark of Millions” but shares the spotlight with a host of other performers. But in a way, “Bark of Millions” is a direct descendent of the “24-Decade” project.
“We were learning all the American music we could find, trying to decide what we wanted to put in the show, and there were hardly any songs about queer existence, about queer figures, about anything about our community,” Ray says. “And we felt like, well, if it’s not there, maybe we should write it.”
In the meantime Mac and Ray collaborated as lyricist/librettist/star and composer on “The Hang,” a 2022 jazz opera about the last days of Socrates.
The two have been working together ever since composer and mutual friend Rachelle Garniez brought Ray in as musical director for “The Lily’s Revenge” in 2009.
“He’s my brother in all of this at this point,” Mac says. “When you play piano and you’re a musical director, you’re often treated like a sideman, but there’s just nobody who understands the many styles and forms and genres of music that Matt does in the authentic way that he does, because he’s just played it for so many years for so many people in so many different circumstances. He has this range that is uncanny, and the music is so beautiful.”
“Bark of Millions” premiered at Australia’s Sydney Opera House last year, and it comes to Berkeley direct from a five-night run in New York earlier this February.
“It’s not really finished in the grand scheme of things, because the idea is that it’s not just a four-hour concert,” Mac says. “Every year we’re going add at least another song to the show. The idea is that it just keeps growing and growing, and maybe in a decade or two, we’ll pass it on to somebody else to continue it.”
That’s “bark” as in boat, not the sound a dog makes.
“Bark of Millions is an ancient Egyptian myth about Ra, a Sun god who is a genderqueer,” Mac says. “It’s this mythical boat that Ra sails around the earth bringing the sun every day. Every night they do battle with the serpent which is an aspect of chaos, and then they arrive victorious the next day, pulling the sun with them. Ra is one of the first gods in human history, and a lot of people in ancient Egyptian times decided that the great god that they would worship would be a god that is all genders.”
It’s certainly not lost on Mac that “Bark of Millions” arrives amid a newly revived and coordinated flood of homophobic and transphobic political rhetoric and legislation across the United States.
“I’ve just done this big thing about history in America, and one of the things that became super clear to me is that history doesn’t repeat, but it rhymes,” Mac says. “And so in no way, shape or form does it surprise me that it’s two steps forward, one step back, because you see it again and again and again and again throughout history. I think that’s why I’m interested in the sun metaphor. For centuries we’ve been doing this thing, but we keep arriving victorious.”
Contact Sam Hurwitt at shurwitt@gmail.com, and follow him at Twitter.com/shurwitt.
‘BARK OF MILLIONS’
By Taylor Mac and Matt Ray, presented by Cal Performances
When: 7 p.m. Feb. 23-24, 3 p.m. Feb. 25
Where: Zellerbach Hall, UC Berkeley
Tickets: $42-$158; www.calperformances.org
