The New Orleans Bingo! Show
02-22-2009
10pm
@ One Eyed Jack?s

Beginning in humble circumstances playing to the rear end of a fried
chicken shack, traveling the far reaches of the world from the U.S. to
the Continent to the corners of the Far East and landing right back
where they started in the storied and seedy streets of the French
Quarter, the New Orleans Bingo! Show remains a curious spectacle, a
thrilling phenomenon and one of the very finest entertainments on the
theatrical stage today.

Dressed in black, white and red like the leering faces on a good poker
hand, the Bingo! Show is a multimedia stage experience that includes
original black-and-white silent films, aerialists, dancers, ingénues,
clowns, audience interaction, bingo games, slapstick comedy and shady
characters who remind you that every stage door opens into a dark alley.

Ringleader ? or ringmaster ? Clint Maedgen, a Louisiana native and
sixteen-year New Orleans resident, writes love songs to the bohemian
beauty of downtown New Orleans with heartbreaking purity and
unimpeachable chops; his songs swell with tenderness and crackle with
sinister menace in equal parts. Rounded out with occasional upright
bass, organ, musical saw, theremin, siren, pantomime, flashlight,
found percussion and suspicious behavior, the band is a Brechtian
cabaret funneled through New Orleans' Ninth Ward via the noir
surrealism of Twin Peaks.

In recent years, The New Orleans Bingo! Show has forged a deep
involvement with the New Orleans traditional jazz institution the
Preservation Hall Jazz Band? touring with them, joining the show and
working with the band to update, twist and preserve the unique quality
that is New Orleans style showmanship.

But as in the finest dime museums, sideshows and collections of
oddities since the dawn of vaudeville, seeing is believing. So step up
to the ticket booth, surrender a nominal sum and allow yourself to be
astonished, amazed and amused by America's best-loved musical gameshow
cabaret ? The New Orleans Bingo! Show.