DAKAI ROCKS NATIONAL UNDERGROUND

Not talking about a new group of subversives, but an exciting duo from Williamsburg Brooklyn creating music in New York City. Definitively not your pre-teen's goth band. Though influences of acts like Nine Inch Nails won't go unnoticed, unlike NIN, DAKAI seduces with a feather touch rather than a jackhammer.

The set kicked off with a slow driving "Heaven and Hell" and never looked back. The stunning Leela provided power packed vocals with a blend of raw sensuality and skill while Dirty Soul supplied everything else in an electronic repertoire wall of sound masterfully constructed.

Sultry, haunting lyrics and melody of "Little Boy" bounced off the stone basement vault of this Lower East Side performance hole transporting its audience deep into the twisted mind and dirty soul of a boy hanging out in some graveyard looking for thrills.

Hypnotic numbers like "The Uncertainty Principle" and "Shocking" cast a spell that can calm raging madness or incite a riot in your psyche.

The show ended with an apocalyptic "Motherland Blues" with its reverberating question of "Whose God is gonna save us now?"

The band plans on playing future dates at venues in our area. Stay tuned for details and definitely check them out.

http://www.myspace.com/dakaimusic

DAKAI TONIGHT

You may not have heard of them yet...but DAKAI is coming. Tonight at National Underground 159 E Houston Street at 9:30 PM the first NYC performance of this exciting new duo....DAKAI.

COME WITH ME...

March: Out Like a Hunter Colt

March was a break out month for theater going. We began with a deconstruction of Tennessee Williams by the Wooster Group and a revival of his work by the Roundabout, Vieux Carre, and The Milk Train Doesn’t Stop Here Anymore respectively, sandwiched between was HERE and the experimental Feeder: A Love Story (pun intended). We followed those up with Beautiful Burnout and Room by the SITI Company, not finished by a long shot we then saw CSC’s Double Falsehood and finally War Horse at Lincoln Center.

This past month of theater, surely enough to make any Greek proud, was a most intense and delightfully rewarding experience.

War Horse, being the most spectacular effort with special emphasis on the word “spectacle”, is a performance which needs to be seen to be truly explained. Suffice to say it is not beyond my power to describe, yet I would rather you see it for yourself. With such notables in attendance the night we went as Donald Rumsfeld and Betsy Gottbaum and that announcer guy Allan Kalter from the Letterman Show, we certainly were in some high profile company. Rummy sat in the first row center on the aisle. I didn’t notice him until the second act started, but by the end of the play, he was weeping too.

Let me just say this work does not judge or glorify war, but depicts it in all its savage and heroic complexity of moral ambiguity. War is hell for man and beast. Beast proves more praiseworthy than man does by the end.

From our near vantage point we suffered some obscured sight lines, but we were treated to intimate performances by the enormous cast and got to see the wires and woodcraft of some amazing puppets. War Horse will move anyone who loves equestrian arts.

April now begins cool and clear. It is a cruel month, “breeding Lilacs out of the dead land mixing memory and desire.” As Poetry month kicks off hopefully this tragic fire season will come to an end in New York City.

War Horse plays through June.