Piano Tales
Written, Performed, & Composed by James Harrison Monaco and Jerome Ellis
Directed by Andrew Scoville
Production Design by Marika Kent
James and Jerome’s work is a collision of live music and literary storytelling. Some call it experimental, they call it the oldest art-form in the world.
Piano Tales celebrates the raw core of their style – new tales that feel like old ones, told with just a piano and their acrobatic storytelling and musicianship. Emperors, slaves, nuns, traitors. These tales are spectacles the audience sees in their own minds.
Running Time: 1 hour
James and Jerome make theater that feels like reading a modern novel. They perform live music that evokes narrative action. They do all this at the same time, in such a way that the audience sees spectacles in their mind.
“Telling stories can be a tricky act, especially more literary ones, as they can fall into the trap where the words just don’t sound as nice spoken aloud as they would sitting on a page to be read. Luckily, the duo James Harrison Monaco & Jerome Ellis (or more simply, James & Jerome) manages to escape this trap entirely. Their tales run the gamut, going from from more casual quips to poetic poignance in a matter of minutes and transforming a simple stage into space for transformation using only words and music.” ~ Cassidy Dawn Graves, Bedford & Bowery