Expect a Powerful Mixture of the Absurd and the Poignant When ‘Puddles Pity Party’ Plays City Winery Monday

Puddles Pity Party Live at City Winery June 26, 2023, 8:00 P.M.Describing the performer known as “Puddles Pity Party” — who is making his first New York appearance since 2021 at City Winery on Monday — as a “performance artist” is the major understatement of the 21st century. Let’s start by stating the obvious. Puddles is almost six feet, eight inches, and is dressed like a classic early 20th-century Barnum and Bailey clown, in a white pagliacci suit and white pancake makeup, complete with an undersized crown fastened to his clean-shaven head. Throughout his entire performance, we never see his un-made-up face, nor do we ever hear his speaking voice — the only time he opens his mouth during the entire show is to sing. And what he sings is rock and roll-era power ballads, with an occasional nod to songbook standards like “Moon River.” His show is a powerful mixture of the absurd and the poignant. In addition to the circus drag, he enters and exits carrying a suitcase that bears the inscription “Puddles Pity Party” in cartoonish white letters, and, in the other hand, a gas-driven lantern, looking for all the world like Diogenes in search of an honest man. Yet he sings the saddest and most heart-breaking songs ever written. Puddles’s artistry derives from the contrast, the deliberate clash between the very silly and the overly serious.Puddles, who, when offstage, is Michael “Big Mike” Geier, and based at Atlanta, is perhaps the most significant musical act so far to use YouTube as a springboard for a major career. To this day, he is an artist experienced visually, as on videos and live in clubs, rather than on audio-only recordings, even though he has a superb baritone voice and certainly could have been successful as a conventional crooner in a tuxedo. Puddles is also one of several artists to be launched to fame via the 21st century musical phenomenon known as Postmodern Jukebox. Around 2012, I spotted him (he was hard to miss) singing in the Heath at the McKittrick Hotel, around the same time that his video of “Royals” with Postmodern Jukebox started accumulating millions of viral views. Feted by two diminutive female backup singers, Puddles sings the Lourdes song straight ahead, without goofing it up in any way. If you were to listen to the audio track by itself, the major points that would attract your attention are the richness of the voice and the sincerity and earnestness of the interpretation. He and bandleader-pianist Scott Bradlee elevated what was already a first-rate song by Lourdes into a powerful anthem for our time. Puddles regularly posts new videos on his own youtube channel, some of which are, like “Royals” simply direct one-camera documents of the artist in performance, as on the Elvis Presley hit “Suspicious Minds,” accompanied by his own guitar, and Paul Simon’s “The Sounds of Silence” with what seems like an EMO country-and-western band from Polynesia called Tongo Hiti. Other YouTube entries are produced more like MTV videos, in which Puddles sidelines to a pre-recorded vocal, which allows for crosscutting and interesting dramatic possibilities. A particular favorite is David Bowie’s first hit song, “Space Oddity,” in which he essays both roles in the song, the luckless astronaut himself, and the guy on ground control. The video intercuts between the two, distinguishing between with the most minimal visual cues, headphones and a childlike name tag that says “ground control” as one part and a costume shop space helmet in the other.As Puddles, Mr. Geier also has a soft spot for ingenious mashups, famously the combination of “Stairway to Heaven” and the theme from “Gilligan’s Island,” for which he gives credit to Little Roger and the Goosebumps. Even better is a collage created by Gregory Dean Smalley in which he belts “Pinball Wizard” from the Who’s “Tommy” to the melody of “Folsom Prison Blues” by Johnny Cash, which originated as “Crescent City Blues” by Gordon Jenkins. On both of these, Puddles pantomimes playing a prop-gag-clown guitar, while on “Silent Night” he “plays” a prop-gag-clown saxophone. Then there’s “Remember Me.” When everybody first heard this lovely song by Robert Lopez and Kristen Anderson-Lopez in “Coco,” the 2017 modern classic from Pixar, we were immediately dying for a major voice to interpret it. Puddles fulfilled that prophecy three times over, as fully three Puddles figures appear on screen. We start with a Puddles singing in the center of the frame, accompanied by a second Puddles, playing a trombone obligato, on the left side of the screen. After the first chorus, a third Puddles enters on the right screen, which prompts a key change as well as a tempo change into what is sometimes called the song’s “post-chorus.” The words of that post-chorus are: “If you close your eyes and let the music play / Keep our love alive, I’ll never fade away.” He then not only switches tempos and keys, but transitions into a trombone solo on a whole other song, Paul McCartney’s “Let ‘Em In.” The three Puddles Pity Parties then parade out the door and into the sunlight, one playing trombone, the other two stumbling as they try to put their instruments together. When he gets to the end of the first chorus, he sings, “Remember me, although I have to travel far / Remember me, each time you hear a sad … trombone.” It’s supposed to be “guitar” as written, but Puddles makes the change as if surprising himself — as if he just happened to notice that his other self is playing trombone. That miniscule interjection of humor somehow only makes the song sadder, and that’s the whole essence of Puddles Pity Party — all seven feet of him — in a tiny little nutshell.

Expect a Powerful Mixture of the Absurd and the Poignant When ‘Puddles Pity Party’ Plays City Winery Monday

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