LGBTQ | Music | Arts & Culture | COVID-19
Screenshot from Scary Times!
A corpse bride walks robotically at the front of the group, arms flying forward in time with the music. Beside her, a zombie Batman lurches to the beat. Vocals soar over the thrum of disco: This is thriller! Thriller night! A skeleton in the second row bows his fluorescent green head. Sunlight breaks through the trees. And no one's gonna save you from the beast about to strike!
Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” makes an appearance in Scary Times!, a surprise Halloween Revue from members of the Connecticut Gay Men’s Chorus (CTGMC). After eight months of Zoom rehearsals and performances turned on their head, members have come together virtually (and briefly, outdoors in person) to lift spirits as anxiety swells around COVID-19 and the upcoming general election. The video is available through Monday Nov. 2.
It is one of multiple Halloween shows across the state, including the New Haven Pride Center’s Halloween bash for LGBTQ+ youth, that have gone virtual. As the state re-enters Phase 2 reopening guidelines, fewer spots will be open to in-person gathering for Halloween at all.
“Halloween is sort of the gay national holiday,” said CTGMC Artistic Director Greg McMahan. “We always do Christmas, but we're not going to be able to do Christmas this year in the same way. We had these great Zoom meetings where we talked about what else we could do. I was sort of thrilled to see the creativity of the guys and the collaboration between them.”
Members of the chorus began rehearsals for the virtual show in August, during Zoom meetings that started in March and continued through the spring and summer. By then, McMahan had scrapped a concert featuring British pop hits when it became clear that COVID-19 was going to last for months. While some members were already collaborating, others started throwing out ideas to the group. Halloween was one of them.
It stuck.This time of year, McMahan is usually in Provincetown, Mass. which typically hosts a large-scale Halloween weekend with costume balls, haunted houses, trick-or-treating. Because of COVID-19, events were cancelled and he made the decision not to travel. It’s a palpable loss, he said: there will be no drag queens on every corner of the little town, and no Christopher Street Halloween Parade in New York. Paired with the lack of trick-or-treating and spiking COVID-19 rates in the state, the holiday is effectively cancelled.
Instead, members assembled a sort of online cabaret, volunteering to mix audio and video that came from phones, computers, and a bevy of professional recording equipment. McMahan recorded and sent out parts, and then held rehearsals over Zoom, during which members would sing together on mute (Zoom’s audio lag makes singing together impossible, he said).
Members proposed scenes, from dancing to “Thriller” in the sun-dappled woods of Woodbridge to piano-voice duets with pieces with crackly audio and creepy twists at the end. They put in segments from previous concerts, in which the possibility of singing together now feels like a distant memory. They added a narrator with a vaguely Transylvanian accent, who appears in between acts with a cape and strong sense of dad humor.
The finished recording is more charming than spooky, with spliced-in bits from horror movies and moments that address the distance and ghastly wear of COVID-19 without ever saying the word. From the beginning, vocalists experiment with spooky faces and dimly lit backgrounds, contorting their cheeks, chins, noses and lips in all sorts of unnatural ways.
There are bizarre and endearing cooking segments, including “Cooking With The Devil” and a Robin Banks appearance in a stretch of months where performing drag has been largely impossible. Prior to COVID-19, Banks led the chorus’ monthly bingo nights, which brought in funds for the group. When she returns to the camera in big pearls and a house dress, she does so with canned laugh lines and applause to make up for the distance.
Cecil Carter and James Hampton have gone all in, with a thrilling, twisted sequence set to “I’m In Love With A Monster.” As Carter belts through it, he and Hampton create a whole narrative sequence with wild costumes, face paint, voguing, and dancing through hallways that make the whole thing feel claustrophobic (think Beyoncé circa Lemonade meets Jack Nicholson’s 1989 Joker). Carter also taught the choreography for “Thriller,” getting members to dance outdoors with Halloween masks over their medical masks.
In other words, members have worked with what they’ve got—and it gets the job done. Parts of the video are intimate: viewers see people’s homes, living rooms, grand pianos and gathering spaces in a way they wouldn’t if the chorus was in full costume performing together.
In a rendition of the Rocky Horror Picture Show’s “There’s A Light (Over At The Frankenstein Place),” everyone slows down, the flicker of candles turning it into an unlikely anthem for the pandemic. Members have fun, but they also make clear that the scary times through which they are singing aren't the dark, wet autumnal nights before Halloween but the very real moments in which they are living.
While it is no replacement for in-person gathering, McMahan said there are advantages to the virtual setup—like the fact that he can share it with his nieces in Florida, who have never been able to get to Connecticut for a concert. He added that it has given members a reason feel happy in a world where the presidential election and increasingly anti-LGBTQ Supreme Court hang heavy over almost every interaction.
“This makes it nice to have something to look forward to,” he said, noting that he’s held off on outdoor choir rehearsals for public health reasons. “To have something fun in our lives. We want people to know that we're still out there, that we’re still thinking about these things. We can still do this virtually.”
Watch Scary Times! below. Find out more about the Connecticut Gay Men's Chorus on Facebook or at its website.