About

Nancy/Marty/Masterpiece Theatre

In Long Beach, California, in 1977, Iris Rose received a Christmas gift from her roommate Jeff
Paul that would have an unforeseen impact on her life and the lives of others. The gift was
the record album Nancy’s Greatest Hits, with its lovely pale pink album cover and photo of
Nancy Sinatra in her matching pale pink lipstick, teased-up blonde hair, and a midriff-
revealing triangular top and hip-hugger skirt. Nancy’s Greatest Hits album cover Upon repeated
listenings, it soon became clear to Iris and Jeff that Nancy really only had a few hits (“These
Boots Are Made For Walking”, “Sugar Town”, “Something Stupid”) and, therefore, much of the
rest of the album was packed not with hits, but with filler (“Lightning’s Girl”, “Friday’s Child”,
“Things”). Jeff’s nickname among some of his friends was the Minister of Fun for his ability to
come up with original ways to pass the time (taking turns replacing the rhyming couplets at
the end of “I Got You, Babe”, for instance: “I got you to disco dance”; “I got you to wet your
pants”). Most of these entertainments are now lost to memory, but the greatest has lived on
– The Nancy Sinatra Game, inspired by Nancy’s least memorable songs.

Like all great games, the rules are simple but executing them requires concentration and
commitment. A player puts on headphones turned up loud enough to mask the sound of his
or her own voice. It is their task to sing along with a song they do not know – they must not
lag behind the music, but instead try to the best of their ability to truly sing along. The task is
clearly impossible, but the effort can be very entertaining to watch. Because the singer
generally cannot sing the actual words, except for memorable phrases or choruses when
they are repeated, the singer sounds as though they may be deaf, mentally challenged,
singing in an unknown language, or possessed. It became one of the rules of the game that
it could only be played if everyone present agreed to participate – it was deemed
unsporting for someone to laugh at the struggles of others without also having to give it their
own best effort. The Nancy Sinatra Game was very popular at certain small gatherings in
Long Beach for many years.

When Iris moved to New York City in 1982, of course she was eager to expose a whole new
group of people to Jeff Paul’s brilliant invention. One of the people who learned the game
from Iris was Joshua Fried, who immediately perceived its performance possibilities. A short
time later, Joshua performed some of his original electronic music at Just Above Midtown,
Downtown Gallery in Tribeca, but he also invited Iris and James Siena to publicly play The
Nancy Sinatra Game with him as part of the show. The audience response was enthusiastic,
so Joshua asked James and Iris if they would be interested in being part of a group, to be
called Nancy*, that would perform only using this technique. They agreed and soon had a
performance date at the Pyramid Club, the first of many appearances at clubs and
fundraising benefits. Pyramid Club postcard

Joshua developed many variations on the standard Nancy technique. In the most
dramatically effective, Joshua would find an instrumental version of a desired song,
recorded by an artist like Mantovani or 101 Strings, and he would create a dual-track
recording with the “cascading strings” on one track and his own voice (which would not be
heard by the audience) singing the lyrics on another. In performance, by shifting the
balance of the audio playback, Joshua could ensure that the audience only heard James or
Iris struggling through the song, accompanied by the lush orchestral arrangement.

Joshua also created medleys, combining highlights of multiple songs by the same singer or
band, and duets were made possible by plugging two sets of headphones into in a “Y-jack”
that went into one input and allowed two singers to hear the same song from a single
Walkman portable cassette player. Other than these advanced variations, the three
performers generally recorded cassettes of songs they chose for each other to sing,
guessing which songs would be unfamiliar enough to the singer. They learned over time
what kind of songs worked best: ones that were somewhat familiar to the audience, but
weren’t favorites that everyone knew the words to. Second best were those that the singer
swore they knew, but soon realized they only knew the chorus and not any of the verses.
Repetitive songs were not as effective because the singer would eventually pick up the
repeated phrases. Since Nancy required limited preparation and absolutely no rehearsal,
they were able to perform whenever the opportunity arose, even on fairly short notice.

In September 1985, Cornelius Conboy and Dennis Gattra, the impresarios behind the club
8BC in the Alphabet City neighborhood of lower Manhattan, invited the group of performers
that would one year later become Watchface to present something there. After some
discussion, the performers decided to begin with Nancy, but expand the concept into a
couple of new directions to create a longer show, which became known as Nancy/Marty/
Masterpiece Theatre.

The show began with a set by Nancy, using some of the techniques Joshua had developed
over the two years they had been performing. This was followed by Masterpiece Theatre,
which applied the Nancy concept to classic, familiar theater works. Four actors were given
Walkmans bearing cassettes on which their lines and their stage directions had been
recorded by two different voices (James and Iris). To make things even clearer, the tapes
included a tone (a single note on a toy piano) that would sound just before each stage
direction. A second tone (a different toy piano note) followed to indicate the end of the
stage direction. Since James had recorded the four tapes as independent tracks on a single
four-track recorder, the four cassettes – in theory – were in sync with one another, and
certainly they started out that way. However, all Walkmans ran at slightly different speeds,
so the actors started out the scene together but by the end were slightly out of sync. The first
scene of the two performed was from Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, with Maggie Siena as
Martha, Joshua as George, Chazz Dean as Nick, and Melanie Monios as Honey. When a
performer was speaking, the acting was passionate, though incomprehensible, since the
actors were more successful at picking up the recording’s emotional content than its actual
words. Whenever the tone sounded, however, he or she tended to drop character
altogether and robotically execute whatever physical action the tape demanded.

Marty (a name arbitrarily chosen by Melanie to go with Nancy), which was performed
between the two Masterpiece Theatre scenes, applied the Nancy concept to the sense of
sight instead of hearing: performers watched television and tried to imitate exactly the
movement they saw on the screen. They were not required to duplicate the audio portion,
which the audience could hear. The night Marty was performed at 8BC, two portable
televisions sat on either side of the stage, facing away from the audience and leaning back
at a 45° angle so the performers, Iris and Melanie, had a clear view of the action. Chazz and
James, squatting next to the remote-less sets, frequently changed the channels so the ladies
would have to adapt frequently to shifting movement situations. They were fortunate on that
particular evening because, in addition to the usual programming, both a boxing match and
a beauty pageant were on at the time of the performance. Although there was a lot of
action, the performers never moved far from their original starting points since Marty required
intense concentration on the small screen.

Finishing off the evening was the second Masterpiece Theatre scene – Shakespeare’s A
Midsummer Night’s Dream. A scene in which the bewitched and mismatched lovers argue
was performed by Joshua as Demetrius, Chazz as Lysander, Maggie as Helena, and Melanie
as Hermia. The blond pageboy wigs that the gentlemen sported added to the absurdity of
unprepared actors trying to wrap their tongues around the Bard’s Elizabethan speeches.

Despite the show’s warm reception, Nancy/Marty/Masterpiece Theatre was only performed
on one other occasion. From 1984 to 1987, the band They Might Be Giants had a monthly gig
at the small East Village club Darinka, and for four months, beginning in the spring of 1986,
they asked Watchface to be their regular opening act. The shows that Watchface used to fill
their part of the bill were Stereotypes, Ralph and Louie’s Bad Habits, Woolworth’s, and
Nancy/Marty/Masterpiece Theatre.

For the Nancy/Marty/Masterpiece Theatre evening at Darinka, Nancy again performed first.
Marty was presented, though the Darinka stage was a fraction the size of 8BC’s, limiting the
range of movement even more than its previous performance (and, sadly, no prize fight or
beauty pageant was broadcast that night). The scene from Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
was performed again, using the original tapes, but with John Flansburgh from They Might Be
Giants playing George. For the second Masterpiece Theatre scene, James and Joshua
recorded a new set of tapes for the “Officer Krupke” and “Tonight” numbers from West Side Story.

Although Nancy/Marty/Masterpiece Theatre was never performed again, the legacy of The
Nancy Sinatra Game lived on. Nancy continued to do their act whenever possible,
including a memorable night of a dozen bands performing Led Zeppelin cover songs at the
Knitting Factory’s original location on Houston Street. Nancy executed a Zeppelin medley
that included vocal renditions of guitar solos, prepared for them by Irwin Chusid, WFMU
deejay, music historian, and the evening’s organizer.

In 1988 James and Iris’ son Joe was born. When he was two years old, Nancy performed live
on WFMU as Joe watched them from the engineer’s booth. Joe’s existence made it more
difficult (and expensive) for both Iris and James to perform on the same night, so Iris stepped
aside and was replaced by Joshua’s then-girlfriend Susan Thompson. Nancy broke up
sometime later, but by then Joshua was already taking the Nancy technique in unexpected
directions. His first piece of serious music for headphones and backing tape was
Travelogue, a solo first performed by Iris at Roulette, a music venue in Tribeca. Travelogue
used movie dialogue, parts of a pop recording, Joshua reading his own original text, and
more on a guide tape that only the performer could hear, and original music by Joshua on a
backing tape that was heard by the audience.

Travelogue led to an even more ambitious and complex work: Headset Sextet. Joshua was
able to address the technological issues that had existed in Masterpiece Theatre so that six
performers could each hear an individualized track while all plugged into a single
multichannel source, ensuring perfect synchronization. In this way, he was able to compose
a complex six-part vocal score and accompaniment with precise timing. Among the many
who eventually performed either Travelogue or Headset Sextet were Kate Valk, Cynthia
Hopkins, James Urbaniak, Penny Arcade, Elizabeth Zimmer, Shelley Hirsch, Tigger, and
Thomas Buckner.

In a further enhancement, performers wore wireless receivers, allowing complete freedom of
movement, in Joshua’s 80-minute collaboration with choreographer Douglas Dunn, Spell for
Opening the Mouth of N, which featured eight headphone-wearing singer-performers and a
dance company of ten.

Unexpectedly, what had begun as an absurd party game in the late 1970s evolved over
more than a decade into the inspiration for serious pieces of music and performance.
 
 
*Nancy, the musical act, was not a Watchface show.