More Sunshine with Joey Arias and Basil Twist
Recently, at the HERE Arts Center, near SoHo, the puppeteer Basil Twist, the performance artist Joey Arias, and six unseen puppeteers (“They’re wearing black velvet, hood on, like ninjas,” Twist said) were rehearsing the grand finale of “Arias with a Twist,” their cabaret fantasia from 2008. To the zingy “You Gotta Pull Strings,” from “The Great Ziegfeld,” puppet chorus girls in feathers and fish-nets exited the stage, a Mylar curtain opened, and Arias—Bettie Page bangs, sheer top, Adidas pants—entered, sprawled on a Twistian three-layer cake with showgirls’ legs extending from it like flower petals. Mirrors appeared, the music intensified, and King Kong-size showgirl calves stepped in from stage left and stage right. Meanwhile, the cake wiggled uncertainly. Twist called out, “Can we pause?” He crouched in front of the cake, raising its white fabric frosting. “How can we help?” he asked.
“Hmm,” the cake said. After they chatted, Twist stood. “Let’s take it from the Mylar curtain!” Triumph: the cake spun like a top, its legs high-kicking in unison. Arias, blissful, waved his own legs in the air.
The Center’s theatre, named for Twist’s grandmother Dorothy B. Williams, is underground; upstairs, Twist and Arias talked about the revival. “It feels fantastic,” Arias, who wouldn’t disclose his age (“I like to round up to a hundred”), said. “It’s, like, more sunshine, more happiness. It is never, like, ‘Oh, it’s too much beauty! Too much art!’ ”
Twist, who is fifty-seven, said that they’d written the show quickly, after HERE, Twist’s artistic home, had a sudden cancellation. He’d approached Arias, who had just returned from Las Vegas after an eight-year stint starring in Cirque du Soleil’s “Zumanity.” Arias, a fan of Twist’s productions, was game. “Every time I saw Basil, I was, like, ‘Put me in the show!’ ” he said. They wrote it together. “He goes, ‘What do you want to do?’ ” Arias recalled. “I said, ‘Get abducted by aliens, go on an acid trip, and have a Busby Berkeley finale with a big cake!’ ” They riffed on themes for Arias’s return: A desert? Dalíesque Surrealism? Ooh, a jungle?
“We got a whole bunch of donated green fabric, and there was suddenly a jungle,” Twist said. “Corduroy, velvet, cotton, silk.”
The two friends met in the mid-nineties, through Twist’s then boyfriend, whom Arias had met while working at a boutique. “Everybody went to Fiorucci!” Arias said. “This beautiful blond guy—hot pants in the summertime, skating, like, wow!—goes, ‘I’m Bobby Miller. I’m a photographer.’ ” One night, at the club Jackie 60, “Bobby said, ‘I want to introduce you to my boyfriend, Basil Twist.’ ”
Twist said, “Bobby introduced me to a whole world of night life. I had just returned to New York from puppet school in France.” (Twist was the first American to graduate from l’École Nationale Supérieure des Arts de la Marionnette.) He first came to HERE, with Miller, for “a gay country-Western cabaret called ‘Y’all.’ Bobby was doing his poetry, and I did a little puppet show,” he said. “Later, I did a bigger project here with Mabou Mines. And the Halloween parade also starts outside these doors! By the way, this year, Joey’s going to be the grand marshal.”
“The daughter of darkness!” Arias said. “I’m representing what the avant-garde, what art, stands for, and that it’s thriving and it’s alive. It’s going to be beautiful.”
Twist and Arias first performed together at a launch party for the fashion publication MAO MAG. “I have these marionettes of my grandfather’s on display in the case outside the theatre,” Twist said. His grandfather, a bandleader, had several bandleader puppets—Harry James, Cab Calloway, Paul Whiteman, Arturo Toscanini, and Ted Lewis, each playing an instrument. “I thought, I’ll use these puppets for Joey, because I love him.” On a little stage, “they came alive with Joey flirting with them, playing with them.” The puppets return in the revived “Arias with a Twist,” and the chemistry remains.
Another creative factor was Thierry Mugler, who had designed costumes for “Zumanity” in the early two-thousands. Arias said, “He came with me to see Basil and started to sketch the little nude corset with the little velvet bikini: ‘This is the way you should look.’ ”
The show delighted and astounded many. “Paul Reubens and I were good friends,” Arias said. “He came, and the whole time he was like this”—gobsmacked. “Afterward, he said, ‘Joey, I hate you.’ That meant ‘I love you.’ I said, ‘I know, I hate ya, too. May I introduce you to Basil Twist?’ And immediately he wrapped himself around Basil and the rest of us.” Twist later worked with Reubens on his 2010 Broadway version of “The Pee-wee Herman Show”: Chairry, Globey, and the gang live onstage.
At the revival’s first preview at HERE, Twist greeted the audience and pointed out emergency exits, and a New York-accented audience member yelled, “Like a airplane!” This turned out to be another Friend of Pee-wee, Cyndi Lauper. After the show, she embraced Arias. “The one and only!” she said. ♦