Elegies for Angels, Punks, and Raging Queens

hi pete,

i’m happy to send songs from “elegies for angels, punks and raging queens” … if you could send $8 per song to my paypal account: billboyruss@aol.com i can send hard copies or email the PDFs … be sure to let me know which songs and how to send them

bill russell

that is so cool!

hi,
the song opens the show and there’s really no more information divulged about the character singing it than what is inherent in the lyric … she’s a singer … she started out in dives … now she’s had success and is looking back on the time when she didn’t … during those intervening years she lost a lot of friends to HIV/AIDS … the character who follows her talks about his friends throwing a party as his memorial and indicates she was one of them
bill

hi liv,

thanks for your inquiry

i don’t know what else to say about these women — i think they’re pretty self-explanatory … charlotte is a junkie who has not interest in reforming … alma got aids from her husband who was on the down low and she’s furious about it

hi nancy,

good question … thanks for asking

initially, i was calling the show “the quilt” because the names project quilt was a major inspiration … but there was a musical at the time called “quilters” (about pioneer women quilting) and people were confusing the two … also, “the quilt” felt a bit generic and i wanted to give a sense of the rock and roll energy in the music and the verse … i came across the word “elegy” and thought that sounded interesting … i looked it up and the definition was “a song or poem of mourning” and i thought that sounded perfect! … i then wanted to add the “fors” and was trying to give a sense of the broad montage of people i hoped to represent … though the title is challenging to remember and frequently gets mangled (eulogies for raging drag queens!) i continue to like it and love when it gets a laugh (as it frequently does in the UK) …

interestingly, maybe a dozen years after we’d written it and it had been produced around america and abroad, william finn wrote a musical called “elegies …” my agent called his reps and begged him not to use that title but no luck … and then it was published by samuel french, who also publishes our “elegies …”!! that’s created some confusion also …

bill

the show is set over the entire history of the aids crisis — starting around 35 years ago … all the speaking characters have died at various times during that period and the singers represent those living with that loss … if i had to set a specific time frame i’d say the early 90s

hi cam,

thanks for your kind words about “elegies …”

i do have a story about Ray … roughly a third of the monologues are based on people i knew, another third on stories i’d heard or read and the rest i made up to fill in what i felt might be missing from the montage we were creating … Ray was one of the latter … i wrote it to lead into the song “and the rain keeps fallin’ down” and i wanted to honor our straight (but not narrow) allies who rose to the occasion and joined the battle …

we did a big benefit in NYC in the spring of 2001 with a cast of 50 … one of the quartets had a married couple — a man and woman who had both been on broadway … after the concert the man came up to me and asked “where did you get that story about the gay kid being flown to an island by his straight friend?” … i told him i’d made it up … he said, “well, i had a gay friend and when he was diagnosed with aids i flew us to mykonos”!! … kind of blew my mind … fiction can be true!

thanks for asking

bill