An interlude, featuring the Tehranfinanced, Beirutbased rapper Def Führer engaged for juvenile appeal, the edifying fun of the kinder: We’re all infidels now / How / Shut the futz up…followed up by a set from a set of Siamese Twin girlpianists, the necessarily packaged two of them the only ones on this tour not in any way faking it, having been imported from Siam itself if it still exists: they play for our pleasure two different nusachs at twinned grand pianos, though thankfully they don’t sing (aren’t allowed to) — have you heard their accents? asks the dramaturge he’s billed as but he’s really a producer, and a dealer in woolwear, hats, gloves, mittens, and scarves; this seguing into a reprise of the opening theme, initially heard scored softly for winds with flute solo amid that sitting and settling rustle (aux. percussion), now though in an arrangement that can only be described as discoliturgical, even the critics agree it’s way over the top, performed past forte and prestissississimo, keying a change to chorus accompanied by triple winds and brass with bells up from the pit’s hellacious darkness, courtesy of the mephistic Maestro and his orchestra, besamimaddled spice addicts all, doing their improvisatorily riffing best to keep those deaf, dumb, startlishly molting feathered and sequined things onstage in the vaguest semblance of together: they couldn’t take a cue if it took them, audiences have said, and it won’t — Management will…these the openers that’ve been contracted tonight like a bad virus that stills the showstopper, keeps the stars in bed and without their shiny understudies for company, makes a boy have to step in to play a girl in drag what with the blond wig and the fainting; the last cast for the last date Ben’ll do in Siegeles, baby, and ever, wherever, the end of one engagement, that is, before the eternalizing commitment that marks the end of another, tomorrow, remember, whose wedding of Him to her and the day with posterity, too, is to be private, then its own reprise the day after that for the masses, the media, with their honeymoon scheduled to rise back in the east to close the tour at the Temple — which event’s to be the culmination of Ben’s public wander: the end to this six nights a week, with two hits per at 1900 and 2200 with only Fridays off, then two shows after Shabbos, the risen black chuppah curtain of night with its three tinsel stars, and then — showtime; He’s been scheduled like this for a moon.
