Wobbling Roof Revue Raised

It was standing room only by the time writer, performance poet, and musician Ken Cormier stood up at the mike, kicking off the last night of the Wobbling Roof Revue, organized by musicians Paul Belbusti and Lys Guillorn at Never Ending Books on State Street.

The event Friday night featured an eclectic lineup of performers from New Haven and elsewhere for a variety show that stayed true to the phrase — and kept a rapt audience in the seats — from beginning to end.

Cormier’s pieces are hard to define and, live, difficult to deny. His songs are a kind of New Wave spoken-word poetry, groovy, unsettling, absurd, and at times really funny. He interspersed these with what he called ​“micro-memoirs,” page-long pieces that dove straight into the tension that can sometimes define a family. In one piece, he described exploring his grandmother’s bedroom as a child, while the rest of the family was downstairs. ​“Inside the drawer is my grandmother’s gun,” he said. ​“It looks like my cap gun except that it has a pearl handle.” He went on to describe how his mother had forbade him to touch it; he disregarded that order. ​“I hear my grandmother’s wheezing laugh from downstairs,” he concluded. ​“I point the gun at the doorway and wait.”

Violet Harlow, a studio potter at Creative Arts Workshop who moonlights as a fortune teller, read people’s fortunes from a risqué tarot deck that let her explore her subjects love lives as well as their general fortunes. After establishing that love may be coming a game audience member’s way, she began to pull another card.

“Let’s see how you’re going to get it,” Harlow said. The card revealed an image that suggested voyeurism might be involved.

“Looks about right,” the audience member said wryly.

“Looks like a little exhibition,” Harlow said suggestively.

“Looks like he’s falling out the window,” the audience member replied. Everyone laughed.

Hartford-based musician Zach Rowden set up a single light to great effect and proceeded to explore all the sounds an amplified upright bass could make if you did just about everything to it except bow or pluck the strings. He started off by bowing the bridge, filling the room with an unearthly whistle that set expectations for what was coming. He passed through a series of harmonics. He mashed the bow’s hair against the strings to make a sound like enormous termites chewing through wood. Shoving two dowels between the strings at the bridge and the nut of the instrument, he slapped them to turn the entire bass into a gigantic piece of percussion. Dragging his hands over the top created subterranean moans. It was a piece filled with the brutal sounds musicians can make only when they’ve gotten really good, and gotten to know their chosen instruments really well. The audience was still for it all, and broke into loud cheering at the end.

Anthony Apuzzo of Digital Tracks Entertainment hosts three trivia nights a week in the New Haven area and, this week, included Wobbling Revue as a fourth. He started with a round in which he read the titles of Hollywood movies as they were retitled in other countries, and it was the audience’s job to guess which movie it was.

“Please shout out answers,” Apuzzo said.

“Nebraska!” someone shouted, before Apuzzo had a chance to give a title. We then learned that the 2007 comedy Knocked Up had been retitled One Night, Big Belly in China. And which movie was titled The Happy Dumpling-to-Be Who Talks and Solves Agricultural Problems in Hong Kong? That would be 1995’s Babe.

In the second round, Apuzzo played the theme songs to TV shows and threw small packages of Swedish fish to the first people to correctly identify which show the song belonged to. This reporter is proud to say that he and a man standing next to him identified the theme song to the sitcom Perfect Strangers almost simultaneously, and were both rewarded.

Xavier Serrano (voice and guitar) and Dylan McDonnell then offered up a haunting set of songs that easily filled the listening space of Never Ending Books.

Belbusti and Guillorn as MCs were beaming all night, easily moving the show from act to act with cheer and angular humor.

Rivener — an experimental duo of Belbusti and drummer Michael Kiefer — did two numbers that somehow bridged the musical territory between Rowden and Serrano and McDonnell, tying everything together.

“We’re going to take Wobbling Roof home and put it where it belongs: in bed,” Belbusti then announced at the end of his set, to introduce Lys Guillorn and her band.

It’s tempting to say that the final act of the final night of Wobbling Roof brought the house down, but that’d be an inaccurate use of the metaphor. Guillorn and her band gave the audience a sharp set of originals to go home with, and a rocking close to the Wobbling Roof Revue. But at the end, the roof wasn’t down; it had been raised, a testament to what can be accomplished when a group of very talented people come together to make something happen.