ABOUT THE SHOW
It’s a play. It’s a film. It’s a rock show. All at once.
After a nearly sold-out run, one of the most successful shows of The Southern Theater’s 2018 season is back for an encore presentation—one night only, December 11—taped live in front of a studio audience.
Come witness the rise and fall of that all-American icon the televangelist, in this wildly imaginative, media-saturated performance propelled by the yearning beauty of Greycoats’ music, with a bump of gold-tinted 1980s nostalgia. Drawing inspiration from true stories of American evangels who flew too close to the sun, CHARISMA! invites audiences on a marathon of telethons, confronting a cult of personality, humanity’s carnal nature, and the impossibility of living up to a divine ideal.
Directed and co-created by theater artist Seth Bockley with cinematography shot and directed by Kevin Horn, CHARISMA! stars Greycoats’ frontman Jon Reine as Reverend Jonny and Amanda Day as Serena, a Pentecostal celebrity power couple preaching an apocalyptic gospel on satellite TV.
With supporting performances from Sierra Schermerhorn, Eric Pierson, Nathan Tymoshuk, Benjamin Kelly and the band: Mike Smith, Matt Patrick, Titus Decker and Cooper Doten, CHARISMA! brings theater, film, and pop music together from Greycoats’ fourth studio album.
ABOUT THE ALBUM
“What if Jimmy Swaggart fronted Joy Division?”
And then, as these things do, it went off the rails...
22 songs were tracked over 9 days in October, 2017 at The Library Recording Studio in Minneapolis. 18 made the cut. No strangers to ambition, Greycoats chase the spectacular with the release of every album, pairing films to songs for Setting Fire to the Great Unknown (2008), hosting an art exhibition for World of Tomorrow (2013) and building a midi-controlled spaceship for Adrift (2015). But if we’re gonna talk about a concept album, this is probably it—from a band that was built for the stage.
PRESS FOR Charisma
“Art that swallows you whole.”
“Greycoats’ new album CHARISMA! could just as well have been named EMPATHY!”
“The music draws largely from the post-punk of the ’80s, the golden age of televangelism… the tracks ‘Strangers Under Contract’ and ‘In My Car,’ sound like they could have been extras from The Head On The Door.”
“Charisma! is a character study—one man’s descent into isolation; a critique of evangelical hysteria; a fairy tale of greed and delusion; a critique of consumer culture… a reinterpretation of the story of Job—one man’s problems get worse and worse and his faith is tested again and again; a story of a marriage on the rocks (and the quiet desperation that ensues); a critique of bombastic language… all of these things.”
PRESS FOR Adrift
“To say that this is my local album of the year is maybe an understatement — it’s gonna creep into my top ten period… This thing is straight up magnificent and epic in all the exact right ways… It’s like this crazy, romantic, gorgeous space opera, like nothing you’ve heard in the last 30 years.”
“Greycoats are a band that make you feel smarter after having listened to them. There’s an intelligence to the structure of their songs and something simultaneously mysterious and knowing in their lyrics.”
“The band’s making strides in both their compositions and their electro-leaning rock sound.”
“On Adrift, everything appears to be moving at a different speed than life around it — beautiful but deep, dark yet light.”
Photography by Dan Norman, Kevin Horn
