Hashtag Comedy Corner’s second presentation, “Mad House,” showcased an eclectic mix of art forms including stand-up comedy, conscious hip-hop, electrically flavored jazz, and neo-burlesque at DeSoto Central Market.
“I wanted to tailor something to showcase exactly what can happen when talented people from all forms of art come together,” said Comedian and Hashtag Comedy Corner Producer Kapono Rowe. “I’ve always had a very talented group of people that I’ve surrounded myself with. I wanted to showcase the talent that downtown and the people I surround myself with have.”
Rowe was both producer and host of the showcase, and he said the pressure of both hosting and producing a comedy show is uniquely stressful. He said the energy you bring to hosting, performing, and producing are all correlated, but individual in their own right.
The common thread between the diverse acts was the drive to connect with an audience, whether to make them laugh, think, or be entertained.
“I think that the more I do this comedy thing, and I think this is true for anyone with passion for something, the more I do it, the more self-aware I become,” said Rowe. “I didn’t know who I was before this, but at least now I know I’m a comic.”
Effectively connecting with an audience is “just a beautiful feeling,” said Nick Perkins, who performed hip-hop and comedy for “Mad House.”
“I want to just touch people’s lives. One of my favorite artists is J. Cole, and when I listen to his music it makes me feel like I can have pride in who I am,” Perkins said. “I want to give that same type of feeling to anybody who listens.”
Appropriate to the series’ namesake, the show opened with a comedy performance by Rowe.
“There’s a lot of intricacies in comedy that I would like the general audience to understand, but I think it would be detrimental to comedians if they did understand it,” said Rowe. “A lot of what we do is just like what a magician does. There’s a lot of smoke and mirrors — I just use my words.”
The comedy acts were separated by two performances by Jacqueline Stevenson, a self- described jack-of-all-trades. Stevenson is an operatically-trained vocalist who performs in circus arts, sideshow acts, femme drag, neo-burlesque, and flesh hook suspension.
“That’s what the scars on my back are from — service-to-service piercings that go through my back and then I go up in the air anywhere between ten and thirty feet,” Stevenson said. “I just kind of pick things up.”
In “Mad House,” Stevenson sang a number from the musical Climbing Uphill. In the second act, she performed a strip-tease neo-burlesque routine to Dead Girl Walking from Heathers, during which she undressed on top of a pile of broken glass. The glass was originally her friends office door, which she said she liked because it was tempered and looked like diamonds.
Nick Perkins finished out the show in collaboration with the band I’m Leaning Towards Space Jazz. Perkins performs in a genre called “conscious hip-hop”, which is hip-hop based in some sort of socially-conscious message.
“It’s just cool that there’s all these feelings you can have with songs,”said Space Jazz guitarist Chase Marquez. “You can create feelings, you can express your feelings.”
Contact the reporter at Nicole.Neri@asu.edu.
