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Trachtenberg Family Slideshow Players Coming through Chapel Hill for a quick one-hitter as they headed back to NYC from a Charleston, SC theater festival, I finally got the opportunity to take in one of the coolest acts going, the Trachtenberg Family Slideshow Players. My previous effort in LA was squashed by a line all around the building of people hoping someone would leave so they could go in. That was disappointing. And of course, when I spent in a year in NYC last year I never got the chance to see the Family because it always would have taken extraordinary effort or a high probability of my car being stolen. Before the opening act, NYC-based the Wows did their Simon & Garfunkel rendition, the dad of the Family, Jason, informed the crowd that they were filming the evening for part of a forthcoming DVD. Jason talking about the DVD with his quirky mannerisms was a hint of what was to come in little over an hour. For those unfamiliar with TFSP, the dad sings and plays keyboards/guitars, the young daughter Rachel plays drums and sings, while the mother Tina clicks through slides from the 1950s-1970s. The songs are written around the slides to tell varying stories all with political and social commentary plugged right in. As the TFSP describe themselves on their website – “[we] are an indie-vaudeville conceptual art-rock pop band. We take vintage slide collections that have been found at estate sales, garage sales, thrift stores, etc., and turn the lives of anonymous strangers into pop-rock musical exposes based on the contents of these slide collections.” That said, and with some pre-show banter, TFSP started off into their forty-five minute set. The first thing one has to get used to is the non-tightness of TSFP, but it is certainly part of their charm. The seemingly hodge-podge attack is perfectly (un)scripted and it is grand. You couldn’t find an unsmiling face in the moderately sized crowd as the Family traipsed through “Middle America,” “What Will the Corporation Do?,” “Wendy’s, Sambo’s, and Long John Silver,” “European Boys” and others. Even a decent delay as Tina and Jason switched to a new project couldn’t dissuade the happiness. The crowd was also treated to a brief question period where we learned that although Rachel lives in Manhattan, somehow she attends school in Seattle; as the Family put it, the school is ‘progressive.’ The one major disappointment is that they didn’t play “Mountain Trip to Japan, 1959,” probably their best known number. Its notoriety is probably why they skipped it, but it would have made the show ultra-sweet. Who knows how long the Trachtenberg Family Slideshow Players are going to keep going with their act, so catch them as soon as you can. For those in the NYC-area, the Family is doing a residence at an Off-Broadway theater this summer.
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