By Sara Lieberth
Standard Correspondent
“How to Stay Sane While Losing Your Mind” is the sophomore album title, and the proposition local artist Sir Babygirl will strive to answer in back-to-back performances at a rock opera this weekend.
The show opens Friday evening at 7 p.m. at the Briggs Opera House, with a dance party to immediately follow, and a Saturday afternoon run at 4 p.m. with an audience talkback to take place afterward. Tickets are $25 for both.
Kelsie Hogue, who performs under the name Sir Babygirl, is a Hanover, N.H. native, whose newest production will run this Friday and Saturday at the Briggs Opera House. Photo Provided
Sir Babygirl (she/he) is the artist’s stage name, who is otherwise known as Kelsie Hogue, of Hanover, N.H. She partnered with longtime friend and fellow artist Rigel Harris, who directs the opera, and who proudly pointed out the pair were both “Class of 2011” from Hanover and Lebanon High Schools, respectively.
The stage is nothing new to Hogue, 32, who tells the Standard she grew up with theater, majored in it in college, then laughs, saying she “graduated, and gave up theater to pursue music,” even finding some success early on.
“Crush on Me” was the indie artist’s 2019 debut album, an effort Rolling Stone Magazine at the time reviewed by terming the songs “Top 40 anthems…with sputtering pop-rock production and histrionic, Broadway-style vocals, all while underscoring a uniquely queer point of view.”
Meanwhile, Sir Babygirl’s Spotify artist profile describes their music as “unabashedly bubblegum, unashamedly queer pop for a future free of genre boundary and the gender binary.”
According to Harris, the opera will feature a mix of “queer rock opera lineage of ‘Hedwig and the Angry Inch’ into a cage match with the ancient Greek mythology of Persephone, the story of a girl who is pulled down to Hell for winter every year. Sir Babygirl explores how we survive the cyclical nature of going to Hell and back, the fleeting feelings of joy and pain, and the inevitability of both.”
Accompanying Sir Babygirl’s lead vocals and acoustic guitar on stage — and forming the contemporary version of a Greek chorus throughout the opera — will be Larz Brogan (they/them) on drums, percussion and guitar, Rose O’Malley (they/he) on guitar and Hannah Hoffman (she/her) on keys, synth and vocals.
Imagination at work
Hogue was happily touring and promoting her first album when the pandemic changed everything for her burgeoning career, and for her personally.
“The music industry went under, and it was like a death to that part of my career,” she states. Hogue moved back to New Hampshire from Chicago, where she was living at the time, and back into her parent’s home.
“The Upper Valley is such a vibrant community and great place for working-class artists, it honestly wasn’t a bad place to land,” she admits.
But during Covid lockdowns, her own long periods of bed rest from chronic illness and the associated depression that came with it left her with only her imagination to inspire her.
“It was a low time, I was so stuck in my body, so out of my mind, I allowed my imagination to run wild. So I would write songs, I wrote this album from 2020 to 2021. I wrote a big tale because my life was so small,” Hogue says.
Drawing similarities between these experiences and Persephone residing in hell was an easy line to draw, Hogue says. “What would that look like?’ I wondered, ‘What would her bedroom look like? What are your creature comforts if you take up residence in hell?” she muses.
Hogue says there are many stories and fables that weave together in the piece, including “The Princess and the Pea,” and audiences will likely recognize hints to several in the production.
Director Harris acknowledged the “extremely low budget” of the performance won’t allow for a lot of set design elements, “so we won’t be having any pyrotechnics in our hell,” she jokes, while Hogue adds that audiences will be treated to an experience nonetheless, where “I think of the audience as a scene partner, so if you come, you feel like you’re in the show.”
Why a rock opera? Hogue answers: “Life is operatic, so an album just wasn’t big enough.”