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OFFICIAL NOMINATION: "Most Entertaining"
-Dublin Fringe Festival, 2005
WINNER: "Best Multimedia
Experience"
-Hoontown Puppet Festival, Bangkok, 2005
WINNER: "Best Music Video:
CLEANING UP CONEY ISLAND"
-Coney Island Film Festival, 2007
"When Pirates of the
Caribbean was just a ride nobody wanted to go on at Disney
World, Jollyship the Whiz-Bang was cranking out funny "pyrate
puppet rock operas," with all the olde tyme speech patterns
that knotty genre tag implies. The group's first song, "Pyrate
Love," covered the swashbuckling traditions of rape and
murder, and the eight member collective - made up of musicians,
singers, puppeteers, and a few Bindlestiff Family Cirkus veterans
- has since waded deeper into the pirate infested waters with
an album called Songs to Drown By. Here, Jollyship
takes its winding storylines, bizarre seafaring characters,
and well-crafted puppets to Spiegeltent, the temporary vaudevillian
venue at South Street Seaport."
-The Onion AV Club, August, 2006
DEPRAVED NEW WORLD: Jollyship the Whiz-Bang
. . .Whiz-Bang makes a solid case that artistic innovation and grandiosity need not be confounded with tastefulness. Low budget showmanship, improvised dialogue and a predilection for ribaldry imbues the episodes with a spirit of joyful anarchy. While critical to the show’s audience appeal, this illusion of spontaneity often conceals the meticulous degree of precision and labor harnessed to synthesize its many components . . .
-Brooklyn Rail (July/August 2005)
for "Songs to Drown By" (album)
After having to listen to hundreds of boring hipster rock band clones, a little novelty music is pretty refreshing. This is a "musical pirate puppet sea saga." I suppose the live show is where it's at, what with the puppets and pirate ship stage set and all, but these songs aren't half bad either. Reminds me of Bobby Conn with a nautical theme. I like "Kill it if it Don't Got Feet" and "Pyrate Love." Fans of kooky stuff like Flossie & the Unicorns or Dame Darcy will dig this.
-VICE (Music Issue, April 2005)
for SLEEPLESS FISHES (running 12/05/03
- 8/13/04)
When my friend Steve called me up and insisted I go down to
the Bowery Poetry Club and see Jollyship the Whiz-Bang, a
crazy "electro-rock puppet show," I could only think
"Holy shit! How can two of the best pleasures of the
modern world be combined into one?" . . . Aquatic ballyhoo
plus electric accordion plus guitar solos equal a guaranteed
good time. When you break it down, the whole 90 minute affair
is like being inside the animated Yellow Submarine: there's
quite a few hot tunes, a cast of notably zany characters and
the big swirls of giddy psychedelia. Okay, so the Beatles
never fucked with any puppets, but when the alternative to
this lysergic rock fest is standing at some bar with your
arms crossed trying to chat up some hoity-toity stranger,
you gotta dive in.
-The Fader #27 (Jan/Feb 2005)
"Life on the high seas has never been easy. Storms create
stomach-churning swells. Being confined to a ship can make
sane souls go positively loopy. And dangers constantly lurk
in the deep. Of course, your woes are just beginning if you've
been captured by pirates. . . It's a hilarious dilemma that's
explored by the multimedia rockers of Jollyship the Whiz-Bang,
which performed Episode 5 of its ongoing pirate/puppet rock
opera Tuesday evening at Someday Lounge as part of the Portland
Institute for Contemporary Art's Time-Based Art Festival.
. . Much of what makes Jollyship infectious comes from Nick
Jones, the group's lead singer, voice of many of the characters,
and one of the three puppeteers. He's got a captivating stage
presence when he's banging out a rocking number, then he slips
into various puppet guises with subtlety and great humor.
He's aided by a rollicking backup band that can move from
sea shanties to punked-out riffs faster than you can slit
a scurvy dog's throat."
-The Oregonian (Sept. 2006)
"A clever musical number
here, some death by scoundrel there, some nasty adult humor
dressed in children's clothing throughout. All in all, a fun
time. The Jollyship crew succeeds in creating a spontaneous,
slapped together, anything can happen aesthetic. Yet, I imagine
the show is pieced together scrupulously. . . Going into the
show, I wondered how (if at all) Jollyship would breath life
into the tired pirate nonsense that has been so thoroughly
played out. It seems everyone I know has come and gone through
a pirate fascination phase. I can't count the number of pirate
parties I've been to in the last few years. . . .I think the
fact that they didn't take the piracy angle too seriously
was a saving grace. The ship and casual references to raping
and pillaging provided a context, but the story was so absurd
it could have worked with any premise."
-PICA TBA Festival Blog (Sept,
2006)
"The show is so inventive and such a
good time; it is the epitome of what good off-the-wall New
York theater ought to be."
-In-nyc.com
Avast, it's the JOLLYSHIP! Pirate
puppets will be pillaging . . . .
-The Nation (Bangkok, December 29, 2005)
"We never understood the appeal of The
Rocky Horror Picture Show or Hedwig and the Angry Inch, but
many of you apparently enjoy them. Nick Jones has created
a twisted musical that we can all enjoy. Jones, the quirkiest
sex symbol around, keeps updating his Jollyship the Whiz-Bang
adventures of pirate puppets and filthy sea shanties. Cheer
on the sweet cabin boy, Tom, as he challenges the traditions
of ocean crime and sodomy, and hope for a happy ending that
may never arrive. Sit up front if you can."
-NY Press
"The creators of Jollyship the Whiz-Bang
elevate what could have been a simple gimmick into the realm
of serious series entertainment."
-ELJ All Arts Annex
"Awesome. . . utterly ridiculous. . .
the performers are obviously having fun with their semi-improvised
dialogue, and it’s infectious. Call it the theater of
low expectations – everything is so lo-tech here that
a simple action like a puppet kicking his feet when he swims
can elicit applause, and an ambitious act like sending a puppet
over the audience on a wire seems like a more impressive piece
of stagecraft than a chandelier collapsing on a Broadway stage.
And it helps that the songs fucking RAWK!. . . it's theater
that makes you feel good. It has the feeling of “Hey
let’s put on a show” – except that the performances
are actually really tight - you don’t get that level
of songs and elaborate sets without some hard work."
-Culturebot
"Loud, low budget, raggedy, and with
a few beers in you, pretty freaking funny."
-Time Out NY
for OTHER SHOWS, tours, one-offs,
and residencies. . .
"For Christian Trosclair, the pirate
scene isn't about entertainment, fashion, art or history.
"It's about being ridiculous and absurd," said Trosclair,
32, standing in line in pirate gear before a recent "Jollyship
the Whiz-Bang" performance in New York. Brooklyn-based
"Whiz-Bang" is part puppet act, part rock band.
The seven-member group started doing pirate stuff in front
of a dozen or so people a few years ago and are now selling
out 200-seat venues. . . ."Pirates have always been cool,"
said Raja Azar, 26, the shaggy haired key board player and
co-founder. "You can project more with pirates, more
so than with robots or ninjas," he said, wearing a striped
tank top, black studded pants and boots with bare feet as
he stood aboard a boat before the gig."
-REUTERS, India, August 21, 2006
"The final fling of the evening was given over to a gang (perhaps I should say 'horde', as there were about a million of them) called Jollyship the Whiz-Bang. With a name like that, you'd probably guess that here you have a band that could comfortably be described as 'eccentric'. For sheer entertainment and a certain youthful zest and diablerie though, they were hard to fault. Besides, I can't but feel an affinity for a band whose members all look like they regularly got the shit kicked out of them in school."
-Somebody's Blog, after a show in Limerick
("Stab City"), Ireland
"Dirty dirty dirty, scurvy scurvy scurvy
. . . Give me some of that PIRATE LOVE!"
-Nonsense NYC
"Shows that really kick ass. . . grab
your eye patch and staple a stuffed parrot to your shoulder."
-NY Press
"Creepy, but funny."
-Carter, Sonna's K-1 Class
Review of "The Colonists,"
a new show (non pirate related) created by Jollyship the Whiz-Bang
for Hoontown puppet festival in Bangkok
"The show itself was a singular mixture of hi-tech and low: in one scene, the Queen Bee (manipulated by a puppeteer in jumpsuit) carefully fertilizes a honeycomb, and each cell lights up one by one as she graces it with her larvae. A few feet away, puppeteers wiggle cardboard honeycomb and jump in place to the music. The story moved forward at a rare, dreamlike pace amidst crowded, century-old homes and residents hawking spicy papaya salad and sticky rice.
-"Bangkok's Puppet Town," Dragonfire
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