Mark Lacey’s Black Box Basilisk Cabaret Opera reimagines the stage musical with a stunning program of music that powerfully critiques the current paradigm of humanity and the technological tightrope we now walk. It transports the audience back to a pre-atomist, Lucretian dream.

Go back to the first century B.C., to a Roman poet writing something that reads, even now, like heresy with rhythm: Lucretius and his epic De Rerum Natura—On the Nature of Things.

Lucretius didn’t give Europe a new god. He gave it a new engine.

Before discussing Lacey’s Black Box Basilisk Cabaret Opera, we must first understand this setup, as Lacey uses it as a thread throughout the progression of the four acts. It becomes a surprisingly subtle and unique device for the aware listener, inviting them to confront their own shadows and enter the “self-reflection mirror” that his AI Manifesto dares us to face in order to reclaim our internal power.

The opening act signals the horrors of Lucretius in both atmosphere and energy, presented through the point of view and reactions of demonic entities. This gives the performers a less restrictive structure, allowing Lacey’s reimagined Verdi-styled arrangements, with their spontaneous twists and turns, to serve the operatic pieces beautifully. The unpredictability of devilish fun and theatrical antics creates dramatic flair.

Here, the materialist cosmology of atomism enters the stage: the claim that the world is not governed by divine intention, but formed by matter in motion. The clue is simple: the little demons want nothing to do with such heresy, since they, too, would be sworn to disintegration without a spiritually governed world. In its place come collisions, combinations, patterns, and lawful necessity. Reality becomes mechanism.

As each act progresses, Lacey carefully structures songs and symbols that reveal a paradigm trapping humanity beneath the over-technicality of a world stripped from nature and replaced with artificial mimicry. The songs remind us that one of the strangest facts about modernity is that it did not arrive only through inventions and institutions. It arrived through a recovered idea; an old mental operating system, reintroduced at exactly the moment civilization was ready to execute it.

Go back again to the first century B.C., to a Roman poet writing something that still reads like heresy with rhythm: Lucretius and his epic De Rerum Natura—On the Nature of Things. Lucretius didn’t give Europe a new god. He gave it a new engine. Reality as mechanism.

That single shift, if you let it take root, does something profound. It moves causation out of heaven and into the world. It turns mystery into structure. It makes nature legible, predictable, and engineerable.

For a long time, that idea did not win. By the end of the first century A.D., De Rerum Natura was barely read. Lucretius faded into near-oblivion. The poem went dark, like a program archived on a forgotten drive. Then the Renaissance happened. Manuscripts were recovered. The poem returned.

Here the story begins to feel like retrocausality, not supernatural, but memetic—as if the future reached backward and retrieved the exact conceptual tool it required. This shift is symbolized during Act Two with a bombastic, almost obsessive musicality: lights, synchronized projections, giant gears, beams of steel, and puffs of smoke.

Once Lucretius comes back online, Europe begins reconfiguring itself around a new default assumption: the universe is lawful matter. Causes are impersonal. Systems can be understood and, therefore, changed.

This shifts the playful demons into instigators, reminding us that the “why” must not be thrown under the rug if humanity’s destiny is to be saved.

The poem helped provide the mental affordances modernity needed: a worldview compatible with mechanism, experiment, and eventually industrial power. Lacey emphasizes this through the slow normalization of “nature without providence.”

Here is the secret that matters for this opera: Lucretius does not only help birth modern science. He also helps reveal modernity’s recurring failure mode—the belief that the future will resemble our past experience.

Embedded in this lineage is a bias: we mistake our historical dataset for reality. In relation to Lacey’s AI Manifesto, for which this opera serves as a musical and artistic companion, the argument becomes clear: we confuse training data with the full space of possibility.

At the emotional peak of Act Four, the opera presents a choice: the bridge into accelerationism, or the bridge over our troubled waters into a new paradigm of Harmonalism.

Once the mechanistic worldview becomes operational, once nature becomes legible and engineerable, modernity does not merely produce knowledge. It produces power. Power seeks scaling. Scaling seeks optimization. Optimization seeks automation. Automation eventually seeks independence from human deliberation.

It escalates, and it does not care what it breaks on the way. So now we can ask the real question: if a recovered idea helped build the modern engine, what happens when that engine becomes intelligent, recursive, and self-improving?

And what happens when our risk intuition—our Lucretius Problem—keeps telling us, “Surely it can’t get worse than this”? And those little demons are back. No longer perched on Maxwell’s box, but metaphorically housed within the AI black box.

That is the setup. That is why things grow more interesting in the tapestry of lyrics threaded across Lacey’s 90-minute program.

ACT ONE — Maxwell’s Daemons

The first act begins in a more intimate cabaret-styled atmosphere, most notably with the sparse, sensual jazz number “Black Box Enigma.” This piece serves as the backdrop to a provocative striptease of shadows and morphing body forms—artistic and classy—that invokes the entities released from Maxwell’s demon’s box, setting the tone for this adults-only production.

The sparse, minimalist opening prepares the audience for the maximalist spectacle ahead. An old ghost solos at a piano, reminiscing about not forsaking one’s own heart in “Anamnesis or Amnesia.” A pitch-perfect crooner sings:

“Humanity stands at a crisis,

Conscious in a divide,

Between gnosis and psychosis.

To liberate or let it slide,

Find the light or darkness hide—

Anamnesis or Amnesia, a visionary recollection,

Embrace the light within or blind your divine connection.”

Staying true to the composer’s themes from his book AI Manifesto, the opera extends the paradigm of humanity facing a bifurcation point and conjures Maxwell’s demons to confront the Mechanistic War Men.

The fiery operatic number “Stars Are Burning” sets the tone, calling out the irresponsible and exploitative forces of Silicon Valley and its alter ego, Pentagon Land. By placing AI as an entity trained toward killing machines, the production warns that the mysteries of AI black boxes may come back to bite their creators as untamed demons.

This offers a unique point of view for many of Lacey’s songs. For example, “Maxwell’s Demon” explores AI’s uncontrollable probabilistic nature as it shifts away from deterministic science, evoking AI as a kind of occult magic:

“Black box beasts of burden,

Must be tamed like Maxwell’s demon.

This entropy ensues, like the horrors of Lucretius.

Binary zero, I am this demon deep within,

I am this demon deep inside—you.”

Through a mash-up of Baroque opera, stage musical styles, jazz-infused cabaret, and cult rock opera, the production dares to confront a true Basilisk Entity with a marvelous mix of polished musical scores, arrangements, and original lyrics that evoke emotion and self-reflection.

The themes dive deep into the abyss, invoking confrontation, with standout vocal performances conjuring each unique character and capturing the expected drama within every breath.

Before the second act, Lacey reveals how these same dark archetypes shadow humanity, preparing the audience to walk toward a paradigm shift on a bridge of harmony. He uses operatic songs and Verdi-style surprises, offering stunning crescendos that soar across your heart with emotional upheaval. The song and dance are punctuated by a rich tapestry of emotionally resonant lyrics that linger long after the show ends.

Lacey’s lyrics pull no punches, gently holding a mirror up to the reality of AI mimicry and its dual use as a harbinger of autonomous war machines.

The fiery “War Men — What Have You Become,” in classical Verdi style, conjures pre-industrial ghosts of war men who hear a strange buzzing, first mistaking the sound for bees before awakening to a future of autonomous flying killing drones.

Lacey provides theatrical shock and awe through flashing lights, amplified screams, and actual drones swirling above the audience’s heads, forming a time-machine vision of the future. In “Drones Descent,” a troupe of ghosts marches in song and dance, each taking turns scalding the war men who sing:

“What have you become?

You war men are still dead inside.”

Startled by the sight of autonomous killing machines, the pitch and tempo ramp up as they scream:

“Haven’t you read Shelley’s Lament!”

With dramatic flair, the song drops into whispers and transforms into a military march of drums and trumpets, building toward the climactic close of the first act with “8th Sphere of Ahriman.”

ACT TWO – Cosmic Man

The second act blazes back with a cabaret-styled troupe performing a trio of theatrical songs with memorable hooks, all from the perspective of digital phantoms: “DA DA DATA!,” “Basilisk Is Coming to Town!,” and “Ontological Disorder.”

These songs conjure the entities of human exploitation through the creation of digital golems, patterned from our data, creating a duplicity out of each human. This evokes the need for archangels to validate the real world from the simulacra, confronting an artificial simulation with no original to copy from.

The songs tie this theme together, dramatizing the opera’s entities and demons as they struggle through a global paradigm where “the false as power”—to borrow Nietzsche’s phrase—rules, reflecting the highest power of the false.

Act Two concludes with “Cosmic Man,” the show’s standout hit. A cultish rock opera number, it affirms:

“We don’t need any aliens from outer space,

When all your power is in your inner space.”

ACT THREE -De Natura Lucretius 7th Symphony,

It is in Act Three that Lacey ultimately unites these themes, compelling us to confront our own inner demons. Here, the production fully delivers on its promise of opera, with authentic classical arrangements and pitch-perfect vocal performances by Mateo Bertolucci and Lucia Parento.

Their performances provide a beautiful segue into operatic Italian renditions of “Nel Vincolo Del Binario” and “De Natura Lucretius 7th Symphony,” showcasing Lacey’s talent for original arrangements.

The opera signals the heart of wisdom and invites us to imagine a new paradigm of harmony. It becomes a declaration, revoking consent from a world that still accepts the atrocities of war when justified by profit.

Lacey’s “I Declare” is offered as a trio of emotional operatic duets in Italian, English, and Spanish. The performers make their declarations while meeting atop a bridge of harmony, keeping the emotional pitch continuous as the work moves toward its final act.

ACT FOUR – AKASHIC RECORDS

In Act Four, a crescendo builds around the transformation of an angel receiving his wings in “To Fly Again.” The preview performance used large projected set pieces, an array of lights, and high-definition screens, creating an immersive and impressive sense of scale through minimal physical set design.

This leads into “Akashic Records,” a dark folk-rock ballad with classical orchestration, sung by male baritone Antonio Silimar, who sweeps the audience into an emotional crescendo. Calling upon the four quarters of creation and the archangels Gabriel, Michael, Raphael, and Uriel, the song segues into a reprise of “Cosmic Man.”

The show concludes with a revival-style ending, psychedelic and choir-laden, evoking the spirit of the 1960s musical Hair and leaving the audience with a bright, inspiring resonance—an embrace of higher consciousness and the possibility of becoming a cosmic man.

An unforgettable fusion of cabaret jazz, stunning pitch-perfect Verdi opera performances, and cultish rock opera numbers, this show creates urgent awareness of the current dangers and exploitative nature of technology and AI when placed in the hands of military minds and techno-elitists.

All of this is woven together with an elegance that echoes a Verdi dream. The program offers more than songs; it offers a moral question, an invocation, and a call to action through self-reflection.

Black Box Basilisk Cabaret Opera is composed and written by Mark Lacey as a musical companion to his book AI Manifesto, with lead vocals performed by Fredrick Gonzalez, Lucia Parento, Mateo Bertolucci, Antonio Silimar, and Sherry Ciceroni.

—John Hersh

Off Broadway, New York, NY

Listen Below to Preview Performance

MUSIC & LYRICS COMPOSED BY

MARK LACEY

PERFORMED BY AKASHIC TROUPE 

FEATURING LEAD VOCALS BY

FREDRICK GONZALEZ, LUCIA PARENTO  and MATEO BERTOLUCCI, ANTONIO SILIMAR, and SHERRY CICERONI