BLACK BOX BASILISK OPERA

“…Soars across your heart with emotional upheaval!”

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 you back to a pre-atomist, Lucretian “binary zero” with sweeping operatic melodies that embed themselves in your senses.
The first act begins in a more intimate cabaret-styled atmosphere, most notably with a 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 you for the maximalist spectacle ahead. An old ghost solos at a piano, reminiscing about not forsaking one’s own heart with “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. By placing AI as both entity and demon, the opera offers a unique point of view for many of its songs. For example, the song “I AM” explores AI’s probabilistic nature as it shifts from deterministic sciences, 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 and stage musical styles, the production dares to stare at a true Basilisk Entity with a marvelous mix of original music. It dives deep into the abyss, unlocking entities and demons that shadow humanity, yet soars across your heart with emotional upheaval. Its song and dance is 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 Are Dead Inside,” a classical Verdi-style act full of twists and turns, conjures old ghosts of war, who deliver a blistering song and dance, turning a military march of drums and trumpets into a climactic close for the first act with “8th Sphere of Ahriman.”

The second act blazes back with a cabaret-styled troupe performing a trio of jazz-infused songs with memorable hooks, all from the perspective of digital phantoms in “DA DA DATA!” 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—thrusting humanity into a simulacrum where the real is no longer valid and establishing an artificial simulation with no original to copy from. The songs tie together this theme, 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.

Ultimately, Lacey unites these themes in the grand finale, compelling us to confront our own inner demons. Through the alchemy of soul and music, the opera inspires us to let our hearts sing and to imagine a new paradigm of harmony, symbolized in the transformation of an angel receiving his wings in “To Fly Again.” This leads to “Akashic Records”—a dark folk-rock ballad with classical orchestration, sung by a male baritone who sweeps the audience up in an emotional crescendo, segueing into a reprise of “COSMIC MAN.” This cabaret rock opera number affirms, “We don’t need any aliens from outer space, when all your power is in your inner space.” 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 woven together with an elegance that echoes a Verdi dream.

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

– John Hersh

Off Broadway, New York, NY