Waiting For the Kick
What if it was time to fix a story that had been told wrong for two thousand years?
Waiting For the Kick is a rock opera modernization of Oscar Wilde's Salome- reset in an after hours club where obsession and generational trauma reach a perfect storm. Off-duty bartenders, strippers, and other night folk collide in a fever dream mashup of dark comedy, psychological horror, sexual fluidity, mountains of cocaine, and twerk-inducing beats from The Sexbots.

WORLD PREMIERE is March 8, 2024 at The Mission Theater in Portland, OR.  Tickets here.

Waiting for the Kick is an official selection of the Oregon Fringe Festival, April 2024 and is the recipient of an honorarium for "creative work that is boundary-breaking, unconventional, excites discussion, and explores different perspectives of a cdl position, principle, and/or belief".

WFTK was written and composed by Ilima Considine of the international art pop experiment The Sexbots. In addition to directing countless music videos and short films for festivals, she is a co-founder of the recording studio The Gold Room. WFTK is co-produced by Sarah Vaeth, who also appears in her first singing role.

The script was intensively developed with two table reads and a semi-staged reading by Magic Circle Opera. 

Our majority non-binary, majority sex worker cast includes reality television stars, Portlandia season regulars, local indie musicians, viral YouTube stars, and performance artists. 

February 22, 2024 on No Dudes Radio Hour listen here.

February 27, 2024 on XRAY FM listen here.

March 7, 2024 on KBOO.FM listen here.

March 12, 2024 on The Recyclables podcast listen here.

Why Tell This Story Now

The story of Salome is recounted twice in the New Testament, after which it inspired countless statues, paintings, poems, plays, and operas. It is typically a tale of a man in power led astray by the wiles of an underage enchantress- and not the story of a young girl, caught in an impossible position- in a world where women are forced to objectify both themselves and others to survive- in a pressure cooker which can only result in tragedy.

Fatalism, eye candy, sonic beauty and the irrepressible nature of young love, growing like dandelions in a sidewalk - give this ancient tale new wrappings while remaining faithful to Oscar Wilde's long banned one-act play, Salome. While Oscar Wilde's version shudders at female sexuality, this version revels in the sexual and gender fluidity of its young cast.

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