The Grand Paradise

by Third Rail Projects
(original music and sound design)
website

“…We’ll see the members of this vacationing quartet throughout the evening, doing various balletic and erotic pas de deux (and trois and quatre) to dreamy, sexed-up elevator music (Sean Hagerty).”
– Ben Brantley, The New York Times

A pas de deux of desire and death, a midlife crisis, a coming of age, and a search for the Fountain of Youth at the resort of the eternally brokenhearted.

Set in those hazy and culturally liminal years of the late 1970s becoming the 1980s, The Grand Paradise is a tropical resort that purports to be the home of the original, genuine Fountain of Youth whose waters promise to quench our deepest longings. Greeted with a tropical drink, a garland of flowers, and an overly-cheerful activities director, visitors encounter the resort’s resident population; characters who embody the era’s shifting and blurring values — a rogue’s gallery of eccentrics, hustlers, eternal youths, gods, monsters, disco queens, and con men. Guests are invited to explore the resort and beaches, watch a floorshow, follow performers into one-on-one encounters, and trade their faded ideals for shiny new illusions.