About us
Since 2004, cartoonist Ben Katchor and musician Mark Mulcahy have collaborated on a series of contemporary music-theater productions that harken back to the ballad operas of 18th century England. The shows use a variety of popular musical forms, sung-through texts and visual projections.
Mark Mulcahy (composer and singer) has released many albums. He performs in the USA and Europe. Mark composed the music for the Nickelodeon television series The Adventures of Pete & Pete with the TV band, Polaris. He has written music for the films Management, Spring Forward, The Crush, and A Matter of Degrees. Mr. Mulcahy is featured in the Nick Hornby essay collection, Songbook. Ciao My Shining Star, a collection of covers from the Mulcahy song catalog was released in 2009. Mulcahy has collaborated on four operas with Ben Katchor: The Slug Bearers of Kayrol Island or the Friends or Dr. Rushower, The Rosenbach Company, A Checkroom Romance and Up From the Stacks. He has performed in all four. Mark is currently at work on his next album and can be found at www.mezzotint.com
Ben Katchor’s (libretto and drawings) picture-stories and drawings have appeared in the Forward, Metropolis Magazine, and The New Yorker. His weekly strips include: Julius Knipl, Real Estate Photographer, The Jew of New York, Hotel & Farm and most recently Shoehorn Technique. Hand-Drying in America, a collection of strips about urban design and architecture was published in March 2013 by Pantheon Books. He was the recipient of a Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship, a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship, was a fellow at The American Academy in Berlin and the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library. Katchor’s libretto and drawings for The Carbon Copy Building, a collaboration with Bang on a Can, received an Obie Award for Best New American Work. Katchor’s music-theater collaborations with musican Mark Mulcahy include: The Rosenbach Company, a sung-through musical biography of Abe Rosenbach, the preeminent rare-book dealer of the 20th century; The Slug Bearers of Kayrol Island, which won an Obie Award in 2008 for its production at The Vineyard Theatre in NYC; A Checkroom Romance in 2010 and Up From the Stacks in 20xx. He is an Associate Professor at Parsons School of Design, The New School in New York City. For more information visit www.katchor.com