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Adelaide Mestre
On October 22 and October 23, The Church in Sag Harbor will host two performances of “Top Drawer: Stories of Dysfunction and Redemption from Park Avenue to Havana,” Adelaide Mestre’s award-winning show of her journey to Cuba to seek out her deceased father’s piano, left behind when her family fled in 1960.
The show takes place in both the past and present as the audience follows her on her quest to reclaim her family’s heritage. In flashbacks, she chronicles her life growing up on Manhattan’s Upper East Side with her mother, a thrice married, opera-singing socialite with impossible top-drawer standards, and her father, a gay, Cuban, manic-depressive concert pianist. In story and song, she shares about her parents doomed love affair, her father’s struggle with his homosexuality, and his eventual tragic suicide.
On her journey, she learns of a famous speech her grandfather gave against Castro and recovers old recordings of her father playing the piano with an orchestra in Havana in 1954. With sentiment and humor, she spins a tale of dysfunction and redemption and, ultimately, shares her discovery that art can be a kind of alchemy that transmutes loss and abandonment into freedom.
“Top Drawer” will make you laugh, cry and maybe even … sing. “Top Drawer” premiered at the New York International Fringe Festival in 2011, and has enjoyed multiple, return engagements at NYC’s Stage 72. In 2013, it was presented, in sold-out shows, at New York’s Symphony Space by The Cuban Cultural Center of New York and in Miami by the Cuban Museum. “Top Drawer” was produced in Boston for Friends of Caritas Cubana and most recently in the 2017 Sarasolo Festival in Sarasota, where it won the Bill Bowers Award of Excellence.
Performances at the Church are Friday, October 22, at 7 p.m. and Saturday, October 23, at 7 p.m. Tickets are $40, payable at the door, or purchase tickets in advance through the website. Proof of vaccinations and masks will be required to enter. The Church is at 48 Madison Street, Sag Harbor. For details, visit sagharborchurch.org.
Staff Writer on Oct 12, 2021