Press/media

PEOPLE WHO MAKE NEW YORK SPECIAL

INTERVIEW WITH MARCY FOR WHAT SHOULD WE DO’S SERIES ON SPECIAL NEW YORKERS

HUFFINGTON POST

FEATURE ON MARCY RICHARDSON IN THE HUFFINGTON POST "SOME GIRLS CAN SING, SOME GIRLS CAN DANCE. THEN THERE'S MARCY RICHARDSON."

TORONTO STAR

INTERVIEW & FEATURE FOR GLUCK'S ORPHÉe

Cover feature in jejune magazine, Jan 2021-click below for full interview

SING FOR HOPE!

READ MORE ABOUT MARCY'S VOLUNTEER WORK/ARTIST SPOTLIGHT

Build Series-Interview with Marcy Richardson, Susanne Bartsch, & Lola von Rox

Elle Magazine

Marcy is one of 7 pole dancers asked about smooth skin tips and tricks!

AGAINST THE GRAIN THEATER

AN EMAIL CONVERSATION WITH MARCY RICHARDSON-GLUCK'S ORPHÉE 

3-Minute Speed Interview for We Love NYC

Pandemic/Lockdown Coverage

Business Insider

Washinton Post

“Marcy Richardson is hanging on, but only barely, and she’s both angry and illustrative of how the pandemic has upended artists’ lives. A classically trained opera singer who lives in Brooklyn, she honed a second specialty as an acrobat and has worked steadily for years in variety shows and high-end burlesque, with avant-garde troupes such as Bushwick’s Company XIV and event producers including Susanne Bartsch. Now, as the $75,000 she made last year as a singing aerialist goes to zero, Richardson, 40, doesn’t understand why government aid has not been solidified to help sustain backbone-of-the-city steady earners like herself.

“We are small, locally owned businesses that are trying to make art a business,” she said. “I’ve never felt less valued and so disrespected as an artist. I want to know, ‘Do you not care if we disappear into thin air?’ ”

To read the full article by Peter Marks, click HERE

New York Daily News

New York Daily News- “New Yorkers of all trades who lost work during the pandemic say it’s been hard to keep active during quarantine. It’s required creativity and unusual determination.

Opera singer, burlesque performer and acrobat Marcy Richardson practices on an aerial hoop in the backyard of her apartment in Bushwick, Brooklyn, on Sept. 3. (Gardiner Anderson/for New York Daily News)

“If you told me five months ago it would be like this, I don’t know if I could have done it,” said Marcy Richardson, 40, an opera-singing acrobat and pole dancer who lost her regular gigs at theaters and clubs in Brooklyn and Manhattan when the spaces closed down in March.

Richardson’s work requires her to stay in tip-top physical condition, and she’s dedicated her time in quarantine to preparing for the moment city nightlife venues reopen.

“Basically, I’ve been running every day no matter how hot it is, I have my aerial hoop rigged in my backyard underneath the balcony, and my pole permanently installed in the living room … taking care of body and mind so I’m able to work when I get the opportunity,” she explained.

Richardson is tremendously frustrated by the fact that other businesses have been allowed to open up while nightlife remains shuttered, without any safety nets in place to support workers.

“My industry should be able to open up under CDC guidelines like every industry around me, or there should be some kind of plan for people like me. I feel like I’m not being given the option to go back to work, but I’m not being given the help I need, either.

“I feel like artists and the small businesses we work for in New York, I feel like we’ve been completely forgotten. I feel like we’ve been thrown to the wayside. I’m frustrated, I’m angry, I’m scared.”

To read the full article, click HERE

ABC

NEW YORK CITY (SBG) — For the final performance of the night at New York City supper club Duane Park, Opera Gaga shed a fur stole and a long white robe before climbing up onto an aerial hoop to enchant the audience below with her acrobatic tricks. Even more impressive was the fact that the hoop was suspended from the building's fire escape above the restaurant's sidewalk dining enclosure, and Opera Gaga, clothed in only a bedazzled bra and underwear with a sparkly mask to match, was braving the December weather to execute her routine. The guests were already sufficiently impressed with her expert moves that when she began to sing a stunningly beautiful operatic rendition of "O Holy Night," one diner turned to her table companion and loudly exclaimed, "Wow, she sings too?" with a tone of absolute awe.

If you follow Opera Gaga, whose real name is Marcy Richardson, on Instagram, you'll learn that she's also adept at juggling, her piano skills are top-notch, and she's an intelligent and outspoken voice in the fight to keep the performance industry alive amidst the lack of governmental support that many venues and entertainers in the city have received thus far. "While the rest of New York gets back to work, artists like me are getting left in the dust with no way to operate legally and no long-term plan to help us or the small arts businesses we work for," she wrote in a Sept. 23 post.

Richardson has been incredibly transparent on social media with regard to the ways in which the pandemic has affected her mental health. In the early days of quarantine, she used studio lighting within her apartment to recreate the experience of a live show for virtual events and tried to stay positive that performing over Zoom would be an adequate substitution for in-person events. The comments that audience members wrote during her Zoom shows became a new form of applause, but when the meeting ended and the comments disappeared, all of the good feelings faded away as well. "My screen goes black, and I am there sitting alone in the dark in a costume feeling completely destroyed inside," she shared back in May.

"Participating almost makes me feel worse because it’s such a pathetic shred of what my life used to be. The stage is my home, my heart, and my life. I don’t know how much longer I can go on like this," Richardson continued in that same post.

Read the full article HERE