While touring with Valerie singer Tei Shi in 2023, Vogue Giambri suddenly lost her mother — a painful experience that only added to the whiplash of life on the road for the New York director. Giambri kept herself busy, though, filming Tei Shi on stage every night opening for Kimbra and journaling about the memories in-between cities.
Those personal entries would later become inspiration for a play she wrote and directed, called I Can’t Make Sense, grappling with death and starring Tei Shi as herself. Late January, the “dark comedy about mommy issues,” as Giambri describes it, ran for five sold-out shows at NYC’s Studio 17 with a live jazz band.
“I’d been dreaming of doing jazz club-style Tei Shi shows for a long time, but couldn’t quite get anyone to see the vision with me and once I met Vogue it gave me the reassurance that I was onto something there,” Tei Shi says. “Coming in to perform my songs with a new group of jazz musicians Vogue had brought together for the play felt completely natural and made so much sense for me.”
Below, the two reflect with their friend Dean DiCriscio about the DIY, dream-like play that Tei Shi says felt like her Broadway debut.
Dean DiCriscio: I saw the play for the first time with my family. I went in fully blind, which was cool, because I usually know everything that you’re doing.
Vogue Giambri: I say it’s a dark comedy about mommy issues.
Dean: It’s truly mind blowing knowing you, and then having seen this whole trajectory of your career and the tangible growth. I felt truly overwhelmed, and me and my mom were crying the whole time, which I don’t really feel like I’m a crier. That shit was heavy.
Vogue: The fact that people cry in the very beginning when [Tei Shi] sings, right? It starts immediately and I feel like there’s a whiplash of emotions.
Dean: The beginning was sadder for me than the end. It was an interesting storyline where you are brought into this insane experience. You’re having these overwhelming emotions, and then by the end, you’re rooting for this person. And it doesn’t end in a way that’s necessarily positive, but you’re feeling a weight lifted.
Vogue: The play opens up with the deepest pain, and Tei Shi’s there hovering over the main character, who’s going through the worst at the very beginning. And then you’re all of a sudden introduced to all these people who are guiding you.
Dean: You did the show once before, right?
Vogue: In London after [Tei Shi] and I were on tour. Remember how I was scared to go on tour, and I was like, “Should I go on tour? I don’t know who this girl is,” and you were like, “You’re an idiot if you don’t go on tour with her.”
Dean: Yeah, I was scream-singing [Tei Shi’s] music for years.
Tei Shi: I know Dean is literally the reason that you came on tour the first time we met, which was the only time we ever met before we were on tour together. You were like, “My friend Dean said I’d be an idiot if I didn’t.”
Dean: I didn’t know the show wasn’t written for [Tei Shi]. It felt that complete seeing it, it felt so right. Can you explain how that happens?
Tei Shi: I wasn’t in the London one, so that was a different iteration.
Vogue: But that one was like a workshop because we were on tour. I was writing the play in the middle of the tour, and then I wrote it in three months and convinced everyone to go to London to put up this show. I changed the Tei Shi character to Victoria Thatcher. I remember thinking, Should I just call her Tei Shi?
Tei Shi: I remember, I thought we were doing Victoria Thatcher when I came and when we started doing rehearsals, everybody was like, “Tei Shi this, Tei Shi that.” And I was like, I guess that makes sense, but Victoria Thatcher was like an alter ego.
Vogue: Yeah, Victoria Thatcher, in other renditions, will be like all sorts of modern pop stars of the day.
Dean: I love the format of the show with [Tei Shi] in it. It feels like something that I could see duplicated in a million different iterations. Or you guys could go on tour with this, which would be so cool, because it’s like a concert that’s made in a dream.
Tei Shi: You literally are part of that process, because you are the reason she came on tour with me.
Vogue: And I literally stole Dean’s words and they’re in the play. One time Dean and I got into a fight and he said, “You’re so disrespectful and rude and nasty.” [Laughs]
Tei Shi: She can be. [Laughs]
Vogue: Back to the London rendition of [Tei Shi] not being in it — I was watching the show with a mindset of, How can this be better? What am I gonna do next time? What is gonna level up this play to be everything I dream? Because I’m obsessed with jazz, I love poetry, I love fashion, I love live music, I love Tei Shi. The whole concept of the play is that this horrible thing happens to her while she’s on tour, but you have to understand what the feeling was like being on tour — every night listening to live music, right?
Tei Shi: The same songs over and over, very intense. We were on tour with Kimbra and she was touring an album that was very heavy, emotional, and there were these songs about motherhood and daughters. It was very, very intense.
Dean: How did you guys pick the music for the show?
Vogue: She was like, “I hate you. You’re making me do all my hard songs,” where she’s wailing. What made [tour] extra magical is that it’s not only great music, but Tei Shi is an amazing performer, and she’s head banging and laughing and cat walking and screaming. The thing that I love about this spontaneous, chaotic style of work is that she has that spontaneous psychotic thing too. [The play] needed to be everything — it needed to be fast jazz, the lighting needed to change constantly. There was supposed to be no breath, every actor was supposed to jump off the other person, and then it’s Tei Shi screaming and then someone’s crying. It needed to mirror what the tour was like, which was us waking up at two o’clock, going to eat, going into the venue and doing sound check, then getting ready for the show. It was constant, no breath. And when you’re grieving in a place like that, there is no time to sit on it. It’s constant, everyday traveling.
Tei Shi: We also did a [show] last year in LA and I sang a few songs. I did “Cry Me a River” and that was during my peak Barbara [Streisand]. So [Vogue] asked me to do that one again for the beginning of the play, and then you chose the songs of mine that you wanted me to do, which I think were right.
Dean: When you were on your knees wearing that wig that went down to the fucking ground, it was so amazing. First of all, the glam, we have to talk about the glam and the look.
Tei Shi: That is a persona that was also personified while we were on tour together, and the videos we did after. That wig was like a character.
Vogue: We met her on tour.
Dean: The song when you were on your hands, how does that one go?
Tei Shi: “How Far.” Some of those songs are so far back in my repertoire that it’s fun because I get to recontextualize them. In the setting of the play, the song takes on a different meaning, which is fun for me. And then we added an unreleased song at the end that I had sitting around. I sent it to [Vogue] after I read the script and I was like, “This song, I never finished it, but it is perfect for it.” We only ended up using one part. As the house is falling apart, it’s narrating it in a way.
Vogue: She’s watching this tidal wave coming straight for the building and she can’t help but feel okay with it — that everything is gonna come down.
Dean: What was the first song when you read the script that you were like, “This song makes sense for this show”?
Tei Shi: I think “Falling From Grace” makes a lot of sense.
Vogue: Technically, that didn’t come out yet, that wasn’t on tour. When you dropped that song, I remember saying to you, “This one’s emotional. This song makes me want to cry.” You say, “Cut me open.”
Tei Shi: And you literally have a line in the play where she’s like, “Cut me open.” There’s so many things that locked into place, even for me, as we were doing the show where it was like, that line completely makes sense with this line in my song. — little moments like that.
Vogue: “How Far” was so important to me because that was the first song that I saw [Tei Shi] head banging and wailing. I was like, “Holy shit, this person is a powerhouse.” Then “Cry Me a River” was supposed to be the audience song, like ambient music, but it turned into people tearing up. You know what you’re about to get yourself into with that. The play needed “Falling From Grace” because it’s about loss, like I’m not ready to die and a little bit about motherhood. Then she gets her little camera and she’s taking pictures during “How Far” because she needs to capture the moment.
Dean: That meta element of the show was something that I found really interesting, where the characters were then aware that [Tei Shi] was there. You always have music as part of your shows, but this time the characters were aware of the music, which was an interesting format.
Vogue: It was supposed to feel like you’re in this surreal space.
Tei Shi: That’s how that tour felt, too, because you were on tour with me, taking photos and video and filming me on stage every night. I was performing for you and the camera that then worked its way into the play.
Vogue: I’m also thinking about the camera being a character.
Tei Shi: When we were on tour, I would be performing to an audience, but also performing to the camera. Vogue was literally crawling on stage behind me and on the floor, taking photos of me.
Dean: Does it feel different [than tour]? The sound was amazing.
Tei Shi: I think people responded to the rawness and the immediacy of it, because if I’m doing a Tei Shi show I’m doing a full sound check. I know the people I’m playing with, I have my tracks lined up, everything is locked in. For this, I obviously had an amazing band, but we didn’t really have a lot of time to practice. It was kind of like doing karaoke, bare bones, but that was what was so cool about it — I got to really sing.
Dean: It felt like I was listening to you perform in a really independent way, like being brought behind the scenes.
Vogue: I was sending [the main character] all these videos of us during sound check, where I’m just vibing behind [Tei Shi]. It was just us getting to hang out.
Tei Shi: [Tour] was literally us getting stoned and taking funny videos and photos, and making all our shit together.
Vogue: We got Isaac [Davidson] to do the hair for the play. And I was like, “We need to bring the long wig out for Tei Shi,” but I want the character who plays the half-sister to have shitty extensions. We told the glam person that she needs to have fucked up fake eyelashes. She needs to be this real Jersey girl. What I didn’t get to do in London are all the dreamy things, the glam. It was bare in London.
Dean: You also had set design [in New York].
Tei Shi: When you described London as a workshop, that makes a lot of sense. [New York] felt like the first play, your debut.
Vogue: And it was everything. It started out with Tei Shi bringing the heartbreak and then it opens with, “I fucking hate my mom,” and people laugh. There’s so many jarring moments like that. I really wanted to simulate that things are funny and heartbreaking at the same time, so it was really cool to watch it all come together. And there’s so many words too, so a big thing was like, I hope everyone can get off book. We only had two weeks.
Tei Shi: I still can’t believe it.
Vogue: Two weeks to rehearse and the band came in a week before everything. I texted [Tei Shi], “Listen, we’re divinely protected.”
Tei Shi: That’s what you said to me and I was like, “Okay, amen.”
Vogue: Everything happens for a reason and we’re all here together. We didn’t have money to put this up, we didn’t have a budget at all. Everyone getting paid came out of ticket sales after, so everyone jumped on this knowing that we were just trying to do this crazy, weird thing. And everyone did bigger than I could ever imagine. It just felt like Broadway.
Tei Shi: In my head, I was like, I just had my debut on Broadway.
Dean: Going back to the outfits, this show you owned being a Jersey girl.
Vogue: And I never do.
Dean: She used to be ashamed that she was from Jersey and I was like, “Who cares?” We’re both Jersey girls. Jersey girls have each other’s back, especially in New York. No one fucks with someone from New Jersey.
Vogue: No, exactly.
Dean: The way that you portrayed the characters was a real representation of the people that we grew up with and the way that we all dressed — like, Cookie Monster PJs.
Vogue: My mom was eccentric for her time, and her style and makeup and inspirations were so ’80s colorful, so I told [the team], “I want it to be ’80s nostalgic.” The sister wearing bangles, the mint green carpet, the VHS. My mom was very into staying home and watching scary movies, but it also needed to feel like this house was abandoned. You know that scene in The Notebook when they have sex, like that house, it’s dusty and broken. Also, the plastic on the ceiling.
Tei Shi: It was kind of giving construction, like a bit of work in progress.
Vogue: But it’s this abandoned space, this abandoned idea, and then it’s falling apart.
Dean: Talk about the experience of writing a show through your own perspective.
Vogue: I had a tour diary. I was like, I’m gonna write in this notebook every day. So I literally had proof of that time: February 2023, two years ago. I almost didn’t miss any days until when my mom died, there’s a big empty week. When I went to start writing the play, I was like, Let me start with my tour diary, so a lot of those entries are actual entries from me living in that moment. I think that’s what brings that raw emotion, because it is super real.
And the fact that it’s actually Tei Shi and you get to experience what it was like watching her every night, how could you be depressed? My mom died and [Tei Shi] was like, “You don’t have to work today,” and I was, “Well, I need to.” And then for an hour you get to just fucking sing and feel and forget. And then you get on the bus, and then the next day happens again. So I really wanted to somehow have those feelings come up for other people [in the play].
Photography: Elinor Kry