New York artist Rachel Mason performs live in Tacoma, Olympia with her rock-opera film

When “The Lives of Hamilton Fish” screens at The Grand Cinema in Tacoma and Olympia’s Le Voyeur Café Sunday, it won’t be your average indie movie experience. For starters, it’s a bizarre story about two men in U.S. history — one a political force for good, the other a horrific killer — who happened to share the same name. Secondly, the film (which garnered rave New York reviews) is all music: a rock-opera written and directed by New York artist and musician Rachel Mason, who also stars in the film as the gritty 1930s news editor who digs up both men’s stories.

But there’s one more element that makes this a truly multimedia experience: Mason will perform the whole score live, singing over the soundtrack with Seattle band Night Cadet.

“It’s totally beautiful,” says Mason, who’s on tour with the film this month from Bellingham to Portland, and who dresses as the zoot-suited, fedora-wearing editor for the performance. “One of my favorite experiences with touring this film is I get to play (the music) with other people.”

Mason’s music — a folksy rock sound with haunting lyrics and her sometimes-ethereal, sometimes-jagged vocals — is evocative enough in itself, a full-length guitar-laden score that tells the story of the two men’s parallel lives through their own voices, sung by Mason. The visuals are a suspenseful blend of dim interior shots of each man and highly-choreographed fantasies that drive their actions, always cutting back to Mason as the war-striped editor at her typewriter, inhabiting both stories.

But it’s the bizarre coincidence at the heart of “The Lives of Hamilton Fish” that drives every creative aspect of it — and in fact, inspired Mason in the first place. Teaching art in New York state’s Sing Sing prison, she came across the story of a man called Hamilton (later Albert) Fish, a serial killer who was executed there on Jan. 16, 1936. While researching his story, Mason discovered that another Hamilton Fish had died in New York just one day earlier — a scion of a prominent family, a speaker in the New York State Assembly and a member of the U.S. House of Representatives. The notice of both deaths ran side by side in the Peekskill Evening Star.

When Mason discovered the coincidence, she wrote a song about it.

“It wasn’t in my mind to write an opera,” says the artist, who has an MFA in sculpting from Yale but no formal musical training, despite having written three operas and recorded 10 albums. “But one song led to another song and to a complete song cycle.”

Mason began performing the songs and giving a brief verbal background on the story. Audiences were fascinated. So when a small Philadelphia gallery asked her to do a show on the Hamilton Fish idea, she put together a video installation.

“People were still interested in finding out more,” Mason says. “So I thought, ‘I have enough for a film.’ I wrote a script, applied for funding and put my head down.”

As Mason admits, it’s unusual — she’s never formally studied filmmaking or made any other films. And it shows: The camera work is basic, the angles fairly static, the plot driven by emotion rather than action. But the unique merging of music with character conveys the paradox of these two parallel yet polar-opposite lives with arresting power.

“I approached it the way anyone does with characters,” says Mason. “You find a way to relate and empathize. With the most evil of characters it’s a troubling thing to do, but it makes us aware. With the ‘good’ Hamilton, I actually met the living version — Hamilton Fish V, who is a solid activist for a lot of things I believe in. But the name is a weight. It’s all over bridges in New York. Everyone knows it, like the Clintons today.

“With the killer Hamilton, there was depravity beyond measure. It’s frightening. But I worked in a psychiatric hospital for a while and in a prison, and with almost everybody there’s a place you relate to. You relate as a human. Albert Fish was extremely religious and probably abused as a child, and that combination I really stepped into, because I could understand that if you get a twisted image of the world … you could end up believing violence is holy.”

Seattle band Night Cadet will play the Northwest screenings with Mason, layering live music over the soundtrack while she sings the vocal line. And while Mason’s thrilled “The Lives of Hamilton Fish” will see upcoming screenings at London’s Raindance Festival and beyond, she’s also pleased she gets to perform it live.

“When you see it live, it’s like a quasi-religious experience,” she says. “You’re in this room with people and an unexpected, unique experience. There’s nothing that will replace that (aspect of live performance). That’s the magic, that’s what makes life in general worth living.”

This story was originally published September 16, 2015 at 6:15 AM with the headline "New York artist Rachel Mason performs live in Tacoma, Olympia with her rock-opera film."