From Congo Square to Cinema Village: The Quiet Triumph of Cannabis! A Viper Vaudeville

A Show That Refuses to Pick a Lane

It opens with a hand drum and a question. Where did the music come from? Then a second drum, then a horn, then a verse delivered as much through the body as the voice — somewhere between spoken word, hip-hop, and what an old vaudeville barker would have called a turn. The performers, Baba Israel and Grace Galu, work in front of a small ensemble. The script moves from Congo Square in 1817 to a Harlem jazz club in 1934 to a Bronx block party in 1973 to a Brooklyn dispensary in 2026. The throughline, plainly stated: cannabis has been inside American music — particularly Black American music — for two hundred years, and the criminalization that drove it underground was never about the plant.

That's Cannabis! A Viper Vaudeville. It debuted in workshop form at La MaMa in early 2022, has toured intermittently since, and re-emerged this spring in a sharper, leaner version. On April 27, 2026, Israel and Galu staged a preview at Nublu on Avenue C — the Alphabet City room that has, for fifteen years, served as the closest thing New York has to a downtown jazz incubator. Tickets sold out in 72 hours. On May 4, the accompanying documentary — a 78-minute film built around tour footage, interviews with cultural historians, and the show's making — opened at Cinema Village on East 12th Street for a one-week run.

It is the rare cannabis cultural project that takes the plant entirely seriously without ever feeling like an advocacy reel.

The Source Text

The show's spine is Martin A. Lee's 2012 book Smoke Signals: A Social History of Marijuana — Medical, Recreational, and Scientific. Lee, who co-founded Project CBD, spent a decade reporting the book; it remains the most-cited single-volume history of cannabis in America. Israel and Galu optioned it for stage adaptation in 2020, in the middle of pandemic shutdowns, when both were running their nonprofit Soul Inscribed and looking for a project that could travel light — minimal cast, portable instruments, no fixed set.

The adaptation strips Lee's 500 pages to roughly a dozen pivot points: the arrival of cannabis in the Americas via the Atlantic slave trade; Mezz Mezzrow's role distributing high-grade marijuana in 1930s Harlem; Harry Anslinger's racially-coded marketing of the Marihuana Tax Act of 1937; Louis Armstrong's daily use; the LaGuardia Committee's 1944 report dismantling federal claims; the Nixon-era Shafer Commission whose decriminalization recommendation Nixon buried; the crack-era escalation that reshaped sentencing; the 1996 California ballot that opened the medical era; the 2012 Colorado/Washington ballots that opened the recreational era; the 2025–2026 federal rescheduling fight.

The trick of the show is that none of this lands as a lecture. The history is delivered as turns — a Mezzrow turn, an Anslinger turn, an Armstrong turn — interleaved with original songs that exist in conversation with the era they're scoring. The Anslinger turn is the only one staged as monologue. It is unsettling in a specific way: Israel performs Anslinger's actual congressional testimony, verbatim, and the room sits with how recent and how plainly racist the founding text of American drug policy actually is.

Who Baba Israel and Grace Galu Are

Israel grew up at La MaMa. His parents, Steve Ben Israel and Bibi Krause, were core company members of the Living Theatre — the experimental troupe that, by way of Julian Beck and Judith Malina, threaded the line between political theater and avant-garde performance for half a century. He came up between the East Village and the road, started as a hip-hop MC under the name BabaSoul, and eventually returned to La MaMa as an artist-in-residence and educator. He is, in the most literal sense, a child of downtown New York's experimental performance tradition. He treats hip-hop as continuous with that lineage, not a separate thing.

Galu is a singer, songwriter, and instrumentalist of Eritrean descent who has fronted Soul Inscribed for over a decade. She is the show's center of gravity musically — most of the original songs sit on her voice. Her vocal palette is closer to Nina Simone and Meshell Ndegeocello than to any contemporary R&B reference, which is unusual on a stage that's also doing hip-hop and live percussion.

Together they have built a piece that does what very few cannabis-related cultural projects manage: it puts Black cultural authorship at the center of the cannabis story without flattening that story into a single political argument.

What Happened at Nublu

The Nublu preview was billed as a workshop performance, but the room was treating it as something more. The audience was a downtown mix — a few jazz musicians, a couple of legacy theater names, several people from the city's dispensary licensing community, a handful of writers from outlets that have covered the cannabis-legalization arc since 2014. Vladimir Bibic, Nublu's founder, introduced the show himself. The set ran 90 minutes without intermission.

Two things stood out. The first was how willing the room was to sit with the more uncomfortable passages — the Anslinger monologue, the crack-era sentencing turn — without the show needing to lighten the mood. The second was how the original music actually lands as music, separately from the historical scaffolding. The single most-talked-about number was a slow Galu lead, accompanied only by upright bass and brushed snare, structured as a letter from an incarcerated person to a parent waiting for an expungement order. It got the longest sustained applause of the night.

The Cinema Village documentary, screening through May 11, is built around tour footage from the 2024–2025 run with new interviews recorded after the Nublu preview. It functions less as a making-of than as a parallel work — closer to a music documentary than a stage doc. Distribution conversations are ongoing; one festival programmer at the Nublu show was already asking about a fall slot.

Why This Particular Project Lands Now

Most cannabis-adjacent cultural work in the legalization era has fallen into one of two categories. The first is industry-funded brand storytelling: glossy short films about growers, dispensary openings, lifestyle reels, the high-end coffee-table books. They are competent and forgettable. The second is the recovery-and-justice documentary tradition: powerful, often heartbreaking, but tightly scoped to the criminal-legal record. What has been missing is cultural authorship that takes the cultural history on its own terms — not as backstory to a business or as evidence in a sentencing brief, but as the actual subject.

Viper Vaudeville sits in that gap. The title itself nods to the 1930s slang for a cannabis user — Mezzrow's Harlem clientele called themselves vipers — and to vaudeville as a form that, before its collapse in the 1940s, was where most of American popular performance was workshopped: Black, Jewish, Italian, Irish, immigrant. Israel and Galu are reclaiming an old performance grammar for a story that the industry version of the cannabis conversation usually skips over.

It is also, quietly, a New York story. Not a Colorado story, not a California story, not a Florida story. New York's adult-use market is now three years old; the licensing fight has been ugly and is not over; the social-equity program has worked in places and failed in others. Viper Vaudeville does not stage that argument directly. But the show is performed by New York artists, in New York rooms, in front of audiences who are watching their own city try to figure out what a legal cannabis culture is supposed to look like. That is part of what the work is doing, even when it is talking about 1934.

What's Next

Israel and Galu are in conversation with two regional theaters about full-production runs in the 2026–2027 season. The most likely first stop is a 200-to-300-seat house in either Brooklyn or the Bay Area, with a four-to-six-week sit-down rather than a touring schedule. The documentary's festival circuit will determine whether the film picks up theatrical distribution beyond the New York run. The original cast recording — the songs alone, without the historical interstitials — has been mixed and is awaiting a release window.

There is no real industry money in any of this. The show was funded by a mix of theater commissions, individual donors, and the artists' own touring income. The documentary was made on a budget that two people, working hard, could plausibly carry. Whatever happens next will happen the way downtown theater has always happened — slowly, room by room, on the strength of the work.

What it has already done is give the cannabis-legalization era something it did not previously have: a serious piece of art, made by serious artists, that treats the cultural history of the plant as worth two hundred years of music and theater training to render properly. That is a small thing and a big thing. The big version is that Viper Vaudeville will, in some quiet way, be the show that future scholars cite when they describe how the cultural side of the legalization era finally found its voice. The small version is just that Baba Israel and Grace Galu made a beautiful piece of theater and a beautiful film. Either way, you should go.

Cannabis! A Viper Vaudeville — next workshop dates TBA; the Cinema Village documentary screens through May 11, 2026.