Name: Samson Y Hiss' Carnival of Psychos
Start: 2025-09-25T20:00:00-07:00
End: 2025-09-26T21:00:00-07:00
Location: Oakstop - California Ballroom

A circus opera/play/theatre music brain melt featuring a live band of carnies.
About this Event

Carnival of Psychos

Calamitous carny, Samson Y Hiss, the award-winning composer and record-holding one-man band, brings his psychotic ooze of circus horror, opera, and theatre to Oakland. The theatrical experience features an original story, operatic vocals, circus performers, stunt artists, overhead projectors and a live band.

Patient 51 escapes an insane asylum, falls headfirst into a traveling carnival and flees across the desert from the authorities—a wake of vultures. Patient 51, a newly committed anarchist, endures experimental shock “therapy.” There's Manhattan, the militant head nurse who turns patients into guinea pigs. And Joplin, the carnival fairy and fearful employee of a traveling sideshow. Carnival of Psychos isn't a place, but a theatrical escape hatch into terror and lunacy.

Carnival of Psychos is an original theatrical performance featuring a live band of carnies. The last show Hiss staged in Oakland, One-Handed Witch, sold out and then shook the knickers off the country from here to Salem, MA. Now the carnival is coming, and with it … madness.

Story

The concept for this experience came after a trip to the Fremont Psychiatric Hospital and a call for an extraction. "5150" refers to an involuntary hold in a psychiatric facility for people who are deemed dangerous, or are gravely disabled from a mental health breakdown. Passing from the waiting room through a security door and encountering a carnival of noise, inspiration struck like a barbed needle.

Music

Hailing from Oakland, Hiss’ credits include One-Handed Witch, Poison Circus and Circus Screams, film and theatre works about witchcraft and mental illness. His cacophonous music is a roller coaster ride from beginning to end. The melodies dance and the trills thrill. Each piece of discordant music utilizing electric organ, saxophone, tuba and percussion featuring artists: Paul Dab (SF Opera) and Jordon Danley (OakTown Jazz).

Opera

Art songs, the hinges and catapults of a Hiss theatrical story, are performed by opera stars from the Bay Area and beyond. Stars from La Boheme and Willy Wonka. Joining the cast of Carnival of Psychos bringing the drama and window-shaking vibrato: Alex Taite (SF Opera), Nina Jones (SF Opera) and Adam Green (California Theatre).

Circus

Reputation precedes the hijinx and disaster follows the mayhem. Injecting Carnival of Psychos with reimagined classic acts and new sideshow stunts are masters of their craft, artists: Dizzy From Earlier (The Ruckus Revival) and Renée Sedliar (Circus Center).

Shadows

Immersed in a world of light and shadow, Italian shadow puppet artist of One-Handed Witch fame, Rita Deiola (Svegliati Europa) creates silhouette frames to be performed with an overhead projector for Carnival of Psychos. Life is breathed into psychotic scenes.