Taylor Mac’s 24-Decade History of Popular Music (2023)

Taylor Mac’s 24-Decade History of Popular Music captures a 24-hour, one-time-only concert performed in New York in 2016 by New York artist, theatre legend and drag royal Taylor Mac, accompanied by a 24-piece orchestra. The immersive theatrical experience offered an alternative take on 240 years of US history, narrated through the popular music of each of those 24 decades. 

From the Oscar-winning director-producer team of Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman, the HBO documentary film has a 100% critics’ rating on Rotten Tomatoes and won the 2024 Primetime Emmy for Outstanding Costumes for Variety, Nonfiction or Reality Programming for costume designer Machine Dazzle. 

The concert itself put Mac among the finalists for the 2017 Pulitzer Prize for Drama and was #5 among the 50 Best Theatre Shows of the 21st Century over at The Guardian, where they called it an “explosive, spectacular, heartbreaking ‘dandy revenge’,” saying, “It took 24 hours over four nights for Mac to complete his queer retelling of American history, and it was still too short.”