SHOP: Still looking for that perfect gift? The Brooklyn Historical Society is holding the 4th Annual NY Creates Craft Fair, and they may have just what you're looking for. Check it out today and tomorrow, and it will be back the 22nd and 23rd for the real last-minute shoppers. Friday and Saturday // Noon to 6pm // BHS [128 Pierrepont St, Brooklyn] ART: Too much is going on the First Friday of every month, so......

MUSIC: If you aren't at your local hometown bar this Thanksgiving-eve, drinking with old high school buddies -- we suggest a sonic alternative. Tonight The Hold Steady and Art Brut do their best at making Terminal 5 feel a little bit cozier this holiday season. Buy tickets here. 7:30pm // Terminal 5 [610 W 56th St] // $30 MUSIC MOVIES: If you're sick and tired of the bands playing around town, go check out two......

Everybody wants to be a rock star, perhaps none more ardently than theater folk, some of whom have been prodding the form toward rock since the sixties. Sam Shepard famously insisted that he wanted to be a rock and roll star, not a playwright; recently the likes of theater company Les Freres Corbusier and playwright Adam Rapp (who moonlights in a band) have expressed a sensible desire to tap into the Bowery Ballroom demographic.......

There’s drama pinballing through the theater blogs this week, people! In a recent letter to subscribers, Carolyn Cantor, the director of Adam Rapp’s play Essential Self-Defense, took issue with Charles Isherwood’s “scathing” review in the Times. Isherwood has become something of a punching bag among theater bloggers for his perceived stodginess, and the review is, at times, unnecessarily ad hominem: “A self-conscious exercise in stagy attitudinizing, it could almost have been composed by a......

Playwright Adam Rapp etches elegantly bleak portraits of America’s young lost souls; his Red Light Winter was an Obie-winner and Pulitzer-prize finalist, Blackbird was recently adapted into a film which Rapp also directed. (He wrote and directed his first feature, Winter Passing, which starred Ed Harris, Zooey Deschanel and Will Ferrell.) Rapp’s published seven novels, plays in a band, and is not someone you’d want to play one-on-one basketball with to settle a bet. His......

Adam Rapp’s play Essential Self-Defense takes place in a Midwestern anytown where children have been steadily disappearing. In this self-described “grim fairy tale”, there are no clues to indicate the culprit; the townspeople (Klieg the butcher, Chuck the barber, Isaak the Russian custodian, Sorrell the punk librarian) are all eccentric but not particularly sinister. Rapp, to his credit, isn’t interested in whodunits; his focus here is the awkward courtship between the diminutive Sadie (brought to......

THEATER: Obie Award winner Adam Rapp has just unwrapped (sorry) his new play Essential Self-Defense at Playwrights Horizons. Set in a mean Midwestern town called Bloggs, the play has, fittingly, been generating big blog buzz. The “grim fairy tale” revolves around a disgruntled misfit “who takes a job as an attack dummy in a women’s self-defense class and finds himself mysteriously drawn to the repressed bookworm who’s beating on him. But all’s not well in......

THEATER: Adam Rapp’s Stone Cold Dead Serious is being revived at Theatre Row on the West Side. The surreally dark comedy deals with a struggling family on the outskirts of Chicago who pin their hopes on their video-game obsessed teenage son. The kid just has to put his skills on the line in a real-life fight-to-the-death video game competition. Fun fact: When Stone Cold Dead Serious was presented at Chashama in 2003, stagehands changed the......

So, as noted earlier this morning, the distance to Broadway’s mostly predictable yet hotly coveted trophies just got a little shorter for this year’s crop of shows, with feel-good musicals taking the lion’s share of recognition, though the reason for a theater climate in which History Boys so easily get beat down by Jersey Boys might also be that there are so few other History Boys. But we digress. So, turning back to our regularly......

Adam Rapp, Writer and Director...

It’s almost April, do you know where your Broadway mega-shows are? Cate Blanchett and Hedda Gabler got things off to a smash start, and the rest of the big guns are revving up: Tarzan, Lestat , Julia Roberts in Three Days of Rain, Ali MacGraw and Julianna Margulies in Festen…and more. We’ll spare you (and ourselves) the wallet strain and the eye-rolling – there are plenty of worthy littler shows crying out to be seen.......