Results tagged “opinions”

The Debate Society is a taut little theater triad comprised of director Oliver Butler and wizardly actors Paul Thureen and Hannah Bos. Their 2006 production, The Snow Hen, took a Norwegian folk tale about an abandoned girl and wove it into a charmingly dark tapestry of melancholy and mystique. Now they’re back at the Ontological Theater (Richard Foreman’s regular digs) with The Eaten Heart, an enchanting mood-play very loosely inspired by Giovanni Boccaccio’s 14th Century tome The Decameron, which packs in 100 stories told over the course of ten days by ten people killing time during the Black Plague.

On Saturday I found myself cycling through the drizzling rain to The World Financial Center, an office building on the western edge of the former World Trade Center site. The occasion was Lisa D’Amour and Katie Pearl’s astonishing site-specific performance piece, Bird Eye Blue Print, presented in several rooms in an abandoned office for small audiences of 22 at a time. Upon receiving my ticket in the building’s lobby, I was asked to jot down my “point of origin” on a scrap of paper and wait.

The Receipt, a charmingly subversive play by a pair of brilliant blokes in town for the Brits Off Broadway festival, is framed by a future archeologist’s analysis of one Alan Wiley, a contemporary Londoner – though colleagues believe the city may have been called something like Glondon – and his strange, quixotic quest to find the “owner” of a receipt that he picks up on the street. The story is the right-brain child of Will Adamsdale, who pours sweat as he embodies the Kafkaesque life of Wiley, racing to complete menial tasks for his boss while his mind is elsewhere, on that customer 24182 who purchased a couple of glasses of Chardonnay at Space Bar. His obsession ultimately costs him his job, but Wiley doesn’t seem to mind, for the receipt is calling him to a higher purpose.

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.

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 life with charming nuance by Heather Goldenhersh), a needy children’s books editor, and Yul (Paul Sparks), a Caulfieldian loner who works as an attack dummy in Sadie’s self-defense class. When Sadie knocks out Yul’s tooth during class, she leaps on her chance to launch a mack attack.

Lots of Broadway spectacles that promise “FUN!" amount to bloated, tuneless exercises in excess and enervation. So the New York premiere of Curtains, a murder-mystery musical comedy, serves as a rare example of all that can go right when a talented team of seasoned pros trust the time-tested basics of catchy songs, stellar dancing and breezy storytelling. And it’s a sign of how starved audiences are for solid musical theater that they roared with laughter at one-liners that were sometimes merely serviceable and exploded with applause after chorus numbers that would have been de rigueur for the Broadway of yesteryear.

When one thinks of King Lear, the image of a half-naked, feeble old man wailing away on a dark stage comes readily to mind. Shakespeare’s tragedy is typically performed as a bleak meditation on man’s helplessness in an inhospitable universe. So the current Public Theater production, starring Kevin Kline as Lear and Michael Cerveris as Kent, is something of a departure. From the haunting (but not heavy) Sondheim score to the colorful and inventive staging, this King Lear is almost defiantly buoyant.

There’s a boldly imaginative high-wire act happening the first week of every month at Greenwich Village’s Barrow Street Theatre. After a twenty minute bombardment of the loudest, most dreadful pre-show music ever, two men finally appear on a bare stage with no script and, for the next 50 minutes, dive headlong into the unknown without a net. Less seasoned pros might run the risk of a theatrical crash landing, but TJ Jagodowski and Dave Pasquesi aren’t called the Wright Brothers of improv for nothing.

It’s been said that one of the defining characteristics of punk rock – besides the anti-establishment attitude and DIY ethos – is the urge to transcend the barrier between the performer up on stage and the traditionally passive spectator. In that sense, there are few artists in today’s theater more punk than Wallace Shawn – which may come as a surprise to those who know him as “that guy” from such movies as The Princess Bride and Clueless.

Don’t tell the music bloggers, but Gloria Deluxe is one of the best kept secrets in New York’s indie-rock scene – even after opening for David Byrne at Bowery Ballroom. Armed to the teeth with – deep breath – guitar, trumpet, trombone, piano, drums, violin, viola, upright bass, accordion and the saw, the band has forged a cohesive yet eclectic sound that somehow manages to swing, rock and groove without collapsing under its own weight. It all hangs together on the distinctively charming voice of Cynthia Hopkins, who plays accordion and writes the music and lyrics.

At its best, Michael Puzzo’s two-character comedy, The Dirty Talk, blows by with a breezy jokiness that’s laugh-out-loud funny, but my periodic chuckling proved no match for the explosions of raucous laughter that repeatedly rocked the house.

In the weeks after 9/11, when Operation Infinite Justice (later re-branded Enduring Freedom) readied vengeance for peasants in Afghanistan, there were several writers who immediately stood out by simply noting the truth amidst an avalanche of jingoism. One that springs readily to mind is Arundhati Roy, who wrote in an article on September 29, 2001: “Witness the infinite justice of the new century. Civilians starving to death while they're waiting to be killed.”

If our global warming trend continues and dog days of January (yesterday’s high: 72) become the norm, one unanticipated side effect may be the prospect of a year-round stuffy theater season. Those who frequent off-Broadway theater have learned to accept their sticky fate in the summer, but the notion of theatrical sweat lodges through January is sure to separate the men from the boys.

It sounds like an open and shut case: A hip London theater company snatched up some funny short stories by Woody Allen and adapted them for the stage, adding live jazz to punch things up. The stories feature a private dick named Kaiser Lupowitz and absurd cases like the search for the missing Almighty and women of the night who’ll talk Proust for a price. Murder Mystery Blues was a hit when it premiered across the pond, and a transfer to Allen-town seemed like a capital idea.

After retrieving your ticket for The Fortune Teller at the HERE Arts Center box office – and I suggest doing that soon – you’ll be instructed to exit the building and head west, following a faded red line along the sidewalk. This leads to a door, which opens onto a staircase, down which you'll descend to a corridor and, finally, the lobby for the dainty theater. It’s a mysterious and fitting beginning to this macabre marionette show that’s been extended through December 22nd, after an initial sold-out run.

Durango, Julia Cho’s subdued melodrama currently running at The Public Theater, casts a bland eye on the ever-deceptive American Dream, as experienced by one shattered Korean-American family. The story (which could also be subtitled Near-Death of a Salesman) begins with the firing of Boo-Seng Lee (James Saito), the family’s reticent patriarch, after twenty years of thankless service as a non-descript mid-level bean-counter.

Jude Narita’s solo show Walk the Mountain, currently running at Theater for the New City, delves into the horrors endured by women who survived the Vietnam War and the Khmer Rouge. The text of the play is inspired by interviews Narita conducted with Vietnamese and Cambodian women; throughout the performance she plays a wide variety of roles to create a detailed portrait of human suffering.

When the young Georg Buchner died in 1837, he left behind his unfinished working class tragedy Woyzeck, which was inspired by the real-life story of convicted criminal J.C. Woyzeck, a soldier who had become unemployed, homeless and hallucinatory. Before being sentenced to death for the murder of his lover, the medical examiner dismissed Woyzeck's mental illness as mere social deviancy.

Adam Bock’s The Thugs is a trenchant little study of office eccentricity currently filling in at Soho Rep. I say “little” not just because the play clocks in and out in under an hour, but also because there really isn’t much in the way of dramatic payoff. Temps come and go, bodies pile up on other floors, somebody gets shoved down the stairs, but ultimately the office manager is always there to drive her staff back to the status quo of their menial tasks. And then it's time to go home.

: An Autobiography of Valentino Achak Deng, A Novel by Dave Eggers?

For anyone who flies out of Newark, this is some distressing news: The Transportation Security Administration conducted 22 security tests at Newark Liberty International Airport, only for the Newark screeners to fail 20 of them. The Star-Ledger noted some of the problems:

One of the security officials familiar with last week's tests said screeners at Newark missed fake explosive devices that were hidden under bottles of water in carry-on luggage, taped beneath an agent's clothing and concealed under a leg bandage another tester wore.

Continue reading "Newark Screeners Might Just Suck"

, which had at least the benefit of still being a well-crafted spy novel until the third act.

But when the night of the performance came I got cold feet. As if anybody needed reminding, the local media outlets had spent the week gleefully trumpeting the news that bed bugs were back in a big way. The Tower of Babel beds would switch occupants 14 times a night. Would the linens be changed after every performance? (Would the sheets be tucked or un-tucked?)

I consider myself a pretty seasoned reader. I can find things amusing, or witty, or well-written, and basically keep it to myself until I’m ready to review the book.

Don’t be alarmed by the synthesized arena-rock Muzak piped into the house before “Esoterica”, Eric Walton’s solo show of magic and mentalism. “Arrested Development” fans may get the feeling they’re in for a long night of cheesy, Gobian gimmickry, but any similarities begin and end with the tacky taste in music - a trait mysteriously shared by virtually all magicians.

“Never Swim Alone” is a swift, funny satire about two Alpha-males and their ruthless competition for the title of Top Dog. The play is structured as a surreal egotistic boxing match: Frank and Bill, two guys in dark suits and bad ties, square off in a 13 round Battle Royale of vicious undermining and one-upmanship.

It shouldn't be a shock to anyone to hear that an executive at Starbucks has a better work environment than a lowly barista. Other than higher pay and a far sweeter benies package, Gothamist imagines the Starbucks executive enjoys a quiter, less asshole-ridden workday (maybe). While to hear that there is a 2-class system for nursing moms on the job there is not surprising, it is still disturbing. Whereas the executive has a comfy and well-equipped lactation room at her disposal, the coffehouse worker has to use the bathroom during her break (assuming their isn't some undesirable in there clogging up the works).

Today in the Fringe Festival 89 of the 200+ shows for 2006 are on view. There is most assuredly something for everyone – just have a look at the listings. And here are five more reviews (see also seven from last weekend and four from yesterday), of Suicide, the Musical, Fatboy Romeo, The Yellow Wallpaper, Their Wings Were Blue, and Armageddon Dance Party, the last of which is going straight to the top tier of our recommendation list. Search for and buy tickets online, or go to Fringe HQ at 27 Mercer St., or call 212.279.4488. A week in the festival remains, but it will go fast!

Photo from Big Doolie by Stephen Kunken.

Open House; Nutmeat: A Fairytale Burlesque; House; The French Defense; The Bicycle Men; Hugging the Shoulder; and The Day the Universe Came Closer. Complete schedules and tickets for all are located on the Fringe listing site.