Results tagged “samshepard”

It's the longest day of the year, so you should be able to fit Shepard Fairey's exhibit and at least one of the following events in.

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.

Sam Shepard once declared that he didn't want to be a playwright, he wanted to be a rock and roll star. So the current rock and roll revival of his 1972 play, The Tooth of Crime, would seem to be a perfect match for his ambitions.

READING: KGB Bar's Non-Fiction Night is playing host to the Subway

This week’s repertory options want to take New York moviegoers around the world and back again via the silver screen. But spring has finally sprung like so many daffodils in the new theatrical releases category as well, so there are lots to see all over the city this weekend.

On Sundays Gothamist runs opinion pieces relevant to life in New York and reviews of recent books and performances. The judgments expressed below are entirely those of the author.

A week or so ago, Gothamist saw this new play by Ronan Noone at the Irish Arts Centre, and we’ve been mulling it over since. Though Noone’s bio claims an influence of Sam Shepard, it’s impossible not to be reminded of Martin McDonagh (The Pillowman) and what he did with his Leenane trilogy, because The Blowin of Baile Gall is part of a Baile trilogy: the first entry, The Lepers of Baile Baiste, earned accolades a couple years ago in different venues around the country and then finally here last fall. Though we haven’t yet seen all of either playwright’s trilogies, they seem to share (in addition to a fondness for writing three-part examinations of the souls of Irish villages) a similar dark, brooding, thriller-thinker cross in their writing’s mood. For this production of Blowin, the actors are well up to the challenge of portraying their troubled, emotionally tangled characters, so that even if in the end the play itself seems slightly wanting, the experience of watching it is likely to stay with you and keep you thinking about it.

Gothamist can always get a sense of what shows are crash & burning and which are just plain sizzling by an occasional perusal of the theater tickets for sale/wanted listings on the oh mighty list o Craig. A browse today tells us the following:

Failure hurts, so there are a lot of miserable producers right about now, given the abundant number of Broadway shows which have recently posted closing notices. Sunday was the last day for Eve Ensler's The Good Body - we liked it, but it just didn't catch on with the masses. We can see how it wasn't exactly great date night fodder, but couldn't the city's female contingency keep it going a hair longer? On January 2nd, it's a double whammy for both Dracula The Musical and Bombay Dreams, each closing that day. Frankly, it's a miracle they lasted this long. Then it was announced that the Marsha Norman play 'Night Mother would be closing on January 9th. That one really didn't surprise us. Gothamist thought the acting (by Brenda Blethyn and Edie Falco) was stellar, but the play seemed melodramatic and dated. Playbill via Yahoo reports here on these and a few other shows also biting the dust.