Results tagged “theater”

One of the most memorable plays we saw last year was The Walworth Farce, a pitch-black comedy by Irish playwright Enda Walsh. The story concerned a menacing father who every day forces his two sons to join him in performing a farcical play he wrote about a phony brain surgeon's attempt to cheat his estranged brother out of his inheritance. In that frenzied, hysterical production, the family's shabby apartment doubled as their stage, and all nine parts were played by the housebound men, as a sort of elaborate domestic ritual for an audience of none.

       

He materializes upstage wearing dark skirts, some sort of plastic tube stuffed in his mouth, his hair tied in a spiky pony-tail, a plastic duck in a birdcage hugged to his chest. The classic Chordettes oldie Mr. Sandman is playing, and in a flash we're once again transported to Foremanland, a singular dimension of feverish theatrical provocation, devoid of conventional narrative but rich with humor and deliciously inspired tableaux.

East Village actor and director Sturgis Warner isn't just facing eviction from his apartment of more than 30 years — in a theatrical twist that adds insult to injury, he might get kicked out of his home by the producers of the Blue Man Group. In 2001, the moneymen behind the indigo-hued performance troupe purchased the building that houses their theater on Lafayette Street's Colonnade Row, where the 59-year-old thespian has lived in a fifth floor walk-up since 1978. Since then, the producers have been buying out tenants to convert the residences into their own apartments, a move that housing laws allow.

Since it's impossible to attend a theatrical performance these days without some bonehead's cell phone shattering the mood, this incident during a recent performance of A Steady Rain isn't exactly news. But what's surprising is how intense actor dudes Daniel Craig and Hugh Jackman restrain themselves from leaping into the audience and thrashing the culprit to within an inch of his or her inconsiderate life. Also surprising is how long the friggin' cell phone rings—even after the frustrated stars stop the performance to beg the owner to shut it off. It's just so painfully awkward to watch, you have to wonder: How many celebrities have to be interrupted before we get those cell phone jammers like theatergoers in civilized Russia enjoy?!

On an old steam-propelled, decommissioned U.S. Coast Guard vessel docked at Pier 40 on the Hudson, 2009’s most exhilarating theatrical achievement (thus far) can still be experienced, and it doesn’t cost a dime. Called The Confidence Man and inspired by Herman Melville’s 1857 novel of the same name, this enthralling production is the work of Woodshed Collective, a company that specializes in immersive, site-specific performance. Last year they filled the vast, empty McCarren Park pool with their acclaimed play-with-music Twelve Ophelias, and their new venture is even more ambitious: The show's comprised of multiple, intertwined narratives performed simultaneously on all four levels of the rusty, labyrinthine vessel, named the Lilac. Like life, it’s impossible to see the whole story from every angle, and what you see is up to you.

As you first venture north across the Harlem River, comfortably ensconced in a retro charter tour bus, a voice inquires, "Are you wondering where we're going? When we get there will you think—This is nice. This is new. This is old. This is urban. These are the real people. These are the other people. This is the old New York... whatever. You shouldn't think." For such a thought-provoking journey, that's a funny instruction, but it seems intended to dispel any preconceived notions about the destination, one of the five poorest congressional districts in the United States. That would be the South Bronx, and the voice is addressing you through headphones provided by the Foundry Theatre, a company with seemingly boundless inspiration and ingenuity.

The first New York revival of Tony Kushner’s Pulitzer Prize and Tony Award-winning two-part epic work, Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes, will be staged by Signature Theatre Company as part of their 20th anniversary season in 2010-2011. Signature, which devotes an entire season to a single playwright's work, announced that part one, Millennium Approaches and part two, Perestroika, will run in repertory; the theater also plans to have performance days where the plays (each three and a half hours) are presented back to back. As usual with Signature, all tickets for the initial run will be sold for $20, thanks to a grant from Time Warner.

It can sometimes spell trouble when an Off-Off Broadway production features cast members of a certain age; seniors willing to perform for peanuts have been known to sink otherwise competent ensembles with an awkward amateurishness. It's hard to say whether Rae C. Wright is in fact an AARP card-carrier—she's in impeccable shape, for one thing—but her appearance in Tina Satter's sort-of-musical Family initially gave me pause. It shouldn't have. Far from scuttling the show into a community theater morass, she electrifies Satter's enjoyably daffy production with an incisive, intelligent humor, portraying the matriarch (Mum) of a once-prominent family in decline.

Yesterday we got a press release about the new Martin McDonagh (The Pillowman) play coming to Broadway in March, A Behanding in Spokane. Intriguiging title, and sounds cool, we thought. Well! The release promised "an all-star cast of four," and now Variety reports that Chris Rock, Sam Rockwell and Zoe Kazan "are all said to be eying roles in the play." The black comedy, McDonagh's first set in America, is described as "a man searching for his missing hand, two con artists out to make a few hundred bucks, an overly curious hotel clerk, and the rest is up for grabs." Whatever, it could be about rollerskating zoo animals and we'd still shell out Times Square ticket prices to watch Rock and Rockwell square off live. And Kazan's not exactly a lightweight, either; she more than held her own alongside an adrift Peter Sarsgaard in The Seagull last season. This would be Rock's first legit run on Broadway, aside from his one-off appearance in the 24 Hour Plays a couple years ago. Could this be our new Passing Strange? We're already obsessed, people. [Via The Playlist]

While performing in a Maine summer stock production of As You Like It back in 2006, a few theater buddies noticed a roadside greasy spoon for sale and wondered: Wouldn't it be a gas if a troupe of avant garde performance artists bought the place and turned it into an experimental "dinner theatre"? Three years later, the fantasy has been fully realized as a five course celebration of kooky transgression—they didn't buy the place but took the name (Conni's) and ran with the idea, setting up residency at the Bushwick Starr in, well, Bushwick. But last week they invaded Manhattan for a four night stand at the Ohio Theater on Wooster Street, as part of the Soho Ice Factory Festival.

Adaptations of Lewis Carroll's 1865 novel Alice's Adventures in Wonderland are legion, and allusions in pop culture innumerable; with its barely concealed drug references, the story became particularly popular in the far-out '60s, most famously with Jefferson Airplane's psychedelic hit "White Rabbit." The latest riff on the tale, from multimedia theater troupe Anonymous Ensemble, incorporates live rock, simultaneous video projection, clowning, acrobatics, and modern dance to tell the tale of 34-year-old Alice, a frustrated administrative assistant who's watching her dreams of fame fade away.

     

If you don't know who Cynthia Hopkins is yet, you will sooner or later—the multi-instrumentalist-singer-songwriter-dancer-actor-playwright (I'm sure I'm missing something) with the distinctively sly voice ought to be headlining Webster Hall, not just opening for David Byrne. (Not that headlining St. Ann's Warehouse is anything to sneeze at, either.) Nevertheless, even if you think you know Cynthia Hopkins, you'll probably still be surprised by the deeply personal way she reveals herself in the unsparing second half of The Success of Failure (or, The Failure of Success), which concludes her convoluted and captivating Accidental Trilogy. But more on that later.

An old tow truck warehouse near the Gowanus Canal might not seem like such a likely location to take in some elegantly highbrow dance/theater, but when you think about it, abandoned industrial spaces have often provided fertile ground for avant-garde performance troupes (The Wooster Group and Radiohole are the first two that come to mind). Still, you'll be pleasantly surprised by the rococo splendor that awaits you inside the Brooklyn home of Company XIV, where their second production, Le Serpent Rouge, unfolds under a lavishly designed, pressed tin proscenium and shimmering curtain.

The office—that overly-lit, frigid warren of tedium where many of us fritter away the best years of our lives—continues to be a source of inspiration for writers, who in recent years have mined cubicles for comedy in works like Office Space, The Office, and The Thugs. The latest worthy addition to the canon comes from Ethan Coen, one half of the famously idiosyncratic filmmaking duo. Last season Coen had a hit with his Off Broadway debut Almost an Evening, a funny exploration of existentialism, religion and homicide neatly divided into three short plays. His newest theatrical venture, Offices, uses the same short play format to skewer the competitiveness, anxiety, and alienation of corporate culture. It's the perfect antidote for anyone suffering from a case of the Mondays.

The 2009 Tony Award nominees were announced this morning, and competition for a nod was particularly intense this year because the 2008-09 theater season saw the highest number of new Broadway plays, musicals, and revivals in 25 years—and an unusually large percentage of them weren't just flashy drivel. Take for example, reasons to be pretty, Neil LaBute's stirring relationship-wreckage play: the Broadway production nabbed three desperately-needed Tony nominations—including Best Play and one for Gothamist crush Marin Ireland—but the show is hanging by a thread at the Lyceum Theatre, filling just 30% of the house last week.

Toward the end of La Didone, the latest multidisciplinary mash-up from the indefatigable Wooster Group, one vampire alien says to a captive astronaut, "Just let one of us join you. It will give you this wonderful new complexity." The line's an obvious metaphor for director Elizabeth LeCompte's conceit, a juxtaposition of the 17th century Italian opera Didone with kitschy 1965 sci-fi horror flick Planet of the Vampires. Yet, just as the alien's promise of "wonderful new complexity" is merely a ruse to latch onto another host body, LeCompte's spectacle feels like an elaborately empty shell, seeking a spirit to animate it. La Didone is more fussy than complex, and "wonder" isn't exactly what it's full of.

It was one year ago that irreverent theater company Banana Bag & Bodice presented New Yorkers with The Fall and Rise of The Rising Fallen, a rock musical which told the intriguing yet aurally execrable story of an oil rig's house band. They've now resurfaced with another offbeat musical extravaganza, and I'm happy to report that this production, which uses the epic poem Beowulf as a narrative template, is a far more successful fusion of rock and non-narrative theater. Credit for that goes to composer Dave Malloy, whose anthemic, bruising score is jubilantly performed by a sprawling onstage orchestra of brass, strings, piano, accordion, guitar, drums and saw.

I never saw First Blood in the theater; I was seven when it was released. But I vividly recall my first exposure to the movie, which occurred a few years later when I caught a glimpse over the shoulders of older cousins watching it on VHS during a family barbecue. I was soon yanked away, but not before the image of a bloody Sylvester Stallone screaming in anguish was imprinted on my ten-year-old mind. Who knows exactly which scene it was—Stallone's bloody and screaming throughout—but it definitely made an impact, as it has on actor Zachary Oberzan, whose 80 minute play Rambo Solo consists entirely of his retelling of First Blood's story.

Could the beloved, longest-running movie house in the nation be saved? The NY Post reports that the 91-year-old Ridgewood Theatre in Queens, on the block for $14 million last year after closing (a price that went down), will reopen partly as a theater.

At 91, Arthur Laurents seems endowed with better acuity, instincts and vitality than most Americans one-fourth his age. At least, that's the impression one draws from his mostly exhilarating revival of West Side Story, which Laurents has brought back to Broadway somewhere in between reviving an award-winning of production of Gypsy and skiing in St. Moritz. The West Side Story that opened Thursday night at the gigantic old Palace Theater is traditional where it matters—faithfully recreating Jerome Robbins's transporting choreography—and unorthodox where it doesn't; some scenes, for example, are performed almost entirely in Spanish without supertitles.

Is it possible for a show to be simultaneously entertaining and annoying? Such is the paradox presented by Elizabeth Swados and Erin Courtney's propulsive opera Kasper Hauser at the Flea Theater. The performances by this talented young cast are uniformly excellent, the staging is mesmerizing, the music is fun and engrossing, and yet... at the nexus of all this dazzling theatricality is the title character, a pigeon toed half-wit with a tendency to drool and babble incoherently. He's sitting onstage as one enters the theater, manically rolling a toy horse back and forth and back and forth and back and forth. The performance was delayed on the night I attended, and after about 15 minutes I began fantasizing about jumping onstage and stomping the squeaky-wheeled toy to bits. That irritation never really abated, though it was balanced out by Swados's stellar score and dynamic direction.

Most of us associate Our Town with unbearably earnest high school drama club productions, or reruns of that very special "Growing Pains" episode in which Mike and Boner get cast in the play and Mike decides he wants to be a professional actor while wearing a regrettable vest. But Chicago director David Cromer, who won an OBIE for last year's Adding Machine, has come to wrest Thornton Wilder's 1938 play back from the tween stage hogs. His inspired interpretation remains faithful to Wilder's intriguing blend of naturalism and formal deconstruction, while also eschewing the hokey, Norman Rockwell sentimentality that's de rigueur for amateur productions.

The National Theater of the United States of America [NTUSA] is not an official, federally-sanctioned performance troupe, but that's a trivial detail. This mischievous gang of innovators represents some of the best attributes of downtown "experimental" theater, and in the eight or nine years since their first production—a neo-vaudevillian romp staged in the tiny basement of a Times Square deli—they've come to earn their tongue-in-cheek title. That Obama's stimulus package doesn't allocate more financing for their endeavors is an outrage!

In the century and change since Henrik Ibsen's A Doll's House premiered, the play's feminist denunciation of male-dominated domesticity has gone from radical to rather quaint. But leave it to pioneering avant-garde theater company Mabou Mines to blow the dust of the classic with their ingeniously staged production, in which all male characters are played by actors whose heights range from 40 to 53 inches, and the women by actors almost six feet tall.

If you're going through the hassle of living in overpriced New York City and not bothering to check out Richard Foreman's annual phantasmagoria, you're really missing out. Stepping into the little theater at St. Mark's Church every February is like taking a mental vacation to another dimension. And this year's Gothic baroque extravaganza is more dynamic than the past few years, in which Foreman experimented with film and a more subdued stagecraft. For now at least, he's dropped the film and picked up avant-garde composer John Zorn, who's composed a feral, heavy metal score for the show, with occasional bursts of Tasmanian Devil vocalization.

Ariana Reines's play Telephone begins in darkness, with the faint but mesmerizing sound of static, finally interrupted by the famous words, "Watson, come here, I want you!" Then, out of the void, burst our two stars, Alexander Graham Bell (Gibson Frazier) and Thomas Watson (Matthew Dellapina), their faces frozen in a tableaux of cartoonish terror. In the highly stylized, presentational comic patter that ensues, staged in front of Vaudevillian footlights, it becomes clear their intention is not so much to sell us on their miraculous invention as it is to figure out what the hell just happened. The first transmission of a human voice has left them rather disoriented, you see, as if they've been teleported to another dimension.

Krapp 39 really should be unbearable. Who's up for an 80 minute solo show about some frustrated actor dude's pre-midlife crisis, written and performed by that very same soi-disant artiste? But Michael Laurence's play, which won the award for Outstanding Solo Show at the 2008 Fringe Festival, is a work of brave and vulnerable beauty that succeeds despite its seemingly off-putting subject matter. That Laurence somehow coaxes the audience to care about and even identify with a floundering New York theater actor speaks volumes about his warmth and charm—which is doubly impressive considering he usually gets cast as the homeless drifter.

A 30-member cast and crew took over various subway lines last weekend to perform a vaudevillian melodrama starring August Belmont Jr., the early-20th century president of the Interborough Rapid Transit, which operated the city’s first underground line. Called IRT: A Tragedy in Three Stations, the show begins in a Brooklyn subway station disclosed only to audience members who buy tickets in advance, and continues on and off various trains running up to Harlem, lasting about two hours, depending on the MTA's quality of service.

Reclusive portrait photographer Mike Disfarmer (1917-1956) believed he was a foundling dropped on his parents' property by a tornado, and as an adult he legally changed his name from Meyer to Disfarmer to disassociate himself from his small-town Arkansas milieu. ("Meier" is a German word for dairy farmer; adding the prefix "dis" was intended to establish what he was not.) Using glass plate photography long after it was obsolete, Disfarmer's work spans the Dust Bowl days to the post-War era. Unrecognized until years after his death, in the 1970s thousands of his negatives were purchased and publicized by an editor at The Arkansas Sun, and the portraits were eventually acclaimed for their arresting clarity and revealing simplicity.

Anybody who grew up shuttling back and forth between divorced parents will be all too familiar with the stifling setting of Sixty Miles to Silver Lake: the interior of a car, inhabited only by a single dad and his soccer-playing son, who have no choice but to interact with each other on the long slog between the boy's mother's house and the father's depressing apartment. If that sounds like your idea of a fun road trip, then you'll love Dan LeFranc's play, which takes place entirely within the confines of a Volvo stationwagon, driven by a miserable father named Ky, with his petulant son Denny riding shotgun.