Results tagged “uprightcitizensbrigadetheatre”

MOVIE: By now you've probably seen Grizzly Man. The Werner Herzog directed documentary depicts one (slightly off kilter) man's relationship with nature. Over the course of 13 summers, Timothy Treadwell lived amongst the animals - most notably the bears, in the Alaskan wild. You know this doesn't end well.

TRIVIA: Think you know a lot about New York? Come "challenge your knowledge of New York places, faces, dates and facts at the New York Book Club’s first trivia night. Special guests Steve Zeitlin and Marci Reaven, authors of Hidden New York and directors of City Lore, will be on hand to explain and educate." They warn you to bone up on your trivia at www.citylore.org and www.placematters.net beforehand.

I was a journalist when I started performing comedy and pitched a profile of Jon Stewart to a people-focused magazine. It was Jon’s first year on The Daily Show, just before their Millennium special, and the night after Bob Dole first appeared as a guest. And the magazine wanted me to ask questions like “When are you getting married and how does it feel to make a lot of money?” Instead, I asked how he made people laugh not realizing it’s practically unanswerable but realizing the questions they wanted me to ask were ridiculous. Jon paused for about two minutes and said “It’s sad you’ve asked me a question I should know the answer to but don’t.” So we spent the time exploring that, and I wrote a piece entitled “ Jon Stewart: What makes people laugh,” which was killed, it never ran, and that’s the last piece I wrote for that magazine. Inside Joke came from that afternoon, and I’ve been lucky to take the stage with amazing people, all of whom happen to be comedians in one way or another. That interview with Jon is on the Inside Joke Web site too.

ART: John Finneran’s Bad Nights, Vandals is at Rivington Arms for the rest of the week. The quirky art displays faces in unlikely places: a rearranged face on a brick wall in one piece and a giddy star in another. - Stephanie Nikolopoulos

With such strange, non-wintery weather, it can be hard to comprehend that the holiday season is upon us – or at least it would be if retailers weren’t so insistent with their decorating and constant gift idea promotions. Theater companies are doing their part, too, gearing up with a wide variety of traditional and anti-tradition productions. One of these, closer to the latter pole, is Balletto Stiletto at La MaMa. It’s loosely based on the Grimm Brothers’ “The Twelve Dancing Princesses,” and tells the story of “the Appliance King of New Jersey” who locks his nine daughters in their room each night only to find every morning that their shoes bear the signs of long hours of partying. If it doesn’t sound like it has much to do with the holidays, well, that’s just one more thing it has going for it.