by The Happiest Medium on February 29, 2012
The Happiest Medium review by guest contributor Katelyn Manfre.
Canadian import Rachelle Elie enjoys being a woman. She especially enjoys her run-of-the-mill feminine pastimes: trying on sparkly dresses with eye makeup to match, dancing seductively to Ke$ha on a fur carpet, and hydrating with imported bottled water. She’s married to an Obstetrician/Gynecologist, has two lovely sons, and is, for all intents and purposes, living the dream.
Served with a side of audience discomfort, Elie’s solo show, Big Girls Don’t Cry (playing at The Red Room), is an insightful, if slightly off-putting insight into the psyche of the Modern Woman. Elie appears in what looks like a doll’s dress that lost a fight with a Bedazzler, knee-highs and platform slippers. She gapes and gasps her way through her basic biography, stopping every so often to sing or dance in a non-sequitur celebration of her womanhood. Questions are posed to the audience, and as she stares hard into each person’s eyes, she dares us to not be jealous of her in all her sparkle, and the beautiful life she has.
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by The Happiest Medium on February 29, 2012
The Happiest Medium review by guest contributor Katelyn Manfre
It’s tough out there for a single girl. It’s especially tough out there for a single girl with a habit of substance abuse and an absent father. But Nicole Pandolfo bravely lays it on the line for us in Love in the Time of Chlamydia running now at UNDER St. Marks.
This Jersey girl has a lot of hilarious, ridiculous and oftentimes make-your-skin-crawl war stories from her wild single days in New York. There’s a lot of bar (and bed)-hopping, recreational drug use, parties with strangers, chance encounters, unfortunate moments, and one memorable trip to Paris. Despite all of the hardships and heartbreak, Pandolfo tells her story with a smile, a smug F-you to all of the guys who hurt her and let her down, namely her distant father.
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by The Happiest Medium on February 28, 2012
The Happiest Medium Review by guest contributor Linnea Covington
Whether you’re M4W, W4M, M4M, or W4W, there is something for everyone in Missed Connections: An Exploration Into The Online Postings Of Desperate Romantics. The play consists of five actors—Jennifer Jean Anderson, Ricky Dunlop, Lauren Roth, Jake McKenna, and Julia Mattison—five Kindles, a handful of accents, and a whole lot of sass. The premise proved simple: scour Craigslist for the best and the worst missed connections postings. For those of you who don’t know what a ‘missed connection’ is, it’s an electronic posting on a website that people do when they see someone and 1) didn’t manage to talk to them, or 2) lost contact with them. It also has become the sort of place where people send long, steamy rants as a sort of digital therapy.
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by The Happiest Medium on February 28, 2012
The Happiest Medium Review by guest contributor Linnea Covington
The term “rock musical” can mean a variety of things, most of them not very good. But in Zack Powell and JD Cannady’s Drowning Ophelia, the musical aspect is all part of the story and the story rocks on its own. Cannady, who wrote the book, manages to create a convincing drama surrounding Ophelia, Shakespeare’s forlorn noblewoman who has the bad luck of loving Hamlet. She also drowns herself, which is exactly how she ended up in purgatory, singing away the time with her band the Clowns and waiting for the day Hamlet shows up.
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by The Happiest Medium on February 27, 2012
The Happiest Medium Review by Guest Contributor Katelyn Manfre
People are always telling D’yan Forest to “act her age.” For her, that is simply unacceptable. At 77 years young, when D’yan has seen, experienced, and gone to bed with so much of the world, she simply hasn’t been able to settle into her age. In I Married a Nun!, running at UNDER St. Marks, she has set out to tell her story, to explain and illustrate just why being a senior is not where she’s at right now.
For the record, she did, in fact, marry a nun. For 25 years D’yan was unofficially wedded to Mary, an ex-lady of the cloth with whom she travelled the world and shared a rather active sex life (don’t worry–she’s got props). While her relationship with Mary is the focus of a large part of her story, D’yan also goes into great detail about her exploits, dalliances, and experiments before and after. She has, it seems, been comfortable in her skin and up for anything since she was a little girl growing up in Boston.
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by The Happiest Medium on February 27, 2012
The Happiest Medium Review by Guest Contributor Katelyn Manfre
We live in a difficult world, rife with headaches and hardships. Each day new problems arise, and we are forced to self-diagnose and medicate to calm the stresses, the woes. But what if we didn’t–what if we made the very specific choice to just be happy? Is that even possible?
This is the massive philosophical question that playwright and performer Tim C. Murphy seeks to answer in Blind to Happiness, his solo show currently running at UNDER St. Marks. Using, in his words, the “quirks and quarks” of characters from his past, Murphy muses through three very different characters.
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by The Happiest Medium on February 25, 2012
The Happiest Medium Review by Guest Contributor Linnea Covington
Afternoon Tea With Jane Austen (Photographer credit: Chris J. Hing)
Most little girls grow up reading the works of Jane Austen, be it Emma, Sense and Sensibility, or Pride and Prejudice. Some boys also read her stories, but usually that’s a school assignment. But, no matter how you digest this early 19th Century author, one thing remains consistent – you never learn much about her actual life. In Tali Brady’s one-woman play Afternoon Tea With Jane Austen, the Montreal-based actress and playwright attempts to share this history with you.
It’s an excellent way to become acquainted with Austen, and while Brady wrote a wonderfully fluid play chock full of personal details, fetching narratives, and historical information about the author, she doesn’t always execute her role as Austen well. The show started out slow as she bumbled around the who’s-who in Austen’s family, and even though she said herself that it was boring, it still shouldn’t have been. This isn’t because of the subject matter but more of Brady reciting her lines like she’s dictating instead of storytelling.
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by The Happiest Medium on February 24, 2012
The Happiest Medium Review by Guest Contributor Linnea Covington
If you have ever had dreams of your dolls coming to life and doing a sexy strip tease, this show is for you. Produced by two-time FringeNYC winning performer and playwright Cyndi Freeman with storyteller Brad Lawrence, both whom are burlesque performers, Scratch & Pitz Burlesque and Variety Hour proved a comical hour of pretty girls, awkward men, song, and a tantalizing strip-off between our heroine and the Devil. That’s right, the Devil. Played by Lawrence, who goes by Handsome Brad in the burlesque world, the Devil comes on stage dressed to the nines with the intention of garnering a few souls for his collection. What he didn’t reckon was facing off against Cherry Pitz, played by Freeman, a pink puffy-wigged aspiring variety show host who is a combination of Lady Gaga and Fran Drescher with just a splash of Jersey Shore.
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by The Happiest Medium on February 20, 2012
Five Questions. Five Answers. And One Big Decision: Rock, Paper, Or Scissors?
LOL: The End.
Keep It Movin’ Productions
Come to a place where tragedy meets comedy meets stupid. A funny and physical look at natural and human-made disasters through the eyes of three clowns. Award-winning writer/performer Una Aya Osato is joined by her family, Michi Osato and Yoshimasa Osato.
Show Times:
- Fri 2/24 @ 10:30pm
- Sat 2/25 @ 2:30pm
- Tue 2/28 @ 10:30pm
- Fri 3/2 @ 7:00pm
- Sun 3/4 @ 7:00pm
Answers by
Una Aya Osato (co-playwright/co-performer)
and Michi Ilona Osato (co-playwright/co-performer)
Karen Tortora-Lee’s Question
That’s some title. How did you come up with it – and what does it mean?
The Osatos: LOL: The End is a funny and physical look at natural and human-made disasters seen through the eyes of three clowns. Overwhelmed by the magnitude of destruction we all live with, our family looked to clowns with the hope that by allowing the “idiot” to interpret for us, that we would be better able to understand disaster and find the ways that still remain to come out hopeful and laughing. LOL: The End as a title came about through a back and forth juggling of the ideas of the show between us sisters. Natural disaster, apocalypse, human created unjust catastrophes, the media, the future, hope…ultimately LOL: The End made the most sense.
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by The Happiest Medium on February 20, 2012
Five Questions. Five Answers. And One Big Decision: Rock, Paper, Or Scissors?
‘Til Love Do Us Part
High Frequency Theatre
A graveyard. Two funerals. Two strangers. Grief. An escape. And a mysterious young girl. Oddities of darkness and light come alive through intense emotion and intimacy.
Show Times:
- Wed 2/22 @6:00pm
- Fri 2/24 @ 10:30pm
- Sun 2/26 @ 5:30pm
- Thu 3/1 @ 9:00pm
- Sat 3/3 @ 4:00pm
Answers by Andrew Hall
(Playwright)
Karen Tortora-Lee’s Question
That’s some title. How did you come up with it – and what does it mean?
Andrew: The title, ‘Til Love Do Us Part, comes from the legendary phrase commonly used in marriage ceremonies: ‘Til Death Do Us Part. A friend of mine read the play, which at the time was entitled The Eulogy of an Endless Marriage. She hated the title. She began to make countless suggestions. And then she said it. She meant to say it should be retitled ‘Til Death Do Us Part, but she accidentally said “Love” instead of “Death.” And it made so much sense to me. The play on words has become a dark symbol of the love/hate relationship the audience watches develop over time.
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