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Stephen Tortora-Lee

What do cell phones, natural disasters, and the industrial revolution have in common? LOL: The End (written and performed by Michi Ilona Osato, Una Aya Osato, and Yoshimasa “Sen” Osato) sets out to investigate how the world got to where it is, starting with Man’s earliest domination over nature in order to create shelter, and ... Read The Full Article...

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Because Frigid slots are limited to 60 minutes some shows have needed to trim their original running time.  Cutting down some of the material can sometimes break a beautifully crafted piece, as you just can’t fit it all in. Not so for Emleigh Wolf who has been bringing The Terrible Manpain of Umberto MacDougal to various ... Read The Full Article...

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A pear is always more than just a pear and a man is more than the sum of his collaborations.   Coosje the story of Claes Oldenburg (played by Steven Conroy) and his long-time collaborator and wife Coosje van Bruggen (played by Julie Congress). It is also the story of a Pear who is “self-aware” ... Read The Full Article...

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15 months ago I had the opportunity to review 23 Feet In 12 Minutes as it premiered in the 2010 NYC Fringe Festival.   Since then this show has made it to New Orleans and back with some wonderful work-shopping in the Cape Cod Theatre Project along the way. It came back to New York as ... Read The Full Article...

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When is a tragedy not a tragedy? When we realize the Only Way Is Forward and healing takes place on a lot of levels. In the folk-rock musical Pawn, by Karmia Chan Cao (playwright, director, and composer) we see a Canadian family split apart twice in 10 years, first by the oldest son being taken from ... Read The Full Article...

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    Schadenfreude, the German word meaning  pleasure derived from the pain and suffering of others could almost be a word to describe the dry, witty, quite thoughtful, and generally dark comedy of  74 Minutes of Stereo Radio Theater. This concept was wonderfully explained in Avenue Q  in 2003, but has been referenced in many other ... Read The Full Article...

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As we get closer and closer to the futuristic realm of cyberpunk, that has been active in our collective imaginations since we first started understanding what computing was or what it could be, one has to ask the questions: What about the people it could hurt?  Would we even know what it meant to feel that ... Read The Full Article...

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  Just about everyone in Western culture has read or seen a rendition of Romeo and Juliet, and one thing that resonates most about this Shakespearean classic is the unfairness of the couple’s tragic ending.  But what if you could jump in at critical times and nudge the characters into making different decisions?  Would that be enough ... Read The Full Article...

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Meet Anna.  In Anna & The Annadroids: Memoirs of a Robot Girl – an  interesting combination of modern dance, techno music, social commentary, science fiction, multimedia, and a bit of burlesque – Anna  is an android who is made of  ”pure synthetic organic flesh”.  So instead of being made only of metal with a “mind ... Read The Full Article...

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Once upon a time…  How that can roll off one’s tongue with a savor that is like the sun kissing your forehead on a sweet summer’s night, as the glowing orb burrows into its deep red cave in the sky.  This is truly storytelling (with properly credentialed and sincere storytellers from the world famous International ... Read The Full Article...

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One thing about Fringe Festival is that it encourages experimentation among the already experimental crowd of off-off-Broadway and regional theatre troops from around the country.  You can read more about their developmental process here, really quite fascinating actually. This piece is interesting in part because of the comedy interwoven into the structure (a fun mix ... Read The Full Article...

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    What’s the difference between a janitor and a custodian? It’s all about a sense of responsibility for what you care for.  The Custodian is a story about trying to find one’s way in the world, the complexities of love, and one normal man’s struggle to learn how to fight back against the messy ... Read The Full Article...

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