Seeing Whatever Happened To Beverly Daniels last night made me a little nostalgic for my high school days, when a group of people – talented actors, great dancers, good performers – would get together and put on a show.  Back then, there was an earnestness, a lot of heart, a lot of energy, a lot of capability, but somehow  . . . you just weren’t going to get around the fact that it was a high school play.

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Read the rest of Whatever Happened To Beverly Daniels? (449 words)

© Karen Tortora-Lee for The Happiest Medium, 2010. | Permalink | 2 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Dream Up Festival, Frank Dunham Jr, Judy Bruno-Bennett, Theater for the New City, Whatever Happened To Beverly Daniels?

Nothing feels better than taking that final bow, and hearing the applause going on and on . . . begging you to come out one more time.  For some very special shows of Fringe, that’s exactly what gets to happen and we at The Happiest Medium are very pleased that some of our very favorites from the Festival are being called back again.

The 2010 Fringe Encore Series

What We Saw:

The Secretaries

Venue: The Lucille Lortel Theater

9/13 @ 10:00
9/15 @ 9:30
9/22 @ 9:30
9/23 @ 10:00

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Read the rest of They’re Baaaaaaaack! The Best Of Fringe Festival 2010 Returns For Fringe Encore (614 words)

© Karen Tortora-Lee for The Happiest Medium, 2010. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Amsterdam Abortion Survivor, and Other Bedtime Stories, BUNKED!: A New Musical, Faye Lane’s Beauty Shop Stories, fringe encore 2010, Fringe Festival 2010, Getting Even With Shakespeare, Hearts Full of Blood, How My Mother Died of Cancer, Jurassic Parq: The Broadway Musical, Just In Time – The Judy Holliday Story, Lost and Found, Made in Taiwan, Over and Over, PigPen Presents: The Nightmare Story, POPE! An Epic Musical, running, Saving Throw Versus Love, Soho Playhouse - Huron Club, South Pathetic, The Hurricane Katrina Comedy Festival, The Lucille Lortel Theater, The Players Theater, The Secretaries, The Twentieth-Century Way, Viva Los Bastarditos!, When Last We Flew

Costume ensembles are just about the only thing that carries Dream of Marionettes as a show. Perhaps the idea of adding a burlesque spirit to a marionettes’ rebellion against an abusive puppeteer who exploited his dolls and threatened to throw them in the furnace seemed like a new twist on the old Pinocchio tale, but the script is simply too flat.

When the dolls get a hold of their Stromboli’s magic wand, they turn the old, bald and goateed owner into a marionette himself, force him to obey their orders and make fun of him in every way imaginable. Nothing wrong with some healthy femme fatale domination, especially when it comes to burlesque, but it’s just never gets funny. In fact, every joke is a cliché, every song sounds like something we’ve heard before and the story comes out lame. Even the promised burlesque part doesn’t seem to really “take” – barely anyone takes any clothes off during the show.

The Bottom Line? The Marionette’s cast, which actually does know how to sing and dance, and the truly great costume designer were the highlights of the show.

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Dream of the Marionettes / Le Reve des Marionettes
Les Marionettes Productions

Written by Johanna Divine and Christy Leichty; Music by Johanna Divine and Daniel Coolik
Directed by Steven Cooper and Christy Leichty
Choreography by John Vincent

Final performance: Sunday, August 29th at 2:30pm

www.DreamOfTheMarionettes.com

Ellen Stewart Theatre at La MaMa (66 E 4th St)

© Lina for The Happiest Medium, 2010. | Permalink | 2 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: burlesque, Dream of the Marionettes, femme fatale, Fringe Festival 2010

One year after Hurricane Katrina struck, the mayor of New Orleans wanted to put on The Hurricane Katrina Comedy Hour.  Public outrage stopped it from ever airing, but here is another attempt.

Rob Florence’s The Hurricane Katrina Comedy Festival directed by Dann Fink gives us a positive story of 5 people who experienced Katrina and made a difference.  This difference is  either to themselves, to their family, to their neighbors (in the normal sense of people who lived next door  as well as the classic Biblical sense of whoever needs help), and to the city itself.  Their “comedy” is not making light of what happened, but rather about not being beat by a situation which so many of the people in this play recalled as “post-apocalyptic”.

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Read the rest of The Hurricane Katrina Comedy Festival: A Festival Of Brightness In The Eye Of The Storm (Fringe Festival 2010) (763 words)

© Stephen Tortora-Lee for The Happiest Medium, 2010. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Batture Productions, Dann Fink, Fringe Festival 2010, Rob Florence, The Hurricane Katrina Comedy Festival, The Soho Playhouse

6 Characters Based On 60 Interviews in 60 Minutes Equals Countless Emotions

Deanna Pacelli is a hero.  Or several of them actually, and also a victim, and often enough some observers.  In 23 Feet in 12 Minutes Deanna puts on many characters and pulls stories from many moving moments as she recounts the events starting with Hurricane Katrina from the eyes of 6 characters drawn from more than 60 accounts of what happened after the storm hit, the water rose, and chaos spread.

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Read the rest of 23 Feet In 12 Minutes: The Death And Rebirth Of New Orleans (Fringe Festival 2010) (583 words)

© Stephen Tortora-Lee for The Happiest Medium, 2010. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: 23 Feet In 12 Minutes, David Travis, Deanna Pacelli, Fringe Festival 2010, Hurricane Katrina, Mari Brown, Players Loft

Boy, do I remember what it was like to be the new gal around the office – to not have the routine down yet, to get sneered at for ordering from wrong place for lunch (”We don’t use them ever since the egg salad incident . . . but that was before your time”) or to be thought of as stuck up for taking lunch alone in the park  . . . or (even worse) not taking a cigarette break with the other girls from the admin pool.  One false step and you’re branded some sort of outcast who thinks she’s better than everyone else.  Offices can be tough, and a Clique of Secretaries who treat the office like High School all over again can be murder.  And in this new production of The Five Lesbian Brothers’ 1994 dark comedy The Secretaries (directed by Mark Finley) Murder is exactly what it is.

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Read the rest of The Secretaries – Do As I Say, Do As I Do (Fringe Festival 2010) (491 words)

© Karen Tortora-Lee for The Happiest Medium, 2010. | Permalink | One comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Babs Davy, Dominique Dibbell, Fringe Festival 2010, Lisa Kron, Lucille Lortel Theatre, Mark Finley, Maureen Angelos, Peg Healey, The Five Lesbian Brothers, The Secretaries, TOSOS

Are you who you think you are or just who others say you are?  Are you a combination somewhere in the middle – or none of the above?  How do you get caught in a rectilinear paradox?  Can’t you just do what the sign says no matter where it’s saying it?

Insurmountable Simplicities (written by Roberto Casati and Achille Varzi, adapted and directed by Natalie Glick) is a very fast paced play with witty dialogue and superb acting which helps us pull apart various layers of philosophical conundrums.

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Read the rest of Insurmountable Simplicities: Philosophers Say The Darndest Things (Fringe Festival 2010) (490 words)

© Stephen Tortora-Lee for The Happiest Medium, 2010. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Achille Varzi, Alex Herrald, Alice Winslow, All Gone Theatre Company, Dixon Place, Fringe Festival 2010, Insurmountable Simplicities, Natalie Glick, Plato's The Allegory of the Cave, Richard LaFleur, Roberto Casati, Victoria Pollack

What is a magician really?  Is he an illusionist?  A storyteller?  A dream-weaver?  A showman? A creator?

Is he meant to astonish you?  Amuse you?  Entertain you?  Scare you a little?  Touch your soul a little?

A lot of magicians are giving away the “how” these days  - but in Ben Whiting’s solo show, American Gypsy, he’s more intent on giving you the “why” – not just through his own magic, but through the stories and illusions of his own mentor, Jim Cellini . . . and of the man at whose feet his mentor studied – Tony Slydini.

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Read the rest of American Gypsy – The Trick To Success (Fringe Festival 2010) (424 words)

© Karen Tortora-Lee for The Happiest Medium, 2010. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Alexander "Sandy" Marshall, American Gypsy, Ben Whiting, Fringe Festival 2010, Jim Cellini, MagicMouth Theatre Company, The Kraine Theater, Tony Slydini

After beginning a normal day at work, in the middle of his most fulfilling time (morning coffee) Elliott (Yehuda Hyman) is approached by a blind man wearing headphones and knocking his stick in rhythm to an unknown beat.  He hands Elliott his headphones and out of curiosity, Elliott accepts and is prepared to listen to …  Nothing, there was nothing on the headphones.  He leaves the old man to his delusions and goes about his way.

As he gets back to his cubicle and on his way to deliver the report he was rushing the entire morning to get to his supervisor he runs into a flamboyantly deaf woman who points and tells him that his answers are leaving him right down the street.  Suddenly in a rush of some sort of compulsion as well as the joy of curiosity and interest in his life he doesn’t remember feeling for as long as he remembers, Elliott is guided by the the rest of the Mad 7 out the door, through the city off on a bus, to a strange old hotel with a funny little room, and cozy little bed with a mysterious suitcase that appeared when he wasn’t looking.   Later, after walking for days through lands both real and imaginary and still not having a morsel to eat, Elliott is tempted again by the forces of darkness to eat the forbidden food of the Cafe Toledo where not only do they take American Express “they take everything”.

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Read the rest of The Mad 7: You Are Now Exactly As I Am (Fringe Festival 2010) (624 words)

© Stephen Tortora-Lee for The Happiest Medium, 2010. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: 4th Street Theatre, Fringe Festival 2010, Mara Isaacs, The Mad 7, Yehuda Hyman

The Conveniences of Modern Living

You know your marriage is on the rocks when your husband would rather spend time with The Dryer than with you.

I’m not talking about any ordinary dryer, mind you, in Daniel John Kelley and Emily Plumb’s The Conveniences of Modern Living Jessica Love plays about a cute a dryer as you’d ever want to have in your home.  She’s earnest, sweet, thoughtful, and yearning for the day when she can go back to Sweden – specifically the Ikea Factory – birthplace, homeland and nirvana.  Till then, she’s trapped here.  But you think she has it tough?  Let me tell you a little about the other folks who live in the apartment she’s housed in . . .

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Read the rest of The Conveniences Of Modern Living – Were You Just Kissing The Dryer? (Fringe Festival 2010) (734 words)

© Karen Tortora-Lee for The Happiest Medium, 2010. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Daniel John Kelley, Emily Plumb, Fringe Festival 2010, Jilted Pigeon Productions, Players Theatre, The Conveniences Of Modern Living