Monologues! Comedy! Improv! Ukulele music!

Friday, Sept. 2nd, 7-9pm

–> Bowery Poetry Club <–

Hosted by award-winning playwright Monica Bauer (Outstanding New Script, MITF 2008; nominee writing for Best Solo Show, Planet Connections 2010; finalist, Heideman Award).

Performers include:

• playwright Monica Bauer performing the Breast Pride Movement from the Diet Monologues
• John Fico performing a monologue from his critically acclaimed performance in Made for Each Other
• Duncan Pflaster, master of the Broadway Ukulele
• and others!

–> Open Mic sign up at 7 pm <–

Admission $8 (includes one free raffle ticket for a $100 Amazon.com Gift Certificate that will be raffled off that evening!)

Related Posts:

• BALLS! – Come See What Goes On In The Minds Of Men
• Last Looks At The Happiest Medium In 3-D – Pull Your Glasses Out
• Made For Each Other – ‘Til Death (Or Something Like It) Do Us Part (Planet Connections 2010)
• CLENCHED: 10 Things To Know About The Show Before You Go (2016 FRIGID NEW YORK FESTIVAL)
• Becoming Butch (Fringe Festival 2012)

Behind many a lime-lit smile beats a bruised and battered heart. Adelaide Mestre, the singer and actress whose self-authored show, Top Drawer, is playing at the Bowery Poetry Club during the New York Fringe Festival, comes with a unique understanding of this dark knowledge. Scion of a socially prominent family, whose parents were both somewhat transgressive artistic types, her upbringing was bright with the aura of musical showmanship and comfortable gracious living. Her mother was an opera-singing socialite, her father an exiled Cuban concert pianist. A heady romantic courtship between these two resulted in the end of her mother’s first marriage and an eventual elopement of the Park Avenue princess and her Latin lover accompanist. But her mother suffered from the familial assessment that her operatic abilities would never be more than fair, and her creative outlet was stymied as a result. Her father’s secret sorrow, one that would eventually prompt his suicide, was that he was homosexual, and tortured by the knowledge. As a set-up it has almost a classical ring for the evolution of a feisty young performer struggling to emerge from the professional and personal shadows of her parentage. And struggle she did in one of those unfocussed, erratic, episodically self-destructive courses pursued by embryonic divas the world over.

But my, how lightly now she seems to wear it in this musical tale of her gradual reconciliation with her history. Confused and off course as she is thrown by her up-bringing, she generously steps to the side here, allowing the swan songs of her parents’ stories the greater part of the spotlight. In a deeply touching instant, she impersonates her mother singing for the family a desperately sad rendition of “A Very Unusual Way” from the musical “Nine“. The voice, one she tellingly informs us she is more comfortable singing in than her own, is searingly rung with a sorrowful understanding of the love that sparked between mother and father, a love no less genuine for being peculiar. Ravaged by self-doubt, her mother could only ever sing before an audience with her eyes tightly closed. Surrounded by privilege as she was, it is this poor self esteem that Adelaide the artist has inherited. There are several haunting moments like this in the performance. For all her would-be Broadway swagger, Mestre has a keen appraisal of the tender, the poetic. In one allusion, as she recalls a later visit to a remote aunt in a crumbling Cuba, she speaks of a collection of family photographs that seem to have faded from too much viewing. The same aunt gifts her with a couple of old recordings of her father’s piano recitals. The vinyl records are antique, chipped and covered with mold, having languished in a tropical climate of stagnation and disintegration. The conflicted, distracted young Adelaide carelessly disposes of them amidst her household clutter, but the image prevails, lingering over the proceedings like a phantom wound. When we are eventually treated to a sample of these early, scratchy recordings, the music is fused with feeling as it drifts out over our heads in the hushed auditorium.

Mestre has a naturally winning stage presence, casually dazzling. And this is fortunate for her as, during the night of my viewing, be it first night nerves, or a want of rehearsal, in her enthusiasm to tell her tale she frequently fluffed her lines and even lost her place in the narrative, prompting her to reach for an iPad which she consults, absently dropping around stage like a favorite old clutch purse. She might stop during a line to insert an omitted word, and in one instant she actually paused her pianist to restart a song when she dropped a couplet. It is to her credit as a performer that she sails through such blunders with hardly a ruffle, her smile confidently assuring “you all know where I’m coming from”. Distracting as these moments might be, in some measure they add to the sense that you are witnessing a real individual on stage telling a real story about real people. There is an underlying modesty about her performance, which effortlessly transcends any gaffes. When she lets loose with a song you can see and hear the real artistry. She has a gem of a song at the end, “Looking for the Light”, written for her by John Mercurio, which would grace any high-end Broadway production. Her accomplished and stalwart piano accompanist is Doug Oberhamer. Coco Cohn directs with a minimum of fuss. A lovely evening awaits.

~~~

Top Drawer
Writer: Adelaide Mestre
Director: Lauren Cohn

1h 30m
www.adelaidemestre.com
VENUE #13: Bowery Poetry Club
Tue 23 @ 5 Wed 24 @ 5 Fri 26 @ 7:15 Sun 28 @ 2

Related Posts:

• Open Mic Night And Post-Irene PARTY!
• FringeNYC 2011 Announces Overall Excellence Award Winners
• Paper Cut (Fringe Festival 2011)
• The Panic Diaries (Fringe Festival 2011)
• Victor And Victoria’s Terrifying Tale Of Terrible Things (Fringe Festival 2011)

It’s pretty clever when a theatrical production adopts the stance that what it is about to present you with is nothing more than offensive, odious rubbish. And when it does so persistently, warning you at each interval that things are only going to get worse, more unbearable, it seems cleverer, because you have no one to blame but yourself for hanging around. And when each performance or act hones so close to the edge of becoming merely cacophonous insult, while convincing you that the method in this apparent chaos is quite sound, well, that makes it even more clever. In fact, everything about Inverse Theater‘s Smoke the New Cigarette by Kirk Wood Bromley at the Bowery Poetry Club is exceptionally clever; so clever it hurts.

We are “presented” with a radio broadcast, purporting to be live, while actually played on a recording. The unseen broadcasting DJ is recounting his introduction to an acquaintance with a new-form music duo calling themselves The New Cigarette, who describe their sound, which purposely has dispensed with both tone and rhythm (!) as “chamber punk” – a punk sensibility rendered on traditional chamber orchestra instruments. What we actually see are five “recorded” performances – the only ever made during the band’s lifetime – played live by the duo, Senstarv and Egon, on cello, piano, trombone, flute and drums – as allegedly witnessed by the broadcaster. These musical performances – free-form, dissonant, with accompanying poetry recitation – are the make-up of the show. They are framed throughout in a cascading, verbose monologue by the broadcaster, who is at pains to describe how at each successive exposure, he is convinced of the group’s worthlessness, even while finding himself recalled again and again in order to confirm this appraisal. He is gripped by a repulsion/attraction dynamic and it is the show’s intention that we are captured too. Can anything that compels our attention again and again be essentially without merit? Without meaning for us? This little confection will place you on the rack of that dilemma, and stretch and stretch.

What will keep you in your seat is the writerly language deployed throughout – in lyrics and in narrative – and the exquisitely rendered noise. A sample of Bromley’s scintillating phrases run – “Please don’t outlive me if I deadbeat myself”; “Show me mine and I’ll show you yours”; “Flush the birds from your binoculars”; “harmonious punishment, you are not exempt”. But every line is some such rich gem of nonsense and you can do yourself an injury trying to unpack each fleeting allusion. It is not a simple coincidence that the narrating broadcaster seems to have sipped from the same poetic cup as the musicians. The musical performances, appropriately, can be hard to sit through, but they are played with such a concentrated attention, such lucid particularity and skill, that you can only admire, even as you are tempted to place your hands over your ears. In one piece the duo are joined by guest musicians and performers and the orchestrated chaos of sound and movement is genuinely impressive. Purportedly satirizing the musical and artistic avant-garde, while mocking the hipster urge to be alternative, New Cigarette somehow succeeds at celebrating both. While ridiculing them. While inhabiting the same space. It delivers the wisest of nonsense, formally as well as linguistically; and the tenderest of uproars, sonically as well as phonetically.

Applause is due to all concerned. Performers include Leah Schrager, Beth Griffith, Peter Schmitz, and the author himself, Kirk Wood Bromley. A roster of different visiting musicians are featured each performance and the evening I attended it was The Broadcloth Trio, who seamlessly entered the fracas. John Gideon is the punctilious sound master, and Bettina Warshaw the stage manager. It would be difficult to say, but I’m sure no one put a foot wrong.

A performance about performance which takes on the thick end of the avant-garde wedge, mocking while championing, at once lisping and orating, this sly serving of effrontery is an unusually sophisticated piece of theatre. Absolutely and unreservedly not for everyone, go, savor the disaffectation, and don’t forget your brain.

~~~

Smoke The New Cigarette
Inverse Kirk Wood Bromley

1h 30m
thenewcigarette.org
VENUE #13: Bowery Poetry Club
Sun 21 @ NOON Thu 25 @ 8:15

Related Posts:

• Elysian Fields (Fringe Festival 2011)
• Open Mic Night And Post-Irene PARTY!
• FringeNYC Announces 2011 Encore Series
• Top Drawer (Fringe Festival 2011)