by Karen Tortora-Lee on August 31, 2010
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
What We Said
This play simultaneously celebrates and skewers the female rituals . . . Fun from start to finish The Secretaries will make you laugh at old stereotypes, new rituals, and the concept of how far one will go just to fit in.(Read Full Review Here)
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by Lina Zeldovich on August 29, 2010
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.
————–
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)
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by Stephen Tortora-Lee on August 27, 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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by Stephen Tortora-Lee on August 27, 2010
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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by Karen Tortora-Lee on August 27, 2010
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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by Stephen Tortora-Lee on August 27, 2010
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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by Karen Tortora-Lee on August 27, 2010
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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by Stephen Tortora-Lee on August 27, 2010
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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by Karen Tortora-Lee on August 26, 2010
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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by Lina Zeldovich on August 24, 2010
“A Jurassic Parq with a ‘q’,” is how the narrator who calls himself Morgan Freeman (Lee Seymour) — although he looks nothing like the actor — presents the show to the audience. “‘Q’ is for the question.” The dinosaurs will tell us the true story.
A baby-Velociraptor (Brandon Gill) is being released from a lab into a peaceful community of female dinosaurs (yes, you may remember in Jurassic Park they were all females … until they mutated) who are happily inhabiting their island paradise much like Adam and Eve before they committed the original sin – or perhaps like a bunch of Eves since there are no Adams. The matriarch community is lead and watched over by a pastor – a Velociraptor of Faith (John Jeffrey Martin) who favors the creationist theory that all dinosaurs were created in a lab.
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