We’re thrilled to pass along the Overall Excellence Award Winners for 2011 FringeNYC.  Some of our very favorite shows and performers are being celebrated and we’re so thankful that we were able to experience these talented performances this year.  Congratulations to all the winners!

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August 28, 2011 — Winners of the 2011 FringeNYC Overall Excellence Awards, as selected by an independent panel of nearly 50 theater professionals, are as follows:

Overall Production/Play

• PigPen Presents The Mountain Song
  • What we said: As always the only disappointment with PigPen is when the play is over; it’s hard to watch them leave the stage – the same way it is hard for a child to watch that
    

    favorite relative go home at the end of a giddy day of make-believe. The good news is PigPen is relocating to New York City so those who can’t get enough of them will now be able to see them a lot more. And as long as they’ll be putting on shows, I’ll be in the audience, watching: amazed and dazzled.

• The More Loving One

Overall Production/Musical

• Yeast Nation
• Pearl’s Gone Blue

Performance

• Jennifer Barnhart (The Legend of Julie Taymor,or The Musical That Killed Everybody!)
• Ryan Barry (In the Summer Pavilion)
• Miles Cooper (Elysian Fields)
• Patrick Byas (Sammy Gets Mugged)
• Casey McClellan (My Name Is Billy)
• Brian Charles Rooney (Winner Takes All)
• Lauren Hennessy (Ampersand: A Romeo & Juliet Story)
  • What we said: [Hennessy] is breathtakingly real … often funny, sometimes sarcastic and deeply sexy … her chemistry with Choura (not only during their intimate moments
    

    but during her moments of longing as well) can be felt all the way in the back row, and considering this show is playing at The Ellen Stewart Theatre that’s saying a lot. When she sings she seduces and bewitches everyone in the room.

Playwriting

• Nicholas Billon (Greenland)
• A.D. Penedo (The Three Times She Knocked)
  • What we said: Writer A.D. Penedo has successfully taken a different type of relationship and made it not only understandable but accessible. By giving Eric a mechanism where he constantly breaks the fourth wall and addresses the audience we’re given a unique look into the mind of a man consumed not so much by a woman but by a way of operating. By Eric himself explaining his little quirks and foibles to us we are left free to sit back and watch as his confessions to us pave the way for his actions toward Tara. And sure, while he may seem a little out of his mind, at least he’s explaining his motives to us.
    

• Bella and the Pool Boy (Dennis Flanagan)

Music Composition

• Chris Rael (Araby)
• Dusty Brown (The Ballad of Rusty and Roy)

Ensemble

• Jersey Shoresical
  • What we said: Fans of (or those who admit to watching) Jersey Shore will love Jersey Shoresical for the extreme attention to detail paid by the creative team.  People who have
    

    never seen one moment of Jersey Shore will also love Jersey Shoresical – because the final product is just that good.  Either way, this was one hour of entertainment that left me clamoring for more.

• The Bardy Bunch: The War of the Families Partridge and Brady
  • What we said: What delights so thoroughly is how faithful each character remains to their Brady/Partridge origins while faithfully moving the Shakespearean plots along.  This story was just waiting to be done.  Thanks to the fantastic team of Garvey and Stern it has now been done perfectly.
• Stimulated!
• Crawling with Monsters

Costume Design

• Stephanie Alexander (Le Gourmand, or Gluttony!)
• Mark Richard Caswell (Parker and Dizzy’s Fabulous Journey to the End of the Rainbow)
• Tara DeVincenzo (Technodulia Dot Com)

Directing

• Greg Foro (Hamlet)
  • What we said: At mid-performance, just after Hamlet has rigged a play to prick the conscience of his murderous uncle, Claudius, the two characters circle the stage silently for a beat, eyeing each other variously as hunter and quarry, before Claudius calls -”Give me some light!”- at which the house is plunged into darkness and we are moved to intermission. This delicious moment is a sample of the thoughtful direction and stagecraft on display here.
• Joshua Kahan Brody (Fourteen Flights)
• Alaska Reece Vance (The Disorientation of Butterflies)

Solo Performance

• Donna/Madonna
• The Day the Sky Turned Black
• Be Careful! The Sharks Will Eat You!
  

• Paper Cut
  • What we said: Rasooly supplies all the voices while working the miniature mechanics and characters. It’s an inspired visual performance. To a movie-literate audience, it’s catnip.
• Heroes and Other Strangers

Dance

• Wallstories
• When the Sky Breaks 3D
  • What we said: The choreography of When the Sky Breaks 3D is nothing short of amazing. Several scenes stand out in my mind – one in particular is a scene where the dancers are fighting. At first two, then four, in a syncopated expression of movement; they struggle against each other, and ultimately themselves. The movements are strong and forceful, falling and rising, breaking apart and coming together – mirroring so many different struggles within our lives. The audience held its breath until the final resolution, as the dancers stood in unity together under the threatening sky.

Video Design

• Cinty Ionescu (Nils’ Fucked Up Day)

TheaterMania Audience Favorite Award

• COBU – Dance like Drumming, Drum like Dancing.

Congratulations again to all those recognized for overall excellence!!

Related Posts:

• Hamlet (Fringe Festival 2011)
• Ampersand’s Rockstar – A Chat With Lauren Hennessy
• Paper Cut (Fringe Festival 2011)
• PigPen Presents: The Mountain Song (Fringe Festival 2011)
• The Three Times She Knocked (Fringe Festival 2011)

At the conclusion of Yael Rasooly‘s one woman “paper and object theater” performance, Paper Cut, the small stage at CSV Kabayitos is littered with piles of crumpled, shorn and torn paper props. This destruction is testament to the intensive, energetic and exhaustive show the actress has just presented in the past fifty minutes. It moves at a cracking pace as Rasooly acts, sings, animates, and shreds her way through a romance, set some time in the 1940s, about a solitary, put-upon secretary, who keeps one foot firmly in an escapist dreamworld. Well, maybe more than one foot. Ruth Spencer, a buttoned-up, bespectacled and be-bunned secretary is at her desk attending, with admirable efficiency, to her boss’s every request. This does not prevent her from plying the pages of her favorite reading, the celebrity movie magazines of the era. The latter say much more about the real Miss Spencer, who nurses a direct-from-the-talkies fantasy about one day catching the boss’s eye, and heart. Characteristically he – a disembodied smoothie-voice coming over her desktop personal address – sees her as nothing more than a utility. He has the insensitivity to consult her about composing a letter of seduction to another woman. And asks her what sort of gift he should get!

Spurned by the rest of the secretarial pool, who refer to her as the “bulldog”,  Ruth is left alone to work late hours and day dream about better things. Here is the show’s magic. Rasooly brings these daydreams vividly to life in the form of paper cut out characters and props, all gorgeously loosed from the pages of Ruth’s movie magazines. Add in the use of period love songs and film themes coming over her small, bakelite radio, and ingenious deployment of office fixtures for atmospherics, and you have a marvelously innovative form of musical puppet theatre. The simplicity of the concept is as seductive as it is formally imaginative. We are treated to exquisite black and white photo stills of some of Hollywood’s finest – Dietrich, Bergman, Fontaine, Bogart, Boyer, and Cary Grant to name a few – hop-hop-hopping about on a desktop stage with magazine spread backdrops and lush musical swells.

Rasooly supplies all the voices while working the miniature mechanics and characters. It’s an inspired visual performance. To a movie-literate audience, it’s catnip. There are hints that Ruth’s (bull)dog’s-body demeanor veils a nature that is much more assertive, even violent. Witness how ruthlessly and crisply she tyrannizes anyone requesting an appointment with her boss. Her day dreams begin to tap into this passionate side, and when jealousy rears its ugly head, Ruth’s romantic narrative begins to swerve off-course, rushing headlong toward a scenario of  victimization and murderous deception.

As her investment in her fantasy realm deepens, her halo as efficient secretary begins to slip, and everything surges forward to a hair-raising and clever denouement which delivers a bang, and not, I might add, from the paper cut out revolver that’s being brandished. Ripping!

If one had a churlish bone to pick with this otherwise delightful show, it would be about the somewhat unambitious scope the narrative holds. Rasooly and co-author Lior Lerman never quite allow anything to break the frame of their time-honored tale. The tone is strictly pastiche, played for light farce. When Rasooly vocally lets loose with excerpts from some torchy blues numbers, the emotional register shifts significantly. She is more than capable of delivering this feeling and it is in some regards a shame that the authors never explore this or permit their characters a sliver of depth. Who knows what might have been? As it is, all is preserved as flatly two-dimensional. Which I suppose, in another way, is the point; It’s Only a Paper Moon. Certainly the capacity-filled and highly appreciative audience did not feel the want of anything extra. This is light and crafty entertainment. At the end of the day, however slight, you don’t have to go deep to really feel a paper cut.

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Paper Cut

Yael Rasooly

Writer: Yael Rasooly and Lior Lerman

Director: Yael Rasooly

0h 50m

www.yaelrasooly.com

VENUE #3: CSV Kabayitos

Sat 27 @ 3

Related Posts:

• FringeNYC 2011 Announces Overall Excellence Award Winners
• The Dick And The Rose – Some Say Love, It Is A Flower (Fringe Festival 2012)
• The Panic Diaries (Fringe Festival 2011)
• Top Drawer (Fringe Festival 2011)
• Victor And Victoria’s Terrifying Tale Of Terrible Things (Fringe Festival 2011)