by Geoffrey Paddy Johnson on December 13, 2011
Younger minds may find entertainment and diversion at 3 Ghosts, this stage musical adaptation of Charles Dickens‘ story, A Christmas Carol by Pipe Dream Theatre Productions. Everything about it resonates with an enthusiastic note of, well, glee. The attractive and animated cast strut and stand about stage looking very pleased with themselves, and the energy level is up; positive; high. They know enough to drop the smiles when the mood switches to somber – as the tale of a haunted, miserly materialist may necessitate – but you know it won’t be long before the scene is lit once more with those megawatt smiles, so de rigueur for the current generation of spotlight-hungry performers. And with an ensemble cast of forty plus, that’s a lot of light, a lot of energy. There are almost twenty musical performances, several involving choreographed dancers, and all on the modest sized stage at the Beckett Theatre. Just imagine the stage direction logistics alone!
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by Geoffrey Paddy Johnson on December 5, 2011
Does being a “fan” always mean that in some sense you are intrinsically a “fanatic”? There is ample, and shocking evidence at this point in the twenty-first century to suggest that there is, well, to some degree, a measure of being “touched” in our adoration of public and performing figures, aka “celebrities”. Some performers, of course, have a more invasive reach than others, and in this regard Judy Garland emerges as singular in her ability to stir the more extreme emotions of her devotees. Mark it down to a singularity of presence and performative intensity in her case – in so many ways a relentlessly raw nerve of emotion projecting powerfully beyond the simple melodic lyrics she could sing. Several generations have been passing the torch for Judy now, and in the gay male community she has been deified many times over. “Friends of Dorothy” have given way to worshippers of the later Garland – the obviously wounded, out-of-control spitfire who could turn it on at performance and Deliver. So when a gay male performer undertakes a role invoking Miss Judy Garland, there is an immediate and heavy-breathing audience that can be relied upon. But beware, there’s a lot of it out there so you’d better be good. And really, at this point, there better be a reason.
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by Geoffrey Paddy Johnson on November 4, 2011
With the rise (and rise) of circus performances in the mold of Cirque de Soleil, western audiences have become more familiar with the astounding acts of physical ability acrobats can achieve, and also increasingly with an old school notion of razzle-dazzle to accompany such acts. Sets and costumes have evolved to elaborately frame these displays and a light narrative or theme is invoked to suggest continuity and order. The circus, in the last two decades, has evolved dramatically. Indeed it is safe to say that spectacle is established as the ruling aesthetic for Hollywood, and now Broadway.
Honing close to a tradition that reaches back centuries and, more formally, under the auspices of a state initiative established by the People’s Republic of China in 1950 – when twentieth century political propaganda was at a hysterical pitch internationally – where do such innovations now leave an outfit like The National Acrobats of the People’s Republic of China? This year The National Acrobats are conducting an inaugural tour of the United States (timing, you should understand, would be one of their strong points) and a lucky audience at a performance given at the Brooklyn Center for the Performing Arts were given an opportunity on Saturday, October 29th,to assess.
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by Geoffrey Paddy Johnson on October 20, 2011
In an era of virtual reality the prospect of visiting an exhibition dedicated to products of designer craft presents a salutary experience. Here, at least, one can be assured of an encounter with the visual imagination made tangible; ideas translated into something that can be touched, held, worn, or reclined upon. The exhibition DUBH – Dialogues in Black, is an eye and mind-opening example of what contemporary designers are thinking about and actualizing at the cutting edge of our engagement with material culture.
Stemming from an initiative developed by Irish craftsman Joseph Walsh’s organization, STUDIO practice, and curated by Irish artist Brian Kennedy, the premise of the show is to place contemporary Irish craft and design practitioners in concert with their U.S. and international peers, demonstrating the vitality of Irish designers and drawing attention to the greater innovative achievements current in contemporary craft and design practice. You can put away your fusty expectations of finding the traditional crafts associated with Ireland – Aran sweaters, bawneen knits, country pottery, Donegal tweeds – and prepare to embark on a distinctly twenty-first century experience. Most of the craftspeople here seem to be considering contemporary notions of biology, genetics, even particle physics, disposing of historical attitudes toward craft practice, or confronting good old fashioned cultural myopia. “Dialogues in Black” may be the organizing principle behind this collection (dubh – pronounced duv – is the Irish for black) but the range of forms, feelings, and ideas at play here presents quite a varied sampling of treasures. Kennedy appears to have reached wide and far, and he is to be commended for both the breadth of the show and for permitting the “dialogue” that occurs to flow so sleekly about the gracious and somewhat period styled interiors of the AIHS’s rooms. An artful balance is struck, never permitting any exhibitor’s contribution a domineering presence or freer rein than the others. He knows how to show this stuff.
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by Geoffrey Paddy Johnson on September 23, 2011
Attempting to grapple with the national ideological landscape of the present, James Haigney‘s new drama, The Woman Standing on the Moon, playing at United Stages on 30th Street, is undeniably ambitious. This is a serious minded engagement with the extremism of the times – religious and atheist. Set around Fayetteville, NC in 2006, the story focuses on the character of Mary Latrobe, a documentary filmmaker currently shooting a project examining Christian fundamentalism in the U.S. military. For her subject Mary has fastened on to a former Military Police officer, Randy Wallace, who is now a charismatic preacher in the area, with the glint of apocalypse in his eye. For Mary he is the ultimate bugaboo in the system, an evangelical extremist fashioning a corp elite of like-minded soldiers with a reach all the way up to the Pentagon. The mix is potentially, well, apocalyptic. She trains her camera relentlessly on Randy, willing him to expose his darker purpose, yet is met with a gentle-eyed, Bob Dylan quoting figure who espouses Christian wholesomeness and accord. We see clips of Randy’s camera self largely projected onto Christopher Thompson’s minimal, subtle set. He gives good face and sounds “harmlessly” idealistic. But Mary’s senses are sharp and she is not easily persuaded. Having both lost loved ones in acts of war, Mary and Randy are traumatized people. In their own ways they are looking to bring off some momentous coup that will bring life back into alignment; both are pushing for “revelation”. One deploys reason, the other, faith.
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by Geoffrey Paddy Johnson on September 13, 2011
Immediately arresting in this production of Deirdre Kinahan‘s new play, BogBoy, at the Irish Arts Center, is Ciaran Bagnall‘s simple stage set of several scrim panels reflecting projected landscape imagery. The mood is heavy and still – darkening flat vistas of bogland stretching off to meet a cloud-crowded sky broken only in places to admit thin fissures of light. The colors shift slowly between sombre browns and blues, with occasional russet veins of sunset. Amorphous, echoing sounds groan forth creating a mournful, timeless feeling. This is a bruised place. Into this scene walks Brigit, a woman as bruised as the landscape, but prickly, defensive, and verbally alert. She is a Dublin rehab patient, a former heroin addict and prostitute, transported to the rural remoteness of Navan, Co. Meath, and initially utterly at sea in this natural wilderness. Warily she begins an acquaintanceship with her neighbor Hughie Doyle, a solitary, slow-thinking bachelor who seems to her as foreign as the landscape. Gradually we watch as their sad stories unfurl.
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by Geoffrey Paddy Johnson on August 30, 2011
There is a delightful episode in Chris Phillips’s play Elysian Fields, which was presented at the Kraine Theatre during this year’s New York Fringe Festival, when the characters Maggie (“the cat”) and Skipper, from Tennessee Williams‘s play Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, are talking. Skipper is recounting to Maggie the early years of his friendship with her husband, Brick Pollitt, and making a veiled confession about the tenacity of his attachment to Brick. He describes a hot southern afternoon as he watches an old tabby cat patiently riding out the uncomfortable afternoon heat on a rooftop, awaiting a patch of shadow to alleviate its situation. He is struck by the cat’s stoic forbearance. He has it in mind to be just like that cat in life, patiently staying put, expectant that what he desires will one day fall to him. This image is more famously invoked by Maggie in Williams’s celebrated play, when following Skipper’s death, she pleads for her grieving husband’s attention and affection. It’s a clever piece of writing, respectfully returning us to the allusive power of Williams’s theatrical storytelling.
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by Geoffrey Paddy Johnson on August 28, 2011
Imagine what it would be like if you had always dozed off to sleep during your childhood bedtime stories, and you never got to hear the words -”and they lived happily ever after”? You were awake for the introduction of the main story characters – a fair maiden, a prince, a beast, a witch – and your head was nodding as the tale was reaching a crescendo of anxiety and crisis, but you were out for the count by the occasion when all was safely resolved and truth and goodness triumphed over evil adversity. Well, all your stories would be unresolved, forever arrested at a pitch of extreme desperation. You yourself might be inexplicably fearful, characteristically tense and anxious, and your slumbering dreams could well be nightmares. Such is the imaginative, if unlikely premise of Cody Lucas‘s Happily Ever After, produced by the Denton, Texas based outfit, Sundown Collaborative Theatre. The main character, Jack, was such a highly sensitive child, drowsy enough to experience this unfortunate set of circumstances. Now, a young man, he is a nervous pill-addicted wreck, afflicted and exhausted by his fear of sleep, a state that delivers him relentlessly to a nightmare realm of terror.
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by Geoffrey Paddy Johnson on August 27, 2011
Kevin Mannering and Matthew Michael Hurley (Photographer: Alona Fogel)
Excuse me, excuse me, excuse me? Wait a minute now – what? Just what is Danny Mitarotondo’s new play, What the Sparrow Said, at CSV Latea, trying to say? Or is it really trying not to say anything? The language has certainly been put through a crafty shredder, stripping it of any natural clarity, eliptically hinting that there is more going on than is apparent, morphing into indigestible poetry, and flashily playing at nonsense while preventing any speaker from actually finishing a sentence. The actors rattle off their lines as if they were in some over-paced 1930s screwball comedy, overlapping sentences in a manner that defies clear communication and challenges listener comprehension. Strain as you will to grasp what is being said, it is all but hopeless. And when this difficulty is pointedly compounded by the decision to stage separate scenes on top of one another, and having characters in different scenes talking simultaneously so that your attention is split in the rising din, and you are forced to abandon at least one set of exchanges… well; really? Yeah, I get life can be confusing; chaotic even. Yes, and life can be annoying. Very annoying. Verisimilitude, however, is definitely not a part of this playwright’s vocabulary. Absurdism? Perhaps.
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by Geoffrey Paddy Johnson on August 26, 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. Continue Reading…
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