by Antonio Miniño on July 9, 2010
The Gospel According To Josh
In case you haven’t noticed, it’s pretty hot outside… summer, yeah… summertime! What that also means is it’s theatre festival season. If you live on the motto that “life is like a box of chocolates,” you can easily apply the same to the festival circuit. Festivals hold lovely truffles covered with exquisite themes, filled with yummy character developments that leave you with a thought provoking aftertaste. They also have strange, oversweetened eerie stuff.
Out of the Midtown International Theatre Festival box –a festival running from July 12th through August 1st in the Big Apple– I’ve chosen a couple of possibly lovely truffles. We start our first Q&A with Joshua Rivedal, writer/performer for The Gospel According To Josh.
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by Antonio Miniño on July 6, 2010
When Shea Elmore talks about his upcoming project, This Is Storybox, his face lights up and you can’t help but listen and be intoxicated with his excitement and sincerity. What he brings us is an interactive approach to performance, where audience members choose to be part of the action or plainly be a viewer.
The project is reminiscent of the 60s movement of the Theatre of the Opressed and Brazilian Augusto Boal, yet Elmore’s contemporary take was inspired and emerged from his collaboration with a professor from the University of Central Florida.
In our Q&A you will find out what makes Storybox different and why you should step in.
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by Antonio Miniño on July 1, 2010
A professor once told me –”If you want to be cast in the kind of plays that you really believe in, if you want to do work that is meaningful to you, with actors trained in the same way as you, and have the same aesthetic… create your own theatre company together, the most important thing in this business is networking, and that starts NOW, in this classroom”– great advice from a very wise man. Seems to be that Rachel McPhee and Jackie LaVanway, cofounders of On The Square Productions, received the same words of wisdom.
Their company strives in non-traditional casting, and community outreach, which might give us a clue as to why their production of William Shakespeare’s A MidSummer Night’s Dream takes place in a garden in Astoria.
Here’s a Q&A with both ladies regarding their upcoming venture.
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by Antonio Miniño on April 7, 2010
Jody Christopherson appearing in TRYING
If you don’t believe read-heads have more fun, just ask Jody Christopherson about her experience working on Erin Browne’s new play TRYING, premiering at The Bushwick Starr, on April 15th.
Ok, I admit the “red-head” line is not the most original way to start an interview, but I’m not fishing for a bloggie award and Jody is not fishing for a Tony… yet. She is a New York based actress and also a writer for New York Theatre Review (an annually published collection of plays and essays launched in 2005, that recently launched their own theatre blog), in her interview she talks about lesbian pulp novels, shark tattoos and why producing your own work is a good thing.
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by Antonio Miniño on February 17, 2010
©Matthew Murphy
“Bad shit in life makes for good art. Things that challenge us emotionally, politically and socially propel us to create. Having this terrible thing in my life has motivated me in a way. I have sort of resolved to not only not let it get me down but use it as a way to improve myself. And don’t get me wrong, I have very dark days. I have days where I sit around and mope ‘why me’ and wish I could travel back in time and change things. But ya know, that only gets you so far. So yeah, the old adage ‘what doesn’t kill you…’“
This is how being HIV positive has changed Dan Horrigan’s life as an artist, and has propelled him to debut as a solo performer with his show MY AiDS now playing at Urban Stages. “What started out as an exercise in trying to put together a sort of comedy act really evolved,” says Horrigan.”I decided that I would accept the encouragement of those around me who think I’m funny and try to create a sort of comedy act but I thought it would be a greater challenge to wrap all of my humor around something that is really difficult for me… which is being HIV positive.”
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by Antonio Miniño on November 3, 2009
If I said to you I was an old time fan of Heather and Retro Productions I would be lying … and why start off with a lie? Who would I be! Despicable me … so lets start with the truth and nothing but! I first became acquainted with their work about a year ago as a matter of … chance. I reviewed their production of Mill Fire for The Fab Marquee and was taken in by their attention to detail, something that made me think they had been around for – oh, I don’t know – 10 years. To my surprise they are only a couple of years old, but seasoned in talent and determined to bring back quality pieces – and as I learned after interviewing their Artistic Director Heather Cunningham – new works as well.
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