You are currently browsing the FRINGE 2011 category.
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…
Related Posts:
by Karen Tortora-Lee on August 25, 2011
“Facebook me later …” is as ubiquitous a request these days as “Call me later … ” or “Text me later …”. For most people Facebook has become their main source of communication these days. Why, I’d even wager you found this review on Facebook.
As adults we all know how we’re using it to keep in touch, get our news (or our “news”), stay connected, and be in random chatter streams with our friends, our “Friends” our friends-of-friends and our frienemies. We’ve learned the art of the passive-aggressive post, learned how to limit our feelings to the right amount of characters, learned that by randomly quoting songwriters, celebrities, philosophers and politicians we can let their words speak for us when we’re too lazy to encapsulate our own feelings. But of course – it’s desperately important that we DO transmit our feelings at least once a day (though some have inner Facebook timers that go off on the hour …) or else our friends, “Friends”, friends-of-friends and frienemies start to wonder how we’re doing. And we can’t have that.
However, unless you’re a parent, and a “cool” parent at that – one whose teen daughter is divulging everything she’s thinking and feeling (unlikely) – do you have any idea how 13 – 15 year old girls are using Facebook? Girls who are already challenged with navigating the socially awkward minefield of adolescence now must deal with the added pressure of projecting it all onto The Social Networking Site. facebook me, created by and starring The Arts Effect All-Girl Theater Company (with script by Katie Cappiellois) is based on the lives and experiences of these young company members as they maneuver through fitting in, standing out, trying to be noticed (but not for the wrong reasons), all while attempting to not alienate their best friends, their boyfriends and their families. Because at any given moment a fatal mis-step will get posted on Facebook by those best friends, boyfriends and family members and damage control worthy of that necessary by BP after the oil spill doesn’t even begin to describe what these girls must summon. Continue Reading…
Related Posts:
by Geoffrey Paddy Johnson on August 24, 2011
Katie Northlich has that commanding sort of physical presence that can hold a room with ease. There is a boldness in her look, an assuredness in her movements that can compel you to watch, whether she’s meekly sipping a glass of tea, or absently raking a hand through her hair while at the end of her tether. But, as her self-authored, one woman show, The Panic Diaries, playing at the Studio in Cherry Lane Theatre, amply demonstrates, she is a consummate actress, and no doubt can make herself invisible in a crowd if she so desired. Some dark glasses might be useful to this end, as she is possessed of a pair of large, glancing eyes that betray the intelligence and watchfulness within. Likely she is aware of this, as she uses their impact to focus an audience, and their watchfulness in appropriating the behavioral niceties of different character types. As an actress she is altogether self-possessed. Which makes it most interesting that the several characters she brings to life in this show are very much the opposite; people who have somehow lost themselves in the act of becoming what they believe is expected of them. On a psychological level, this particular malaise must be the classic actor’s dilemma. Adept at becoming someone else, they experience difficulty merely being themselves. So, for all her poise here, we can believe that she knows something of what she speaks.
Continue Reading…
Related Posts:
by Michelle Augello-Page on August 24, 2011
Before Placing Me on Your Shelf, a Lunar Energy production directed and conceived by Philip Gates and featuring the talents of Jonathan Horvath, Caitlin Johnston, Adam Scott Mazer, Josh Odsess-Rubin, Elizabeth Romanski, Theo Salter, and Nadia Sepsenwol, is inextricably tied to the poetry of James Tate.
Nearly all of the dialogue in Before Placing Me on Your Shelf is taken directly from Tate’s poems, and the vision of this play rests in bringing the enigmatic, associative, and absurd worlds created in his poems to life, which is a very interesting concept and makes for an intriguing work of Art.
Continue Reading…
Related Posts:
by Stephen Tortora-Lee on August 24, 2011
As we get closer and closer to the futuristic realm of cyberpunk, that has been active in our collective imaginations since we first started understanding what computing was or what it could be, one has to ask the questions:
What about the people it could hurt? Would we even know what it meant to feel that way? Would dysfunction be the first glimpse into a greater ability to truly live on or beyond “the net”? If the first person in this new space were alone, would he make friends with virtual projections of himself?
Virtual Solitaire written and performed by Dawson Nichols is a fast paced drama which does an amazing job of exploring these themes in a very real and human way — in an artificial world.
Continue Reading…
Related Posts:
by Michelle Augello-Page on August 23, 2011
Break dancing, waving, popping, locking, and expanding the very definition of hip-hop style, the dancers in Decadancetheatre’s When the Sky Breaks 3D weave a radiant and essential story, moving beyond narrative dance and into an abstract world where environment is infused, challenged, and released through the body.
When the Sky Breaks 3D is directed by Jennifer Weber and choreographed and performed by The Deca Crew: Megan “Megz” Alfonso, Ann-sylvia Clark, Lucile “Frak” Graciano, Taeko Koji, Casandra “Defy” Rivera, and Adaku Utah.
The performance is set in an urban landscape with 3D visuals by Holly Daggers, reflecting city streets, buildings, and fences, transforming and morphing the physical environment by the elements and the rising and setting sun. DJ Boo keeps the beat and the energy high, creating a musical immersion into the world when the sky breaks.
Continue Reading…
Related Posts:
by Geoffrey Paddy Johnson on August 22, 2011
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.
Continue Reading…
Related Posts:
by Antonio Miniño on August 22, 2011
Director Joe Barros (green) and part of the cast of The Legend of Julie Taymor
The rise and fall of director Julie Taymor and the behind-the-scenes scandals of Spiderman: Turn Off The Dark is the premise behind the 2011 Fringe sensation The Legend of Julie Taymor, or The Musical That Killed Everybody! In the show Julie faces financial problems, actor injuries, technical malfunctions, opening delays, scathing reviews, all while battling her arch-nemesis, an unrelenting theatre columnist.
Behind every great show, especially a high energy rock musical like this one, there is a great director. In this case producing artistic director of New York Theatre Barn, Joe Barros, helms the direction and choreography of one of the hottest tickets at the Fringe this year. Read on and check out the show this Wednesday. But hurry! the show is selling like Book of Mormon only way cheaper.
First show you ever saw that made you want to be a director and a choreographer?
The film The Wizard of Oz and a subsequent community theatre production.
Continue Reading…
Related Posts:
by Geoffrey Paddy Johnson on August 22, 2011
A Terrifying Tale of Terrible Things? With such alliterative allure we are beckoned to witness the strange story of fretful fraternal twins, Victor and Victoria. At curtain, on a darkened stage, the two children lie side by side in a commodious bed that features a headboard resembling, is it, a pair of pitching headstones? (Thank you Edward Gorey.) Sinister noises reverberate around them, hinting at… what? It’s too terrible to say, and Victor, the softer-hearted sibling, rouses suddenly from his sleep with a blood-curdling (and ear-cramping) shriek. Victoria is not the only one sitting bolt upright in the theater after that, but mercifully it is her task and not ours to calm the quaking Victor and convince him that his night terrors were just a dream. Or, were they?
Continue Reading…
Related Posts:
by Lina Zeldovich on August 21, 2011
Dystopia Gardens: Soylent Green meets Sleeper.
Ladies, gentlemen and other fellow Fringe enthusiasts, Will Nunziata and Jerry Sean Miller do it again: with their hilarious multi-media one-act, they instantly drop us into One World, a place allegedly so polluted that people live inside humongous domes and savor food pills. “Allegedly,” by the way, is the keyword.
Continue Reading…
Related Posts:
