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.
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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.
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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?
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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.
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by Stephen Tortora-Lee on August 21, 2011
Photo by Chelsie Lloyd of Juliet (Kyra Corradin), Romeo (James Waters), and Rosaline (Katie Jeffries)
Just about everyone in Western culture has read or seen a rendition of Romeo and Juliet, and one thing that resonates most about this Shakespearean classic is the unfairness of the couple’s tragic ending. But what if you could jump in at critical times and nudge the characters into making different decisions? Would that be enough to uncross the star-crossedness of these famous lovers? Would it at least be enough to pull one of them out of the the jaws of ironic death? Or would all that meddling mess up the whole point of the story?
Romeo & Juliet: Choose Your Own Ending attempts to explore that question.
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by Lina Zeldovich on August 21, 2011
So What Really Is Salamander Stew?
Shakespeare meets The Nightmare Before Christmas in Salamander Stew, a Romeo and Juliet musical powered by love and a mighty joint, currently playing at The 4th Street Theater as part of the New York International Fringe Festival. There aren’t too many international productions in Fringe this year, but a lost-in-time enchanted forest does the trick to make this one feel far removed from New York. The only verse-play in the festival, Salamander Stew takes you into a phantasmagorical world of slithering creatures, hungry spirits, and deceptive rather than deciduous trees. Everything we always read about the deep dark woods but were afraid to experience unfolds before our eyes in its native wickedness. If you are a Harry Potter fan, a Tolkien geek or if Beetlejuice was one of your favorite movies, Salamander Stew is a must.
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by Karen Tortora-Lee on August 21, 2011
Bill Connington Long Island Film Fest
The short film ZOMBIE will be screened on Monday, August 22 at the New York City International Film Festival. The program of shorts is at 11:35 am – 1 pm at the Abingdon Theater, 312 West 36th Street, 2nd floor. ZOMBIE is the last film on that morning’s program. Tickets are $5.
ZOMBIE tells the story of a mild-mannered “normal-seeming” serial killer, who abducts innocent victims, and attempts to turn them into his “zombie” slaves. The stage play was presented at the New York International Fringe Festival, Off-Broadway at Theater Row for an extended run, and at the Gerald W. Lynch Theater in New York. It was also recently performed in Seattle, and a production is planned for Mexico City. Continue Reading…
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by Karen Tortora-Lee on August 21, 2011
There was so much to be excited about before heading into Gleeam – the Glee / Scream Mash-up Musical written by Andrew Lloyd Baughman with lyrics by Phil Close and directed by Emily Jablonski. First of all, the advanced artwork was fun and clever. The iconic loser “L” now holds a menacing knife! How cunning! Secondly, the idea was how-can-you-miss?-perfect: two well-recognized, well-received high school memes thrown together to create one fantastic pot of crazy zaniness. Hilarious! Thirdly, the venue (Le Poisson Rouge) is sexy and spooky all at the same time, glowing red against oceans of black. “This is gonna be good,” I thought to myself as I took my seat and waited – I’ll say it – gleefully … while taking in the gorgeous backdrop done by talented artist Jared Davis.
It didn’t take long, however, to realize that Gleeam was actually not going to live up to its advanced hype.
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by Michelle Augello-Page on August 21, 2011
Lipshtick is an ambitious play, taking the audience on a funny, poignant, and complex journey through what it meant to be a woman in 20th century America amidst a media blitzkrieg mirroring society’s perceptions, ideals, and images, while seeking to expose how women internalize and externalize these expectations as they struggle towards a sense of self and continue to define the realities and experiences of being female in American society in the present.
Written by Romy Nordlinger and Adam Burns, “Lipshtick” is centered around the Make-Me-Over Show, a reality T.V. show which eavesdrops on women’s lives by hacking into their media devices in order to find the next contestant to win an appearance on the show. The lucky winner will receive the ultimate make-over, becoming the very image of society’s ideal woman.
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by Stephen Tortora-Lee on August 20, 2011
Meet Anna. In Anna & The Annadroids: Memoirs of a Robot Girl - an interesting combination of modern dance, techno music, social commentary, science fiction, multimedia, and a bit of burlesque – Anna is an android who is made of ”pure synthetic organic flesh”. So instead of being made only of metal with a “mind full of microchips” she’s got a heart filled with “…love…passion…confusion…pure sexuality”. The dancing and aerial acrobatics of Anna Sullivan (Anna), are accompanied with ambient, driving techno beats created by various artists which she performs while wearing beautiful costumes created by Elizabeth Harzoff. The acrobatics seem to correspond to times of dreams (whether regular or daydreams) as something seems to be making her concentrate on something other than reality.
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