by Karen Tortora-Lee on February 3, 2009
For those who know their Broadway Show history, I Can Get It for You Wholesale is the 1962 musical responsible for bringing a teen-aged Barbra Streisand to the New York stage; she not only debuted to critical acclaim, but she sang her way into a Tony Nomination as well for her role as Miss Marmelstein. (For those who know their Karen Tortora [sans Lee] history, the Miss Marmelstein song was in very heavy rotation during the Spring/Summer season of Karen’s Basement Follies of 1982. If I haven’t mentioned it before, I’m an only child who, alas, garnered no such critical acclaim).
In any case, today “I can get if for you wholesale” is more than just a link you can click while you’re reading your way through my column. Today it’s also a very clever pun because I, I … can help get you a ticket to a Broadway (okay, off-Broadway) show for what will feel like wholesale. And these days, that’s saying a lot.
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by Karen Tortora-Lee on January 28, 2009
Eric Sanders is many things: a prolific playwright, a producer, and a lover of the horror genre. With his upcoming play, The Wendigo, he takes the old tale written by Algernon Blackwood and brings it to the stage. I sat down to talk with him about his career, his upcoming play, and his thoughts on theatre.
KTL: Eric, thanks for taking some time to chat with me today. Before we get into your latest play, The Wendigo, I wanted to talk about DEWEY’S NIGHTMARE: The Library Play Challenge which was a process where people were blindfolded, set loose in a library, had to pick a book at random and then had one week to come up with a play based on the book. Your play was called Mangina. I have to ask, was it about what it sounds like it’s about?
ES: The cool thing about doing Dewey’s Nightmare is that the books were all random and very arcane, really one-of-a-kind books. I wound up getting a yearbook from a small New Jersey State School from 1982 and I had to write a play based on it. I was trying to just absorb it all … and I saw a picture of this sad looking girl, sort of looking off into the distance. On another page there was this picture of a jock. I just pictured the two of them having an end-of-year conversation about a failed relationship. The twist is that he’s a hermaphrodite.
How that came out of seeing those two photos, I don’t know. I’d be horrified if they saw the play! Not that they would ever know it was based on their pictures. So yeah, that’s what Mangina is.
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by Karen Tortora-Lee on January 26, 2009
Before anyone calls the ASPCA, let me say right up front that Broken Dog Legs, the one woman show written and directed by Emily Conbere and starring Penny Pollak, does not harm any dogs. Rather, “broken dog legs” is a metaphor that reflects one woman’s journey (“SHE”) through therapy as she confronts issues dealing with her distant father, her dizzy mother, her lost-to-suicide brother and Citibank.
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by Karen Tortora-Lee on January 19, 2009
Hollow Log by Lawrence Dial is billed as a Comedic Thriller, but I think that’s just economy of words. It’s not so much a comedic thriller as it is a drama, which then becomes a comedy, then moves on to a thriller, then becomes dramatic again then swerves over to tragedy just before ending on a happy note. Sitting through Hollow Log is a bit like renting a whole season of a TV series from Netflix and watching several episodes back to back. As in: the characters are consistent in each episode (read “scene”), but the tone from one episode to the next can change dramatically. Still, after you’ve seen it all together, it’s a pretty satisfying 2 hours, though you’re not sure it all should have been seen one right after the other like that.
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by Karen Tortora-Lee on January 16, 2009
Last night I had a great night … just kicked back with some old friends, drank a lot, reminisced, sang some songs, then passed out. Oh, wait, that wasn’t me … that was the cast of Mike Leigh’s Ecstasy.
For the next few weeks, until January 25th, 2009, you can catch this fantastic play at the Red Room, 85 East 4th Street which is being presented by the Black Door Theatre Company in association with Horse Trade Theater Group.
Ecstasy begins with a visual metaphor that’s impossible to miss in this tiny tiny theater; Jean (Mary Monahan) is naked in bed with her lover Roy (Josh Marcantel) and she’s more than just enticingly naked, even as she starts to dress she becomes emotionally naked, and uncomfortably so. With very few words, and just some subtle, longing glances, (which are responded to with casual, thoughtless gestures) we know who Jean is. We know where she’s been. We know what just happened … and we know that it will keep happening.
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by Karen Tortora-Lee on January 15, 2009
Webster’s Dictionary defines Theatre as … come on. You really think I’d start off like that?
Theatre as concept, theatre as concrete structure, theatre as war … for the purposes of these posts, “theatre” is any time someone stands (sits or lays) in front of a group of others and entertains them. So today rather than review a play, I’d like to exercise that notion and take a bit of a turn.
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by Karen Tortora-Lee on January 5, 2009
Pop Quiz. Becky Shaw is:
a) your old college roommate who reconnected with you on Facebook
b) your boyfriend’s ex-girlfriend – who still has her ski boots in his closet
c) your mother’s bingo partner who keeps asking if you want to be fixed up with her recently divorced son
The answer is actually: d) the play I saw recently, written by Gina Gionfriddo, directed by Peter DuBois and currently being produced at the 2econd Stage Theatre (307 West 43rd Street off Eighth Avenue).
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by Karen Tortora-Lee on December 19, 2008
I was lucky enough to snag some deeply discounted tickets to the limited engagement of The Cripple of Inishmaan (by Martin McDonaugh and directed by Garry Hynes) last week. Let’s face it, when someone offers you discount tickets that cost less than a movie ticket, as long as the plot is a shade better than Death Race you’re already ahead of the game. So excited was I by the chance to see live theatre for ten dollars, that I barely glanced at the synopsis which informed me that The Cripple of Inishmaan was set in 1934, on an island off the west coast of Ireland, and that it involved events surrounding the time filmmaker Robert Flaherty came to the area to film his movie Man of Aran. I mean, I’m not really one for blurbs. Anything loses its zing when boiled down to a few sentences. I’m more of a jump-in-with-both-feet-and-then-decided-if-I-like-it type of gal, ’specially when, as I’ve mentioned before, the tickets are ten bucks.
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by Karen Tortora-Lee on December 10, 2008
If Christmas in New York could be found on the map I think most people would agree that its address would be Rockefeller Center, filled as it is with the tree and the giant decorations, and the fabled City of Radio … where Rockettes dress up as reindeer and dance their little hearts out, doling out Christmas Miracles to the tourists one high kick at a time.
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by Karen Tortora-Lee on November 20, 2008
My husband’s home town in Michigan is so small that, to them, the word “theatre” is 1) spelled “theater” and 2) always preceded by the word “movie”. And if you want to get to that “movie theater” you’ll need a car — because the closest one is 13 miles away in the next town over. Growing up, if he wanted a theatre experience of ANY kind he needed to head to Chicago.
Meanwhile, New York is so rife with theatre space that you can’t go to a Starbuck’s without being within a stone’s throw of one. Heck … there’s one in the building where I work. There was even a theatre connected to the restaurant I had dinner in last night. If you climb on any mailbox and squint, you can see independent theatre going on everywhere in New York.
I’m particularly fond of theatre companies who put on well crafted plays written by up and coming writers. Johnna Adam’s Angel Eater’s Trilogy is just such a work, and FLUX Theatre Ensemble is just such a company.
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