Friday, April 26, 2024
Fancy DuCan almost catapulted to stardom when her song blasted from a car window in a 1997 episode of Cops! She's fresh off her album tour, which includes hit songs, “Can’t Heal a Heart with More Heartbreak,” “Only Circle At The Square Dance,” and “All The Times I Didn’t Kill You.” This show features comedian, Jennette Cronk, and musical director, Frank Spitznagel. Host of the Suncoast Burlesque Festival's Comedy Night, Jennette has performed in the Del Close Marathon, New York Musical Improv Festival, in comedy clubs from NY to FL, and performs weekly at The Magnet Theater in Chelsea. I caught up with “Fancy Ducan”
Month: October 2018
“Happy Birthday, Wanda June” at the Duke on 42nd Street
Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. wrote this piece in 1970. For better or worse, it's highly relevant to America in 2018. It's about men who like to kill, and about men who don't. Harold Ryan (Jason O'Connell) is an Hemingway-esque sort of fellow, a hard-drinking, war-fighting, animal-hunting he-man. He's been missing 8 years in the Amazon with his pilot Colonel Looseleaf Harper (Craig Wesley Divino) who dropped the atomic bomb on Nagasaki and who seems rather sad about it. Harold has been declared legally dead, and this creates something of a problem when he turns up on his birthday. His wife, Penelope (Kate MacCluggage),
2018 BAM Next Wave Festival: Jerome Robbins’ ‘Watermill’
A man looks back on his life. As ballet plots go, Watermill is fairly straightforward. It's in the telling that makes it Jerome Robbins' most theatrical and intimate work. Predating the first Next Wave Festival by 11 years, the seldom-seen 1972 dance appeared at this year's Festival as part of the Jerome Robbins Centennial Celebration with recent New York City Ballet retiree Joaquin De Luz and students from the Conservatory of Dance at Purchase College SUNY. Robbins applied elements of his early modern dance training, work in Yiddish theatre, and Japanese Noh to Watermill. The choreographer said, "The ballet itself is influenced
Sesar at Theatre Row
Sesar is the piece all solo shows want to be when they grow up. Although, Orlando Pabotoy plays so many characters if feels like there is a huge cast peopling the stage in this astounding production. It’s an intelligent, vital discourse on the nature of birthing an artist. Sesar also tackles the use of language and how empty words can be when they are not colored in with truthful connection and understanding of context. It’s a memoir, a memory fuelled expression of navigating a war torn world and finding courage in the well worn words of a master of his
India Pale Ale at MTC at New York City Center –Stage 1
Jaclyn Backhaus is breaking bread and building enduring bridges with her epic theatrical feast –India Pale Ale. It’s a story of close knit family claustrophobia, of big dreams never spoken out loud, of lost love, of the rhetoric of “othering”, of ancestors that arrive in the present moment when courage is required and of the ocean of life carrying curious people to new lands. It’s crammed full of everything – a lucky packet of sensations. We zoom into complex, naturalistic family interactions and then suddenly zoom out into a Punjabi Bhangra dance celebration. You are constantly taken by surprise with
Group.BR presents ‘Inside the Wild Heart’
“I am so mysterious that I don’t even understand myself.” Clarice Lispector (1920-1977) Ukrainian-born Clarice Lispector achieved fame as a 23-year-old in her adopted country of Brazil with the publication of her first novel, Near to the Wild Heart. In the four decades following her death, biographies and translations led to her re-evaluation as an early innovator of the male dominated Latin American "Magic Realism" movement. The Jewish author has never been more popular, "her" Twitter feed @RecitoClarice has one million followers. There are many ways to present someone who wrote ”to save somebody's life...probably my own." Group. BR, New York City's only Brazilian
“The Niceties” at The Studio at Stage II
The Manhattan Theatre Club's production of Eleanor Burgess' “The Niceties” is a thoroughly enjoyable, thoughtful piece. Set at an elite university in the northeast, it is the story of a white, female, history professor and an ambitious, black woman majoring in political science. They meet to discuss the latter's paper on the American revolution, and the exchange rapidly takes them into discussions of race, privilege and generational attitudes. It gets ugly, and the premise that these sisters are on the same side in The Struggle rings hollow. Yet, somehow, it irritates because there was so much potential that went unrealized
Do This One Thing for Me at FringeNYC
Jane Elias is a fabulist, a bard, a griot, a fabler – a healer storyteller tasked with bearing the weight of memory. She has started the necessary journey of chronicling and sharing her family’s personal accounts of the Holocaust and it is a life affirming work. Her father was 16-years-old when the British freed him and the other survivors at Belsen-Bergen. The youngest survivors of the Holocaust are now in their 80’s and the need to preserve their experiences becomes a vital mission, so we never forget. Jane Elias gifts us with a deeply personal memoir of her relationship with
The Ferryman: Broadway Opening October 22nd – The Carney Family Is Ready For A Fight!!
Photo Credit: Joan Marcus When individuals talk about key commodities in life several needs come to mind. Food, water, procreation, love, money, binge watching "The Walking Dead". All of these utensils of life will come up, but more times than not a soul will say, "the love of family". To assist in propelling something larger than one self forward is in my opinion the definition of family. Websters Dictionary defines family as, "a group of people who share common ancestors". Family is your representation when you are gone. There is no opposite of heritage. To be from nowhere? There is no such
Lincoln Center’s white light festival on Film: Dreyer’s ‘Ordet’
Now in its ninth year, Lincoln Center's white light festival explores ways of better understanding one's self and others. While there are no easy answers, generous programming in and around the complex provide artistic responses to seeking inner peace and fellowship. Here at Stagebiz we are excited about, well, the stage, let's make an exceptional exception. white light's first week included one of cinema's greatest seekers: Carl-Theodor Dreyer (1889-1968). His disquieting Ordet (The Word, 1955), screened on October 18 at the Walter Reade Theater, illustrates the interchanging properties of "light" and "dark." The Danish director made only four feature films. Three are