Wednesday, December 18, 2024
Push Party is the story of five black women who have gathered to celebrate one of them giving birth. Set in a community room of a Harlem apartment building, the piece is not for the faint of heart. In the lobby, there is a sign that warns the audience about the content, which includes: drugs, sexual assault- a miscarriage. fibroids, violence, graphic references, STIs and Interracial relationships. While it may sound like heavy going, the show flies by thanks to witty writing, a great set and a cast that performs as a true ensemble. It is not a laugh fest, but
Tag: Off-Off Broadway
Quinn’s Quixotic, Quagmire & Laughs At The Lucille Lortel Theater
PHOTOS BY: MONIQUE CARBON Colin Quinn has been a New York City mainstay for over 35 years. He’s remembered as far back as the mid-nineties when he was the co-host and announcer for MTV’s trivia show, “Remote Control”. I can still hear Colin’s voice in my head right now introducing the show's host, the late Ken Ober, “The Quiz Master of ’72 Whooping Cough Lane”. Many will also remember his iconic “I’m Going Back To Brooklyn” parody. There is also, of course, his very memorable stint as SNL’s News Correspondent in the early 2000s. He’s been at the forefront of comedy
What Kind of Woman — the cell theatre
Every actor, writer or musician starts out with a side hustle to make ends meet. In the case of actor and playwright Abbe Tanenbaum, it was organizing people's apartments. While working with one client, she found twenty letters from women in the pre-Roe era seeking abortion services from her client. These letters and her client's past inspired this show. With that as a foundation, this could have been less pleasant than watching a 1950s Soviet propaganda film about periodontal disease. The ease with which it could have turned preachy, maudlin or just plain tedious is obvious. Tanenbaum skillfully avoided these dangers
Now Playing — A “Playhouse 90” for the 21st Century
The Pandemic has shuttered New York Theatre, and London is operating with limited capacity. Live entertainment is on hold. Yet the desire for story-telling, the urge to see something new is greater because we are all in various stages of lockdown. Artists are a bit like nature in that they abhor a vacuum, and where there is a theatrical void, artists will try to fill it. That brings us to a new venture by Jay Michaels and Mary Elizabeth Micari -- “Now Playing” will be a new theatre streaming service on “CHANNEL I”. StageBiz: First off, tell us about CHANNEL
The New Stage Theatre Company’s ‘Near to the Wild Heart’
2020 marks the centennial of Clarice Lispector's birth. The Ukrainian-Jewish refugee who settled in Brazil has long been acclaimed as a feminist trailblazer in male dominated South American literature. Fortunately, her canon is newly translated into English. The New Stage Theatre Company celebrates Lispector with an evocatively uncompromising adaptation of Near to the Wild Heart. Artistic director Ildiko Nemeth's production is both an English-language premiere and first-ever North American stage adaptation of Lispector's 1943 debut novel. Lispector's writing is semi-autobiographical and surreal - the artistically experimental, not the hashtag kind. The "Wild Heart" belongs to Joana (Sarah Lemp), who is smart, bored and unhappily married to Otavio
Even If It Gets Us Nowhere at Access Theater
This production from The Social Club Theatre is Brechtian in its approach. We truly don't ever get to know the characters, what their jobs are, why they are sharing an apartment – and we don't need to. In yet another season of juke-box musicals on Broadway, the script and the staging are swimming against the stream. This is a piece of theatre that makes one think, not just during the production but the next day and thereafter. Bartholomew (Matthew Zimmerman) and Milo (Justin P. Armstrong) are friends who share a common problem – they're single and don't want to be. In
The Loneliest Number Amios Theatre
The Loneliest Number by Lizzie Vieh is one of the best written plays I’ve seen in years. It is about a couple who decide to invite a different third party to their bedroom every month. They take turns, one month she chooses, one month he chooses. At first it seems like the main reason is to add some spice to their long term relationship, but as the play unfolds we see there is a far deeper reason. Within two minutes I knew I was going to love this play. I love when that happens! It’s just amazing to me that
The Accidental Club at The Cell
“The Accidental Club” has some rather impressive members: Janis Joplin, Billie Holiday, Judy Garland, Amy Winehouse and Prince. All were unique singers, and all battled against addiction in one form or another. And all lost the fight. Sherrie Scott has pulled these artists together into a one-woman musical-comedy-tragedy that addresses addiction without preaching. It had its workshop performances at the Cell in Chelsea as January became February. She tells the stories of each artist – the joy, the pain and the desire to fill up the emptiness with something they never could find. Today's headlines call it an opiod epidemic, but that
Theatre: Theatre of War presents “(Flying) Dutchman” at The Tank
He said nothing. She said nothing nice. He tried. She still made no effort. He got angry. She got violent. That is the double one-sided conversation at The Tank in Theatre of War’s reimagining of Amiri Baraka’s “(Flying) Dutchman”, which is as confrontational and relevant as it was in 1964. Rather than setting the interaction between middle-class African-American Clay (Malcolm B. Hines) and White poetess Lula (Jonathan Schenk) in a subway like Baraka did, director Christopher Stevenson has the two “talk” across a long table. Microphones provide the public performance Lula craves and testimony Clay provides her with regarding his life.