You are here: Home / 2011 / Archives for January 2011

Tonight’s Taffy Punk is SOLD OUT; so stream it instead

January 18, 2011 By 2 Comments

Unless you already have a reservation, you can’t see Taffety Punks‘ bootleg performance of Reals at the Corner Store tonight. It has sold out.  But Gwydion Suileban’s new play about a crime fighting team of superheroes will be streamed direct from the Corner Store starting at 8pm. Just click here.

It is all part of the livestream.com channel #New Play TV.  Arena Stage will be using this channel for streaming its New Play Development Program panel on Jan 26th, which will include an address from Rocco Landesman, Chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts.

Kris Swanson from the Corner Store tells us that Arena Stage is sending camera people to the Corner Store to capture tonight’s performance.

Filed Under: News

8th Annual Winter Carnival of New Works

January 18, 2011 By 1 Comment

Maybe I just have brain-freeze lately, but I could swear that as the days start to get longer again, so do the ten-minute plays. Is it a trick of the light? A side-effect of the winter Solstice? Whatever the cause, the Winter Carnival of New Works – presented by Madcap Players now for the eighth year running – joyously defies basic arithmetic by presenting nine ten-minute plays over the course of an evening that runs two hours and twenty minutes. [Read more...]

Filed Under: Our Reviews Tagged With:

To Broadway, To Life! The Musical Theater of Bock and Harnick

January 18, 2011 By 2 Comments

Last fall was not a good time for fans of Fiddler on the Roof. In October, we lost its librettist, Joseph Stein, at the age of 98. In November, it was its composer, Jerry Bock, who departed this life at the younger age of 81. Thank goodness we still have lyricist Sheldon Harnick clicking his heels at age 86. [Read more...]

Filed Under: Theatre Shelf

2010 WATCH Award nominations announced

January 17, 2011 By Leave a Comment

Sunday, Jan 16, 2011 — Nominations for this year’s WATCH (Washington Area Theatre Community Honors) Awards were read at the Birchmere Musical Hall, Alexandria, VA, which will also host the Awards ceremony March 6, 2011 at 7pm. [Read more...]

Filed Under: News

Other Desert Cities

January 17, 2011 By Leave a Comment

2011 struggled to its feet and came up with a winner courtesy of Lincoln Center Theater’s André Bishop and Bernard Gersten, who’d stumbled themselves in recent weeks with Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown and A Free Man of Color. [Read more...]

Filed Under: New York City, NY Theatre Buzz

Return to Haifa

January 17, 2011 By Leave a Comment

The terrible consequences of war never make for short summary, but the ongoing loss of our children is surely the most egregious crime on the list. In some families, the smallest and most innocent disappear completely. In others, it’s in the transformations a child goes through during wartime – the small and large tragedies through which he learns, too soon, to be an adult – that the real losses breed. [Read more...]

Filed Under: Our Reviews Tagged With:

Marcus; or the Secret of Sweet

January 17, 2011 By Leave a Comment

If you were looking for more of the riveting theatre that rocked Studio Theater in the first two parts of the trilogy by Tarell Alvin McCraney, you will be sadly disappointed since Marcus; or the Secret of Sweet is simply not as powerful as The Brothers Size (2008) or In the Red and Brown Water (2010).  Not that Marcus is a light weight, wipe-out.  McCraney can do enough with images, emotions and lyrical language to make a trip more than worth your while.  It’s just that Marcus feels more like an exploratory exercise when compared to the other productions, and doesn’t hold its ground with the same ferocious grip as the previous “brother/sister” productions. [Read more...]

Filed Under: Our Reviews Tagged With:

The Importance of Being Earnest

January 14, 2011 By Leave a Comment

If you’re looking for a recipe for a successful revival of Oscar Wilde’s 1895 masterpiece, a major ingredient has to be Brian Bedford.  This British born Canadian resident is among the world’s greatest actors of classical material, tragic and comical.  In comedy, he has no peer. The career path he’s chosen since 1959 when he  arrived  from Britain in Peter Shaffer’s Five  Finger Exercise became clear early on when he later moved to Canada, and became a member of the company at Stratford Ontario Shakespeare Festival for 27 years. [Read more...]

Filed Under: New York City, NY Theatre Buzz

Anna Deavere Smith

January 14, 2011 By Leave a Comment

Back in the 1990s, when I first saw Fires in the Mirror, a play about a conflict in which African Americans and Orthodox Jews battled in the Crown Heights neighborhood of Brooklyn, I wanted to meet Anna Deavere Smith.

That play was amazing, it broke new ground and introduced like a mini-explosion a talented, gifted, completely unfazed-by-anything playwright-actress, a do-everything, want-to-know-everything kind of woman. Smith played all the parts—community activists, some of them familiar in the headlines, rabbis, students, neighborhood angry young men, the victims, the agitators, the angry citizens and residents of a place where two very different cultures collided. [Read more...]

Filed Under: Two Hands Clapping, UpClose Tagged With:

Red Bastard

January 14, 2011 By 1 Comment

Something about diligently recording your thoughts in a notepad seems profoundly absurd when there’s a grossly overweight man-demon wandering around nearby, provoking people at random with his bulges and pointy parts. The odd man out in this scenario, as you may well guess, is the note-taker. I mean, what is this, a philosophy lecture? There’s a misshapen, wicked-minded wacko in the audience, crammed into a bright red jumpsuit and goading you into touching his butt. Tonight, theatre isn’t dead – it’s just been sucker-punched. [Read more...]

Filed Under: Our Reviews
« Older Posts
Newer Posts »