You’ve got to hand it to Pointless Theatre- the above title alone is just about perfect for 2020, even if it started out as a simple twist on the company’s clever name. As we are all in need of a little pointless cheer these days, I must tell you that it cheers me no end […]
Review: Forest Treás. Pointless replaces puppets with cameras to tell the story of the Beltway sniper attacks
Forest Treás is a fictionalized cozy Mayberry-type Maryland town described by its residents as the “safest place” to live. This original story loosely inspired by conditions surrounding the 2002 Beltway sniper attacks, explores what happens in the heart and soul of a community when danger threatens to destroy their sense of safety. The townspeople enter, […]
Review: Charlie Chaplin’s City Lights gets the Pointless treatment in Visions of Love
The Pointless Theatre collaborators are skilled adaptors of familiar stories. Using a unique visual approach to theater and storytelling, the company finds the pulse points, the underlying heart beats of each story, and finds fresh ways to bring it all to the stage. They accomplished this with Sleeping Beauty, Minnie the Moocher, Imogen, and now […]
How Pointless springboarded from Lorca’s puppet show to their own Don Cristóbal
One of the great perks of being in the theatre community is getting little sneak peaks at your friends’ shows. When you meet for drinks or run into one another at various places around the city, you talk about the things you’re working on, what you’re coming up next. You share gossip and whispers. The […]
Review: Pointless turns Garcia Lorca’s puppet show into a delightfully absurd fantasia
Productions that are the most fun ask their audiences to buckle up, embrace the madness, and hang on for a wild ride. Pointless Theatre has such a carnival of entertainment in their latest offering, Don Cristóbal, freely adapted, as only Pointless can, from Federico Garcia Lorca’s puppet show El Retablillo de Don Cristóbal.
Review: Pointless Theatre’s Rite of Spring
When Rite of Spring first premiered in Paris in 1913, the music and the dance proved so…strange and bizarre that it allegedly sparked a riot, resulting in 40 people being removed or arrested. Accounts vary. Either way, the music proved so outlandishly new and strange, and the dancing so modern and far removed from “Ballet” […]
Pointless Theatre’s Imogen, a romance with puppet (review)
It’s always a treat to see what Pointless Theatre does with a story, and they rise to new levels with their take on one of Shakespeare’s rambling masterworks. The program notes that Shakespeare’s Cymbeline mentions Imogen throughout the script but the character’s storyline is mostly offset as secondary. Wonderfully adapted by director Charlie Marie McGrath, […]
Big changes coming to theatres in 2018
The greatest sign of stability in a culture is, paradoxically, its ability to absorb change. There was a collective holding of breath when Joy Zinoman announced her retirement in 2009; could Studio stand the absence of its only Artistic Director? We needn’t have worried. Studio’s fine, and so are we.
.d0t: a RotoPlastic Ballet, short and very much on point (review)
With puppetry, projection, lighting, and video timed perfectly to a live, original, nerdcore rap score, .d0t:: a RotoPlastic Ballet runs like clockwork, even as it tells the stories of machines destroying the perfect System.
Pointless Theatre’s absurd – or is it? King Ubu (review)
The time may have come around when we need anti-art bombs like Ubu again. Regardless of your political leanings, you must admit that reality has once again become too strange and ridiculous for serious theatre to address by itself. Which is to say, don’t go see Pointless’ Google Translate-aided adaptation of the proto-absurdist King Ubu […]
Hugo Ball: A Dada Puppet AdveNTurE from Pointless Theatre (review)
If everything means nothing, and art can be a smear on the wall – DADA speaking -what, then, defines and separates art from indecipherable noise? It’s a question Pointless Theatre grapples with and inventively shows us the roots of the art movement, and the resulting chaos that ultimately engulfed it.
Gimme a Band! Gimme a Banana! from Pointless Theatre
Those of us at a certain age grew up with the image of Carmen Miranda as the exotic Brazilian fruit wearing artist who was all the rage in the 1950’s. With Gimme a Band!, Pointless Theatre provides glimpses of the woman beneath the “tutti-frutti” hats.
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