BY CHARLES BATTERSBY | If you sill have a few nuts to crack in 2020, the Immersive Nutcracker Cocktail Fête is running through Jan. 26. Attendees find themselves as guests at a Christmas party, where they will mingle with Clara and her family. There is virtually no dancing—but there is a scripted show about a […]
BY CHARLES BATTERSBY | When Slava’s Snowshow first came to New York, back in 2004, American culture had little representation of clowning outside of Pennywise from It, and the new interpretation of The Joker from latest Batman movie. How times have changed in the last 15 years… Slava Polunin, the creator of Snowshow, hails from […]
BY SCOTT STIFFLER | Ascot around neck, cigarette in hand, lips pursed in close proximity to the rim of a stiff cocktail, uncompromisingly outspoken gay bar denizen Buddy Cole made his bones as a monologue-delivering mainstay, during the televised run of iconic sketch comedy troupe The Kids in the Hall—whose wonderfully eccentric, character-driven work was […]
It’s set on Christmas Eve, and there are holiday-appropriate decorations strung about the set, to be sure—but don’t expect any nostalgic flashbacks shedding light on what a child’s Christmas was like in Wales, or, for that matter, a trio of spectral visitors haunting the town miser until he arrives on the doorstep of a poor […]
BY SCOTT STIFFLER | “Human and humane” is the apt description of Palissimo Company—artistic director Pavel Zuštiak’s dynamic, deeply affecting, 2004-founded collaborative platform for research, development, and production of live arts, whose exploration of the human condition captures the imagination and stirs the soul. Merging, they tell us, “the abstract aspects of dance with the […]
BY SCOTT STIFFLER | It’s fitting that our first encounter with the three generations of North Dublin women in Elaine Murphy’s heartfelt, heart-wrenching, often hilarious 2008 debut play, Little Gem, happens while they’re hunkered down in the waiting room of a doctor’s office—an environment that invites introspection and anticipates diagnosis, followed by, one hopes, a […]
BY SCOTT STIFFLER | A fast friendship and onstage collaboration that began in 1993 during a performance at the Meatpacking District nightspot Bar d’O has blossomed into a current production in which the scandals of original sin are front and center on the lobes, and loins, of legendary drag artists Joey Arias and Sherry Vine. […]
BY TRAV S.D. | Are you feeling what I’m feeling? Excitement about Pride Month seems particularly marked this year, most likely because it is the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall Riots that helped spark the modern Gay Rights Movement in America, but undoubtedly also because the community’s hard-won rights are once again under threat from […]
BY TRAV S.D. | ‘Tis surely no accident that the Irish Repertory Theatre has chosen the month of June in which to premiere Yes! Reflections of Molly Bloom, a theatrical adaptation of the final chapter of James Joyce’s Ulysses (aka Molly Bloom’s Soliloquy or the Penelope chapter). The events of the novel famously take place […]
BY TRAV S.D. | April 2019 marks the 80th Anniversary of the groundbreaking 1939 New York World’s Fair. To mark the occasion I’ve booked two talks at two related locations, one in Brooklyn, one in Queens. Sunday, April 28, 3pm: Backstage at the ’39 World’s Fair | The 1939 New York World’s Fair was famously held […]