If you were going to try and start a religion for under 5 dollars, I would suggest you buy a flashlight.
Keep your iGizmos and your 3-D IMAXIMUM picture shows; at the end of the day, nothing is more primal, or more compelling, than a little bit of good old-fashioned radiance. Alvin Sputnik: Deep Sea Explorer, a new one-man show imported from Australia, uses this principal to tremendous effect as it chronicles a lonely widower’s quest to save a drowned planet from utter extinction. Or at least in theory. Alvin really dons his one-size-fits-all planet-saving suit to follow the light, which is the embodiment of his wife’s departed soul, or companionship, or meaning, or hope.
The last of these things is in very short supply. The disastrous global flood destroyed billions of lives and millennia of technological progress, leaving seemingly nothing behind but a plaintive ukulele, a Monty Python-esque sergeant recruiting heroes, and the sea-dwelling behemoths that were here long before humans ever set to their puny work melting the polar ice caps. [click to continue….]
Tagged as:
Alvin Sputnick: Deept Sea Explorer,
FRINGE Festival,
Tim Watts
Don't let this blue face scare you. They are a gentle species.
It’s an easy recipe; you can try it at home. Apply face paint, a bald cap, and a black turtleneck. Be silent. Interact with humans for best results.
This is the simple formula that has allowed the Blue Man Group to conduct one of the most successful and inventive social psychology experiments in the world of theater consistently for nearly two decades. There’s no tinfoil, let alone CGI, but when the Blue Men get into costume, they become aliens, and through their eyes, we are able to see the strangeness of our own world. [click to continue….]
Tagged as:
Astor Place Theater,
Blue Man Group
Yisrael Campbell in "a new comedy on the cutting edge." Ouch. (photo © Carol Rosegg)
Only in New York would you find a thrice-circumcised Irish Catholic-turned-Orthodox-Jew, kvetching about everything from terrorism to hard-core drugs to Baby Gap on an off-off Broadway stage behind a deli. That’s why, perhaps, the audience of Yisrael Campbell’s (formerly known as Christopher) one man comedy show, Circumcise Me, seems to be at least half tourists, hailing from places as far flung as Russia, Israel, and Alaska. But regardless of where they come from, they are all invariably Jewish.
This creates a warm tribal feeling in the tiny black box theater; there’s plenty of pre-show schmoozing, food-sharing, and offers of travel advice from the locals to the visitors. By the time the show starts, it feels a bit like a hipster Jew convention. [click to continue….]
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Bleecker Street Theatre
Angela Lansbury, Catherine Zeta-Jones (her Broadway debut!) and Alexander Hanson take a bow.
At the current revival of A Little Night Music, directed by Trevor Nunn, I imagine that even the front row felt far away from the stage. A come-tragedy of manners taking place in turn-of-the-last-century Scandinavia, the musical depicts a world in which people are acutely divorced from their surroundings, and only exist in their neurotic perceptions of themselves. Every interpersonal relationship is horrifyingly complex, and characters agonize and rhapsodize over minutia, completely oblivious to the furious inner-monologue taking place in the mind of whoever’s beside them. It’s a little bit like real life, actually. [click to continue….]
Tagged as:
Walter Kerr Theater
The Christian Marclay: Festival exhibit currently on view at the Whitney Museum of American Art is a multimedia performance of the artist’s “graphic scores” through sounds and images, but in fact, it seems more like a session of marriage counseling between two of the most uneasy partners in human history: music, and the mundane, insane, or just downright silly ways that humans try to codify it.
