Category: theatre

“At last, a play for the Moldovan balloon wrangler in all of us.” The new Off-Broadway play Aliens with Extraordinary Skills depicts a pair of Eastern European clowns who “come to America… attached to a circus that would provide them with gainful employment if only it existed anywhere but on their visa applications.”

Influential NY theater critic Michael Riedel is slamming the organizers of the new $200,000 “Mimi” award for handing their first-ever prize to already-successful playwright Tony Kushner. In addition to the argument that such prizes should go to up-and-coming playwrights who need the cash, Riedel snarks, “If an advisory board is going to give someone $200,000, that board probably shouldn’t be made up of the recipient’s friends.”

This year’s installment of the New York Musical Theater Festival seems to be all about two major themes: “Nobody wants to be in 2008 New York. [And] everybody is gay… Even Bonnie and Clyde: A Folk Tale has a gay subplot, with J. Edgar Hoover singing and dancing and eventually showing his supposed true colors.”

“The same Ann Liv Young who has stepped onstage, torn off all her clothes and rolled around in her dog’s ashes like a bereaved stripper (‘Tribute to Elliot’) and has been penetrated with a dildo (‘Snow White’) has a new piece she describes as ‘the love story of Martha Washington, George Washington and Oney, their slave.'”

“The visa application for Austrian actor Martin Niedermair has been rejected by the Dept. of Homeland Security, forcing UCLA Live to cancel the first production of its Intl. Theater Festival. … UCLA Live asserted that the labor union Actors’ Equity automatically rejects visiting visas to any actor performing in English, which has happened for every English-speaking production they have imported.”

Charles McNulty wonders if the one million free theater tickets the British government is providing to young people are going to the right audience. “All joking aside, without the AARP crowd, American theater would have collapsed ages ago. If anyone deserves free tickets, it’s those stalwart patrons on fixed incomes who have made theater a regular part of their lives.”

For two decades, the resourceful company Nós do Morro has been presenting professional theater in a hillside slum above Rio de Janeiro. “People from the rich areas of the city will now come here to go to the theater,” says the troupe’s founder. “They might never have ventured to a district like this before.” (Next month the company does Two Gentlemen of Verona at London’s Barbican.)

A Broadway transfer is considered validation of an Off-Broadway show — but what about plays that have no chance of drawing a mainstream crowd? “Whatever happened to the thriving scene that supported artists and seduced audiences with edgy, serious, unconventional work that didn’t need to attract thousands of customers a week or compete with ‘Mamma Mia!’ and movie stars for attention?” Linda Winer asks, sounding the alarm.

“George Bernard Shaw’s typewriter is up for grabs at AbeBooks.com — it could be yours for roughly $8,600.”

Composer Jason Robert Brown’s new Broadway-bound musical has a rather unusual pit orchestra. First off, it’s a rock band, not an orchestra. Secondly, they’re on stage with the actors, not in the pit. Third, by order of the composer, not a single member of the group is over 18.