The Annual NY Clown Theatre Festival Yucks it Up

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Parent Category: Other Festivals

Category: Theater

Published on Saturday, 21 August 2010 03:37

Written by Bree Rubin

Big shoes and face paint and red noses oh my! It's time for the New York Clown Theatre Festival at The Brick (575 Metropolitan Avenue in Brooklyn, NY)! From September 6th through the 26th, 2010, mimes, acrobats, contortionists, side show specimens and, of course, clowns will be taking over Brooklyn.

It's time to abandon notions of sophistication and have a laugh. With 20 stage shows, five cabarets, several workshops, a parade, and even a clown funeral, the zany annual NY Clown Theatre Festival promises to bring in the clowns. The event will showcase performances by comedic talent from all over the country and the world. Content runs the gamut from lighthearted and family-friendly silliness to some rather off-color Tom foolery.

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Strawberry One Act Fest Provides Opps for A Bwy Hopeful

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Parent Category: Other Festivals

Category: Theater

Published on Wednesday, 18 August 2010 17:55

Written by Jennifer N. Alvarez

While Mitchell Robert Glazer serves (so to speak) as food services director at the U.S. Merchant Marine Academy on Long Island's north shore at Kings Point, he serves up another type of fare as well.

Though he provides three squares to over 1000 hungry midshipmen, the 58 year-old has not allowed his hectic schedule to interfere with writing and performing his plays. His latest, Simply Me, was one of only 36 entries (out of 204) accepted in the 2010 Strawberry One Act Festival – Summer 2010 edition, running from August 12 – 22, 2010. The first performance was held at the Riant Theatre at St. Clement’s in Manhattan, on August 15th, 2010.

Celebrating its 18th season, the festival, brainchild of Artistic Director Van Dirk Fisher, is a play competition in which the audience and the theatre's judges cast their votes to select the best play of the season. Twice a year, hundreds of plays from across the country are submitted for the competition. Plays move from the 1st Round to the Semi-Finals and then the Finals. The playwright of the winning play receives $1,500.00 and the opportunity to have a full-length play developed by the Riant. The awards to be presented are Best Play, Best Director, Best Actor and Best Actress.

Glazer's play advanced to the semi-finals to be held at St. Clement's on Wednesday, August 18th.

Growing up in 1950s Brooklyn had a tremendous impact on Mitch and his passion for theatre. Mitch points to such icons as the late Dean Martin, Sammy Davis Jr. and Frank Sinatra and one of comedy's living legends, Jackie Mason, as profound influences.

 Said Glazer, “I remember watching Jackie and thinking that I can write something for him. He is a world famous comedic genius and yet a regular guy who is always himself, not a Hollywood phony at all.”

After watching one of his shows, Mitch visited Mason backstage and offered him a few original jokes. Mason, impressed with Glazer's genuine heartfelt intentions, eventually became Mitch’s mentor and life-long friend.

Although a first timer at the Strawberry One Act Festival, Mitch is no stranger to the stage and bright lights. He has been writing, singing, and performing for over 25 years in a variety of venues, including the New York Comedy Club, where his 2001 show, It’s Definitely Going to Happen-Maybe, was staged.

While he always loved performing, Glazer was realistic about making a living in show business. "You’re either rich because you made it big, or poor and still struggling for recognition." In light of this, Mitch nurtured his gift and desire to perform while working as the controller for 30 Macy’s restaurants and later at the USMMA.

 “If I didn’t think I had good material, I wouldn’t do it," asserted Mitch. “I do it because I don’t want the classics that I grew up with to disappear.”

As testament to his dedicated yet light spirit, Mitch states, “As I approach the milestone of 60 years old, I realize that if I obtain notoriety a little later in life, this can be a plus since no one can say, ‘Look how old he got!’”

Known professionally as Mitchell Robert, his two-hour script of Simply Me contains 13 original songs composed with the assist of musician Albee Barr. Mitch hopes that his 30 minute mini-performance at the Strawberry One Act Festival will gain recognition with agents and others in the business so that he might take another step closer to his dream of performing regularly on Broadway, or at least somewhere in the general vicinity.

Tickets may be purchased online the Strawberry One-Act Festival or at the Box Office for the Strawberry One-Act Festival from Aug. 12, 2010 at The Theatre at St. Clement's.

Tickets may be purchased online and picked up 30 minutes before show time.

Box Office Hours:
Monday - Friday:  6pm - 10pm
Saturdays:  2pm - 10pm
Sundays:  1pm - 9pm

The Award Ceremony  and performance will be held on August 22nd at 2 pm.  In addition, some of the plays in the festival will be selected for publication in the anthology: The Best Plays From The Strawberry One-Act Festival: Volume 7.

For more info on the fest go to: http://www.therianttheatre.com/

2010 Strawberry One Act Festival
August 12 – 22, 2010
The Riant Theatre
at St. Clement’s
423 West 46th Street
Between 9th & 10th Ave.
NY, NY
646-623-3488

Stratford and Shaw Festivals, Summer 2010

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Parent Category: Other Festivals

Category: Theater

Published on Tuesday, 17 August 2010 05:00

Written by Kevin Filipski

The Tempest
Written by William Shakespeare
Kiss Me, Kate
Music & lyrics by Cole Porter, book by Sam and Bella Spewack
(Tempest through September 12; Kate through October 30)
Stratford Shakespeare Festival, Stratford, Canada
stratfordfestival.ca

John Bull’s Other Island
Written by Bernard Shaw
The Doctor’s Dilemma
Written by Bernard Shaw
(John Bull through October 9; Doctor through October 30)
Shaw Festival, Niagara-on-the-Lake, Canada
shawfest.com

Summer in Canada has much to recommend it, notably more bearable weather than hot, sticky New York. But Canada’s best are its theater festivals at Niagara-on-the-Lake and Stratford, as excellent actors and inventive directors combine for top-notch productions of great plays by Shakespeare, Shaw and others—with a musical or two thrown in.

The Stratford Shakespeare Festival gives preeminence to the greatest playwright in English (or any other language). And this summer’s star is our greatest living classical actor in English: Christopher Plummer unforgettably plays Prospero in The Tempest, and if Des McAnuff’s visually dazzling, sometimes too-clever staging doesn’t always let Shakespeare’s final masterpiece breathe, it at least lets Plummer—who enacted a monumental Caesar in Shaw’s Caesar and Cleopatra on the same stage two summers ago—to crown a storied stage career.

Now a spry 80 years old, Plummer uses his lifetime of experience to plumb the depths of Shakespeare’s deposed duke turned magician on a magical isle with his teenaged daughter Miranda, orchestrating the play’s events to happen in his favor with the help of the sprite Ariel. If McAnuff’s staging drags during the usual overdone comic scenes featuring a drunken Trinculo and Stephano with the monstrous Caliban, there’s ample compensatory theatrical razzle-dazzle, including an enchanting opening image of Ariel descending to snatch Prospero’s magic book.

The cast is not nearly on Plummer’s level, with Peter Hutt’s dull Alonso and Julyana Soelistyo’s disastrous Ariel on the lowest rung. But Plummer controls the stage throughout, whether reacting angrily as he recounts his banishment to Miranda or playfully aiding her courtship with Prince Ferdinand: here’s an actor in complete command of his resources and who, like his character, relies on them to do his stage magic. Plummer has the rare ability to speak Shakespeare’s lines so trippingly off the tongue as to sound like everyday speech. And his final speech to the audience is as unbearably moving as only a great actor can make it.

Also at Stratford is Cole Porter’s classic musical Kiss Me Kate, based on Shakespeare’s early comedy The Taming of the Shrew. Happily, there’s little of director John Doyle's penchant for ruining musical theater works from Company to Peter Grimes. Porter’s songs, of course, are killers—“Wunderbar,” “So in Love,” “I Hate Men” and “Brush Up Your Shakespeare,” for starters—as are the women, led by firecracker Chilina Kennedy, who came from the Shaw Festival to become a star at Stratford with a booming voice and charm to spare. Likewise, there’s Monique Lund, a fabulously-talented comedienne with an operatic voice. Their leading men aren’t as memorable, but no matter: Kiss Me Kate is a keeper.

The Shaw Festival’s two namesake plays this summer are rarely done in New York. Christopher Newton has staged John Bull’s Other Island as if it was a fairy tale. That’s not far off the mark: Shaw’s beguiling (if dated) comic drama is about an Englishman who goes to Ireland for the first time with his Irish business partner and falls for the charms of the Emerald Isle—including the Irishman’s former gal. Newton wittily uses British and Irish music by Vaughan Williams, Arnold and Harty, and his actors—led by Shaw vet Benedict Campbell, typically debonair as the Englishman—lead the way to a frolicsome, if ultimately frivolous, 2-1/2 hours in the theater.

Uneasy laughs are plentiful in The Doctor's Dilemma, Shaw’s prescient black comedy about a doctor who must choose between two very different sick men to partake in a miraculous new treatment: a great artist who’s an awful human being or an elderly doctor as honest and humane as they come. Morris Panych’s production is hampered by the large Festival Theatre stage, which dwarfs the drawing-room intimacy of Shaw's philosophizing, and his “ironic” use of the Rolling Stones songs “Under My Thumb” and “You Can't Always get What You Want,” which smothers the beginning and end of each act. But the performances are top-notch, particularly Patrick Galligan as the perplexed physician and Michael Ball as his esteemed yet crusty colleague.