Winter Theater Festival Fever-Redux

The weather has been unseasonably warm here in the city but the winter theater festivals, including a few new ones, are plowing ahead as usual and so I thought I’d do a redux of the guide to them I did a couple of years ago. These theatrical expositions tend to showcase experimental works, under-represented performers and other kinds of productions that don't get as much attention during the rest of the year. And their ticket prices are cheaper too.

But I'm going to start this off with  BroadwayCon. This three-day fandom extravaganza of panels, workshops and sing-alongs is returning to its original home at the New York Hilton Midtown next weekend, Jan. 11 to 13. My BroadwayRadio pals and I are joining in the festivities on Saturday, Jan.13, with a live version of the “This Week on Broadway” show and we’d love to have you join us. You can find more about how to do that by clicking here.

Below are a few of the other events that you might want to catch while waiting for the big spring shows to open. I’ve listed them in order of how much time you still have left to see them; click on their titles for more info:

Under the Radar: This 15th edition of the  Public Theater’s venerable winter series began Jan. 3, runs through Jan. 13, and features more acts homegrown in the U.S. than usual but it still boasts artists from nine countries.

American Realness: Dance is the connective thread that ties together the 17 performers scheduled to explore themes ranging from ancient rites to sci-fi fantasies in spaces spread across four of New York’s five boroughs from Jan. 4 to 13.

Prototype: Performing in venues from La MaMa in the East Village to Harlem Stage uptown, this festival, which runs from Jan. 5 to 13, is devoted to chamber operas and other musical theater works and is offering 12 productions this year, including a bilingual opera performed in Spanish and English.

First Nations Dialogues: This first-time series of performances, workshops, discussions and ceremonies led by indigenous artists representing tribal peoples from Australia, Canada and the U.S. will be held in a variety of downtown venues from Jan. 5 to 12.

Act One; One Act Festival: Lots of up-and-coming theater makers now live in Long Island City and once again its Secret Theatre is hosting three different programs of short comedies, dramas and dramadies from Jan. 2-10, and inviting audience members to vote on their favorites, which will get encore performances on Jan. 13.

DirectorFest: The Drama League is marking its 35th celebration of young directors with a racially diverse slate of newbies showing off their stagings of both classic plays and original works in various theatrical spaces from Jan 11 to 28.

Exponential Festival: Based in Brooklyn and supported in part by a Kickstarter campaign, this festival is back for the fourth time, running from Jan. 4 thru Feb. 13 with works from an eclectic mix of performance artists.

The Fire This Time Festival: Taking its name from the seminal James Baldwin book, this festival spotlights black playwrights from all parts of the African diaspora. Past participants have included Jocelyn Bioh, Marcus Gardley and Dominique Morisseau. Eight newcomers will present their works from Jan. 21 thru Feb. 2

Winterfest: The New York Theater Festival's annual showcase for still unknown-writers will feature some 50 Fringe-style productions that started Dec. 30 and will run thru March 10 at the Hudson Guild Theatre in Chelsea.

Frigid New York Festival: Now celebrating its 10th year, this theatrical grab bag will offer works by 30 different companies from Feb. 20 thru March 10

Festival Fever for the Cold Theater Months

It's been cold and snowy in New York over the past few days, the kind of weather that makes even a theater lover want to stay home and snuggle up with a book or something on the DVR.

The theater world accommodates by slowing down, as old shows depart (The Color Purple, The Encounter, Les Liaisons Dangereuses and Falsettos all closed last weekend and The Humans, Holiday Inn and even the long-running Jersey Boys take their final bows this coming weekend) and meanwhile, new ones ready themselves for spring openings (22 are scheduled to hit the boards before the season ends in April).

But over the past few years, a growing number of winter festivals have popped up to provide relief for those of us who get too antsy going without live theater for too long. As a bonus, the festivals offer experimental works and other kinds of shows that don't get seen as regularly. And the ticket prices run cheap too.

Even I, who can't stand the cold, ventured out last weekend to see Blueprint Specials, a revival of the variety shows that the military commissioned folks like Broadway showman Frank Loesser and comedy writer Arnold M. Auerbach to create and then shipped out, along with instructions for easy-to-make costumes and scenery, for soldiers to perform for their mates during World War II.

The current production, lead by Broadway regulars Laura Osnes and Will Swenson, featured a cast of 34 and included both Broadway gypsies and active service men and women. The show, which was performed on the huge hangar deck of the USS Intrepid, the decommissioned ship that is now a sea, air and space museum, maintained the sweet and silly humor of its 1940s origins. I appreciated it more than I was amused by it. But it did get me thinking about what kind of entertainment the folks now defending us are getting.

The final of the five sold-out Blueprint performances is tonight. They were part of the Public Theater's Under the Radar series, which began Jan. 4, runs through Jan. 15 and features theatrical events from around the world. You can find out more about them by clicking here. 

And here are some other festivals that you might want to consider, listed in order of how much time you still have left to see them; click on their titles for more info:

Prototype: Now in its fifth season, this festival devotes itself to chamber operas and other musical theater works and is scheduled to present seven of them from Jan. 5-15

La Mama's Squirts: The venerable downtown theater champions queer artists from a variety of ethnic, gender and generational backgrounds in this theater jubilee that runs from Jan. 6-15

  

STEM Fest: The worlds of science and theater come together when performers ranging from storytellers to burlesque specialists will present shows dealing with science, technology, engineering and math at the Under St. Marks performance space from Jan. 4-21

The Coil 2017 Festival: The performance art space PS 122 will host 12 shows that include dance, film, theater and works that resist being categorized from Jan. 3-22

The Fresh Grind Festival: Just six-months old, newcomer Black Coffee Productions is precociously presenting staged readings of works by 10 emerging playwrights at TheatreLab from Jan. 18-22

Act One: One Act Festival: Manhattan doesn't have a monopoly on festivals, four different programs of short plays will run at the Secret Theatre in Long Island City from Jan. 12-28

The Exponential Festival: Based in Brooklyn, this festival will spotlight some 30 works, all by New York theater artists, between Jan. 13-30

The Fire This Time Festival: Black playwrights from all parts of the African diaspora will be celebrated in this festival that includes a mini-festival of 10-minute plays, all running from Jan. 16 - Feb. 5

Winterfest: The New York Theater Festival's showcase for still unknown-writers will feature some 50 productions between Jan. 2 and March 5.

Frigid New York Festival: Now in its 10th year, this eclectic festival will feature works by 30 different companies from Feb. 13 thru March 5

That's a lot of stuff so if you'd like a little help deciding what to see, you can check out the Maxamoo podcast's preview of the festivals in which its knowledgable regulars list the shows they most want to see by clicking here.  

And, finally, there's BroadwayCon, the three-day fandom extravaganza of panels, workshops and sing-alongs that will take over the Jacob J. Javits Convention Center from Jan. 27-29. Not even a blizzard kept last year's inaugural fest from taking place and even more stars have signed up to participate this year. You can find more about all it by clicking here.  

The Pains of Summer Festival Fatigue

We theater lovers used to beg for things to see in the summer.  And so we got festivals. Lots and lots of festivals. Maybe too many festivals.  

There’s the New York Musical Theatre Festival, the Midtown International Theater Festival, the Lincoln Center Festival, the New York International Fringe Festival and a bunch of mini-festivals at the 59E59 Theaters, including the East to Edinburgh Festival, which showcased 16 of the American productions that are among the nearly 3,000(!) shows playing this month at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, and Summer Shorts, a grab bag of six one-acts by well-known and upcoming playwrights.  
 

From all accounts, very little of what any of them have offered this summer has been worth seeing.  I skipped NYMF this year because my husband K and I were out of the country. But my blogger pal Chris Caggiano at Everything I Know I Learned From Musicals saw 18 of the 250 productions; he really liked three of them but just the thought of having to sit through the other 15 depresses me. (Click here to read Chris' final report on the festival.)

 

I also couldn’t work up much enthusiasm for the salmagundi of international productions that Lincoln Center served up this year and so I passed on them too. The New York Times critic Charles Isherwood's recap of the shows, including Monkey: Journey to the West, the circus-like extravaganza performed entirely in Chinese, confirmed that decision (click here to read what he wrote.)

And now, alas, I can tell you from personal experience that this year’s Summer Shorts offerings aren’t faring much better.  Or at least that was the case with the three one acts my husband K and I saw in Series A, the first of the two bills that are being presented this year.

The lineup had seemed promising: playlets by the old masters Neil LaBute and Tina Howe, both of whom are Summer Shorts regulars, plus one by the young playwright Lucas Hnath, whose A Public Reading of an Unproduced Screenplay About the Death of Walt Disney stirred up a lot of buzz when it was performed at Soho Rep in the spring. 

The evening started off with LaBute’s Good Luck (in Farsi), a piece that he also directed about two actresses trying to psyche one another out as they wait outside an audition room. It includes so many of LaBute’s tics—the jousting for power, the obsession with looks, lots of profanity—that it almost seems a parody of a LaBute play.  Still, the put downs are mildly amusing and the young actresses game.  So no harm, no foul. 

But Hnath’s About a Woman Named Sarah completely baffled me. It’s an imagined recreation of the conversations between John and Cindy McCain and Sarah and Todd Palin during their first meeting. The four actors playing the characters sit on benches and get up when it’s their turn to perform a series of two-person dialogs that are punctuated with a clicking sound, whose purpose I’m still trying to figure out. 

The deadpan actors make no attempt to mimic the well-known people they play and director Eric Hoff gives them little else to do.  So there are no new insights into any of the characters—and no enjoyment on my end.

 

Howe’s Breaking the Spell was, at about 25 minutes, the longest and most ambitious of the three. I had been expecting another of her meditations on WASP culture but Howe seems to have taken to heart the notion that playwrights can play around with one acts. Her story is set in a fairytale kingdom where a princess has fallen under a sleeping spell. The King, her devoted father, has watched over her for 100 years, trying everything he can think of to break the curse.

The play seems to nod to Eugene Ionesco’s absurdist drama Exit the King, which I loved when Geoffrey Rush brought it to Broadway back in 2009 (click here to read my review of that) and the theater vet Michael Countryman does a nice job with this king. But Breaking the Spell also seems custom-tailored for the talents of the young pianist and saxophonist who play the many suitors who try to awaken the princess.  

They may be talented musicians—the program proudly notes that one of them, Evan Shinners, will play a different prelude from Bach’s “The Well-Tempered Clavier” at each performance—but they are both amateur actors and that undercuts the impact. At least for me.  The actress Jane Alexander, a friend of Howe’s since their student days at Sarah Lawrence College, was in the audience at our performance and howled at almost every line.  

 

It isn’t popular to say that there is too much theater (Rocco Landesman, one of Alexander’s successors as head of the National Endowment for the Arts, got blasted when he said as much a couple of years ago (click here to read about that dust-up). But I’m going to stick my neck out and say it anyway:  there are too many people doing theater in New York and  many of them should be doing something else.

 

The Fringe Festival begins today.  I’ve enjoyed some of its productions in past years (click here to read about the day I spent theater-hopping last year) and I’ve really tried to gin up some interest in this year’s slate but, on the basis of how the festival season has feared so far, I'm probably going to sit this one out.

A Surprisingly Satisfying Day at the Fringe

Unless a friend, relative or lover is doing one of its shows, deciding what to see at the New York International Fringe Festival can be daunting.  Not to mention disappointing. There are nearly 200 shows each year, ranging in quality from polished professionalism to flagrant narcissism. In the past I’ve either thrown up my hands and skipped the festival entirely or chosen haphazardly and then wish that I had skipped it. 

But I got smart this year and about a month ago, I enlisted the help of my intrepid theatergoing buddy Bill, who read through this year’s offerings (click here to do the same) checked out the early buzz on them and then made up a short list of candidates that we might want to see. Luckily, three of the shows that most intrigued us were playing on the same day and so this past Wednesday, Bill and I created our own mini-festival and for the first time ever I can say I had a great time at the Fringe.

All of the Fringe shows play at theaters downtown within walking distance of one another, which makes it easy to get from one to the other.  Bill and I started our day at 2 p.m. at the Gene Frankel Theatre with Pink Milk, a 90-minute meditation on the life of Alan Turing, the brilliant computer scientist and cryptologist who helped the Brits break the German code during World War II but later committed suicide after being prosecuted for gross indecency because he was gay when that was illegal in England.

The show's playwright Alex Paul Young and his seven-member cast are all current college students or recent grads and both the play and the performances reflect their youth. And Pink Milk doesn’t add much to our understanding of Turing beyond what Hugh Whitemore offered in his 1986 play Breaking the Code, which introduced Turing to the general public and gave Derek Jacobi his West End debut.

Still, there is a sweet earnest to Pink Milk that flows from a new generation’s delight in having discovered a martyr and hero.  And director Brandon Powers has gussied up the production with all kinds of stagecraft, including stylized dance routines and some symbolic business with apples. He slightly overdoes it but I wouldn’t mind seeing more from him—or from Young for that matter. And, if you hurry, you can see what they’ve done with this since there’s a performance tonight and one more on Sunday afternoon.

Our next show, Independents, was scheduled to start at 4 p.m. and so Bill and I scooted up Second Avenue to Theatre 80 on St. Mark’s Place. There was a great deal of interest in this musical because its book writer Marina Keegan was killed in an auto accident in May, just days after graduating from Yale and a few weeks before she was scheduled to start working as an assistant at The New Yorker (click here to read more about her).

Her collaborators and fellow Yalies, composer Stephen Feigenbaum, lyricist Mark Sonnenblick and director Charlie Polinger, have dedicated the show to Keegan’s memory and it turns out to be a very nice tribute. 

The plot centers around a group of young misfits who are living on a Revolutionary- era tall ship that is the only thing one of them inherited when his parents unexpectedly died. He and his crew try to raise the money to pay off some debt on the boat by performing as Colonial Williamsburg-style reenactors.  But they’re no good at it until a Corky St. Clair-style intern arrives.

There are additional subplots involving a brother in foster care, at least two troubled romances and drug smugglers that Keegan might have combed out and tightened had she lived. But as is, the show is buoyed up by its terrific score—an entertaining blend of pop-rock tunes, riffs on sea ditties and a lovely cabaret-ready ballad, “I Should Be Glad He’s Gone.” 

Polinger meanwhile has directed with a sure hand. The cast—a mix of vets from the original Yale production and young New York actors including Lilli Cooper, the original Martha in Spring Awakening who sings the hell out of that “He’s Gone” ballad—comes with varying degrees of talent but is so thoroughly natural and comfortable with one another that I thought they’d all been longtime friends until I read the Playbill. Kudos to both Polinger and casting director Holly Buczek.

The production values are similarly strong. The handsome nautical set by Brian Dudkiewicz reminded Bill and me of the one for Peter and the Starcatcher and appropriately so since this show is not only set on a ship but deals with a contemporary group of lost boys and girls. 

Independents is scheduled for three more performances next week before the whole Fringe Festival closes on Aug. 26.  The word is that all seats for it were sold out but there were a few vacant ones at our performance so go and you might get lucky.

It began to rain when Bill and I walked out of the theater and since we had an hour until our 7 p.m. show, we ducked into a café on Second Avenue and got a quick snack. When the rain slowed, we ran over to the Kraine Theater on 4th Street, where we saw the most professional of the three shows, Tail! Spin!, Mario Correa’s satirical spin on political sex scandals.

Excerpting verbatim transcripts from press conferences, interviews, emails and other public utterances, Correa revisits former Sen. Larry Craig’s arrest for lewd conduct in a men's airport bathroom, former Rep. Mark Foley’s salacious email exchanges with teen boys, former Gov. Mark Sanford’s extramarital affair with an Argentinean journalist and former Rep. Anthony Weiner’s sexting and emailing of lewd photos of himself. 

The fun derives from the way Correa juxtaposes the words each man said as he tried to control the damage after his alleged indiscretions had been revealed. Veteran comedy director Dan Knechtges brings a light but deft touch to the proceedings in which the actors sit on stools and occasionally refer to the scripts they carry. Video projections help the audience keep track of who’s speaking.

The shamed pols are played by a terrific quarter of actors who’ve honed their comedic skills on TV and onstage: Sean Dugan as Craig, Dan Hodapp as Foley, Mo Rocca as Sanford and Nate Smith as Weiner  But best of all is  “Saturday Night Live’s” Rachel Dratch, who, as the Playbill notes, plays the men’s “wives, tails, beards & Barbara Walters” and is LOL-funny as each. 

Bill and I caught the next-to-the-last performance of Tail! Spin! but it wouldn’t have mattered even if I’d told you about it earlier because all of the seats sold out as soon as the tickets went on sale last month.

So, we did three plays in six hours. None was perfect but they were good enough that I would have been up for even another.

Getting Hitched to NYMF with "Marrying Meg"

The New York Musical Theatre Festival has been around for 26 years now.  Among the more illustrious NYMF alumni are shows like Altar Boyz, Next to Normal and [title of show].  So I have no excuse for never having gone to one of the festival productions.  Except for a bad case of festival phobia.  Festivals offer so many choices that I suffer the symptoms of Stendhal syndrome and by the time I've recovered my senses it's too late to see any of them.

But this year, I discovered the Broadway Bullet podcast and its host Michael Gilboe provided such terrific previews of 21 of NYMF's 30 full productions, complete with two musical selections from each (click here to hear them) that I was able to summon up the courage to overcome my trepidations.  And so on Saturday afternoon, I went to see my first NYMF show: Marrying Meg at the Theatre at St. Clements on West 46th. 

Why that one?  Well a large number of the Festival shows tend to be spoofs or variations on campy monsters, vampires and other goofy ghouls and the horrors of Mel Brooks’ Young Frankenstein have left a bad taste in my mouth for those.  A few NYMF productions are imports sung in foreign languages (like the Korean My Scary Girl and the Spanish Anjou) and others sounded like outtakes from somebody’s Guitar Hero sessions.  But I liked the musical excerpts I heard for Marrying Meg and its creator Mark Robertson, a Scot with an easy sense of humor, came across in Gilboe’s preview as a nice guy who, as he says in his program notes, simply wants to make the audience smile.  Which he did.

Marrying Meg is based on Scottish playwright Alexander Reid’s 1950 play The Lass with the Muckle Mou.  It combines two folktales to tell the whimsical story of a medieval troubadour who’s struggling to write a ballad and a nobleman’s daughter who can’t find a husband because she has such a big mouth. Robertson has tweaked the story to draw a comparison between troubadours and their modern-descendants: celebrity journalists.  And he’s added lots of funny songs (plus a couple of ballads, although those aren’t his strong suit).  

The result is no more than a really good children’s theater piece.  But that was fine with me because I once studied with two co-founders of the Paper Bag Players. I know how hard it is to do good theater for kids and how important it is to do it well so that they grow up thinking that going to the theater is a cool thing to do.

There were six little girls sitting two rows in front of me (since all NYMF tickets are just $20, it cost less for all of them to see Marrying Meg than it would have for one of them to see Shrek) and they were delighted, sitting literally on the edges of their seats as one of the reluctant suitors was taken to the gallows after refusing to marry the nobleman’s daughter. It was fun to watch kids enjoying a witty and entertaining show that didn’t feel the need to show how hip it was by throwing in gratuitous profanity (although it did succumb to some fart jokes).

It’s too late for you to see it because the musical’s four-performance run ended last night.  And  the show is unlikely to be picked up for a larger production but I’m writing about it anyway because it’s my first NYMF show. And because it made me see how valuable the festival can be for theater folks who want to experiment with musicals (something that can no longer be done in Broadway's high-stakes arena), for theater lovers who want to see the genre grow and for the theater fans of tomorrow like the kids at Marrying Meg. So go see a NYMF show before the festival ends on Oct. 18.  You may even see me there.