Category: Off-Off-Broadway

News: “NAFTA comedy” I’m directing opens TONIGHT!

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Quit the Road, Jack, a new comedy by Jerry Polner, directed by GaySocialites contributor Jonathan Warman, about the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), premieres tonight, Thursday March 5 as a guest production of TheaterLab in Manhattan.

When the son of a divorced and miserable couple of burnt-out ex-musicians runs away from home to join up with the immigrant worker rights movement, mom and dad are forced to travel across North America together to find their boy. Directed by Jonathan Warman, acclaimed for his work by the New York Times, Backstage, TimeOut NY and Theatermania. Quit plays Thursday to Saturday at 8 PM and Sunday at 3 PM through March 22. TheaterLab is at 357 West 36th Street, 3rd floor in Manhattan (between 8th-9th Avenue; Subway A,C,E to 34th Street), and $18 tickets are available ($12 student discounts for advance sales, using promotional code STU; discounts for groups of 10 or more ­ use promotional code BIG) at OvationTix at https://web.ovationtix.com/trs/pr/941428 .

Jerry Polner (“I saw a lot of terrific shows at The Planet Connections Festivity, but nothing made me laugh louder, longer, or more pleasurably than the first scene of Jerry Polner’s Fix Number Six”­ Martin Denton, nytheatre.com), is a writer of sketches, parodies, and stage comedies, many taking skewed looks at serious issues. Recently, his How Do You Want it, a romantic comedy about the Federal Reserve System, won the Planet Connections Award for Outstanding Production of a Staged Reading, and his Fix Number Six, nominated for six Planet Connections awards, was also published by Next Stage Press and Indie Theater Now. His other short plays have been produced by the Workshop Theater Company, Brooklyn Playwrights Collective, Manhattan Theatre Source, and NY Madness; and Weatherman, a comedy about the weather bureau, was published by Samuel French. Jerry’s comedy sketch script Fugitive Math Teachers was one of the winners of Break Media¹s Break.com Video Contest. Online, he has written for Political Subversities and McSweeney’s.

Quit the Road, Jack, produced by Radical Gags Theatrics, is co-presented by ALIGN (Alliance For A Greater New York), Community Voices Heard. The Greater New York Labor-Religion Coalition, and New York Immigration Coalition. In connection with the subject matter of the play, the co-presenting organizations will join in Fair Work, an onstage panel discussion about immigration and worker rights, immediately after the Thursday March 12 performance.

Jonathan Warman’s New York work includes the premiere of Tennessee Williams’s Now the Cats with Jewelled Claws, starring Mink Stole and Everett Quinton (“Outrageously entertaining, thanks to the imagination of the director”­ Backstage; “His surehanded staging provokes both laughs and thought” ­ Theatermania) and the new musical Me and Caesar Lee with two-time Tony nominee Ernestine Jackson. For more information on his directing work, see jonathanwarman.com.

The cast of Quit the Road, Jack, features Cynthia Bastidas; RJ Batlle; Jes Dugger (Fancy Nancy, “Homeland”,  “One Tree Hill”); Rosemary Howard (“The Wolf Of Wall Street”); Connor Johnston; Jorge Marcos (“The Good Wife”, “White Collar”), Jaime Puerta (El Quijote, La Isla Desnuda) Jay Reum and Rob Skolits (The Normal Heart, Lincoln Center Theater). Set design is by Eric Marchetta, costume design is by Maddie Peterson, lighting design is by Yuriy Nayer, and choreography is by Liz Piccoli. The production is stage managed by Vanna Richardson.

Review: John Epperson: Show Trash

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Show Trash

The artist otherwise known as Lypsinka takes off the wigs, makeup and sound design, and – lo and behold – is still an engaging entertainer without all that. Sure, John Epperson sans the Lyp armor is a very different sort of performer, but his much more traditional cabaret act Show Trash holds the stage, with considerable grace.

Show Trash is in many ways a Lypsinka origin story, showing how this small-town Mississippi boy eventually blossomed into an emblem of all that is worldly. It takes a few songs before we turn to his childhood on Hazelhurt, Mississippi (2010 population: 4,009). This is a good thing – one of Epperson’s great gifts is his ability to reveal hidden dimensions using surprising juxtapositions. Though that gift is used with more subtlety that in the Lypsinka shows, it still gives freshness to an essentially autobiographical act.

Epperson gives us a more exposed, vulnerable side of himself in Show Trash. He reveals that Lypsinka’s brashness comes in part from a desire to mask his own reticence about performing (he’s gotten over that: in addition to this show, Lypsinka has made increasing numbers of appearance in “straight” plays).

In the show, Epperson accompanies himself on piano. His first notable artistic efforts were on the piano: he was a rehearsal pianist for American Ballet Theater in the 1970s and 1980s, playing for the likes of Baryshnikov and Marakova. While this provided him entree into a world he loved – he tells many engaging stories from those years – it stifled his own creative impulses. From this unmet need sprang Lypsinka.

There are glimpses of the Lyp, as Epperson’s lip-synchs to some Hazelhurst favorites or flashes a particularly sharp hand gesture. Barry Kleinbort is the one of the great masters of cabaret direction, and his sensitive work here includes the supple use of home movies and photos to reinforce Epperson’s story. Highly recommended.

For tickets, click here.

To learn about Jonathan Warman’s directing work, see jonathanwarman.com.

Review: Lypsinka: The Boxed Set

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Lypsinka Box Set

Lypsinka long since turned the drag queen craft of lip-synching into high art. In The Boxed Set, the artist otherwise known as John Epperson refines and reconnects the various pieces he has been doing since the 1980s, in a sort of greatest hits collection. He has done this compilation before, and this time around the thematic strains about identity, gender and madness have just gotten clearer and stronger.

Thank goodness, though, that increased clarity has done nothing to diminish the fundamental strangeness of the Lyp’s audio collages. One of the great pleasures of Epperson’s brand of lip-synch is the way it doesn’t so much tell a story as paint a picture. An Ethel Merman outburst next to a Dolores Gray tune, next to Faye Dunaway channeling Joan Crawford, next to the Crawford herself, next to a Vegas bopper you’ve never heard of – these juxtapositions are the very things that make both the surrealism and the sharp insights happen.

Those things, and the very precision of the lip-synch. You can’t do the things Lypsinka does without meticulous attention to the basic craft of lip-synch, and her talent in this arena is unparalleled, awe-inspiring. And Epperson’s background in dance just adds to the meticulous construction.

Sometimes Lypsinka will play a moment straight, but just as often she takes a wisp of irony in the original and puts it under a magnifying glass with a look, a sneer, or even a limb that seems to be rebelling against her brain. But never doubt that even that rebellion is under Epperson’s laser-sharp control.

What can I say? This is 5-star, 10s across the board, the gold standard of drag queen artistry. This gets my very highest recommendation. What haven’t you bought your tickets yet? For those tickets, click here.

To learn about Jonathan Warman’s directing work, see jonathanwarman.com.

News: I’m directing NAFTA comedy “Quit the Road, Jack” by Jerry Polner

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In March 2015, I will be directing Jerry Polner’s new comedy Quit the Road, Jack. It’s a comedy about NAFTA! But it’s actually about a divorced and miserable couple of burnt-out ex-musicians whose 16-year-old son runs away from home. Somehow, the son gets involved in the immigrant worker rights movement. He sends cryptic notes back to his parents, telling them what losers they are and giving them just enough information to make them think they can find him. Mom and Dad can’t stomach each other, but neither trusts the other one to find Jack, and so they’re forced to travel across North America together in search of their son.

For more about my directing work, see jonathanwarman.com.

Review: Bad with Money

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Director Ben Rimalower is making a second career of turning life’s lemons into the lemonade of serio-comic one man shows, which he performs rather than directs (Aaron Mark directs Rimalower, and you have to give Mark credit for having the requisite boldness to direct a director). First there was Patti Issues, which detailed his complex relationships with both his heroine Patti LuPone and his own father. Now, in Bad with Money, he goes into his even more complex relationship with cash and credit.

While Rimalower again brings wit and humor to the story – especially jokes and references designed to tickle theatre fanatics and insiders – the tone here is a bit more shaded and muted. He’s come to some kind of resolution in his relationship with Patti and Daddy; not so much with his addictive desire for the more, more, more than money can buy.

As such, Bad with Money isn’t as quite as breathlessly entertaining as Patti Issues. Neither does it have any particularly deep insights into the consumer culture that so grips Rimalower. This isn’t a huge problem, and in a way makes for a more truthfully ambivalent story. While his stories about going into prostitution are salacious and mostly fun, the stories about charging a boss’s account and dipping into a show’s budget are more dark and poignant.

It’s a complex story, involving lots of travel around the country, a large cast (though Rimalower only acts out a handful of the people he mentions), name changes and the difficult ebb and flow of a life in the theatre. It testifies to Rimalower’s skill as both writer and performer that very nearly every moment is crystal clear. Recommended.

For tickets, click here.

To learn about Jonathan Warman’s directing work, see jonathanwarman.com.

News: I’m directing a new R&B musical

On By dramaqueennycIn musical, news, Off-Off-Broadway, theatreLeave a comment

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I’m directing the new musical Me & Caesar Lee by Pat Holley, set in the world of 1980s R&B. A 43 year old former pop diva hopes to make a comeback by writing songs for a teen age singing group. Infatuated with the group and deeply infatuated with their 22 year old manager, she journeys through the resulting heartaches and betrayals, leading her to confront the haunting legacy of her mother’s suicide and her own desire to live. The cast includes Robyn Payne (The Lion King, Thoroughly Modern Millie, Kismet @ Encores!), Two-time Tony nominee Ernestine Jackson (Raisin, Guys & Dolls), Raun Ruffin (The Civil War, Randy Newman’s Faust), up-and-coming R&B singer Amanda Holley, Nick Mara (“America’s Best Dance Crew”), Joshua Scarlett and Sadat Waddy. For tickets, click here.

For more about Jonathan Warman’s directing,  see jonathanwarman.com.

Review: Mildred Fierce

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Mildred-Fierce

International drag superstar Varla Jean Merman and avant-campy playwright Ryan Landry make for a flat-out hilarious combination in Mildred Fierce. This parody of the 1945 Joan Crawford film Mildred Pierce doesn’t have any serious message to deliver, but does its spoofing with a fun-loving ingenuity that makes it a real pleasure to watch.

Mildred Fierce could be called a pastiche musical: the songs aren’t original. Instead, they’re song parodies like one might find in Varla’s nightclub act, but cleverly stitched to the madcap plot at hand. Like the Crawford flick, Fierce focuses on the pie-making Mildred’s fraught relationship with her diva daughter Veda.

This is presented by Landry’s Boston-based troupe, The Gold Dust Orphans, which has been doing this sort of thing up in Beantown for nearly 20 years. As such they’ve developed a relentlessly creative low camp style which is surprisingly detail-oriented: The stage is overstuffed with toys and miniatures, as well as way-over-the-top costumes and set pieces…not to mention the tap-dancing pies!

Varla trades her usual operatic shenanigans for a more restrained vocal tone, as fits the rejiggered standards Mildred sings. Thank goddess, though, that doesn’t mean that she’s at all restrained in delivering trashy, down and dirty comedy. Penny Champayne, in the show’s other star turn as the conniving Veda, is hilariously mannish and brutish. In the end, Mildred Fierce isn’t anything revolutionary – or even insurrectionary – but it is undeniably a whole bunch of anarchic, raunchy fun.

For tickets, click here.

Review: Patti Issues

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Patti Issues Ben-Rimalower-PR-Photo-by-Gustavo-Monroy1

This one-man show is quite possibly the gayest show in town. Ben Rimalower, a director making his writing/performing debut with this piece, tells his own story of a gay man dealing with his estranged father – who is also gay – interspersed with Patti LuPone diva-worship. Gay, gay, gay!

Rimalower has deftly combined his family history, a story that anybody can relate to, with jokes and references designed to tickle theatre fanatics and insiders. I have to admit that I have come to this particular party very late – Patti Issues has been running weekly for the better part of a year at the Duplex – so it comes as no surprise that Rimalower has the pacing of this story down pat. It’s generally a breathless pace, which works great for the comedy, but Rimalower also has a director’s sense of when a moment needs to sit or simmer (the show was actually directed by Aaron Mark, to whom I have to give credit for having the requisite boldness to direct a director).

It’s a complex story, involving lots of travel around the country, a large cast (though Rimalower only acts out a handful of the people he mentions), name changes and the difficult ebb and flow of a life in the theatre. It testifies to Rimalower’s skill as both writer and perform that very nearly every moment is crystal clear.

It’s also impressive that Ben never whitewashes the setbacks that happen in every theatrical career. As a director myself, I could definitely identify with those moments when you think one thing is going to lead to another – and it doesn’t.

LuPone herself played a role in one of Rimalower’s bigger disappointments, and he renders that moment very movingly, but just as movingly narrates how he took a deep breath and turned that lemon of a moment into lemonade, saving both face and his warm relationship with the diva. Highly entertaining, sometimes moving and definitely recommended.

For tickets, click here.

Ronald Tavel’s “Kitchenette” – directed by me – is TOMORROW!

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Kitchenette

I am directing – for one night only, TOMORROW, Sunday, March 24 7pm –  Kitchenette by Ronald Tavel, one of the first “ridiculous theater” plays ever! Adapted from Tavel’s scenario for the Andy Warhol film “Kitchen”, Kitchenette hilariously spoofs the making of an avant-garde movie. Tickets available here.

The cast:

Charles SchickCharles Schick (Filmmaker) recently acted in and co-directed Tennessee Williams’s In the Bar of a Tokyo Hotel with Regina Bartkoff at 292 Theatre/Gallery in NYC where their paintings and drawings are currently on display. Even more recently (last week) he appeared as the Khoregos opposite Everett Quinton in a staged reading of Charles Ludlam’s Medea directed by Jonathan Warman at the Phoenix Theatre Ensemble. Other recent credits include The Strangest Kind of Romance and Now the Cats with Jewelled Claws, both part of the Provincetown Tennessee Williams Festival.

Wayne HenryWayne Henry (Mikie) is thrilled to be working with Jonathan Warman again. Under Jonathan’s direction, Wayne has most notably toured Provincetown, Mississippi & Tennessee in Tennessee Williams’s The Strangest Kind of Romance. Last year, Wayne appeared as Leonard in Theater 292’s critically acclaimed In the Bar of a Tokyo Hotel with Regina Bartkoff and Charles Schick, and his play JAWS: the Musical was remounted to great reviews at The Broadway Comedy Club. His original short films are available at YouTube.com/HenryAndStein.

Tatiana GombergTatiana Gomberg (Jo) is thrilled to be working with these awesome people on this zany piece! She has performed Off and Off-Off Broadway as well as regionally and internationally. Her work in The Night of Nosferatu garnered her an NYIT award nomination for Best Featured Actress and her portrayal of a drone pilot in Hummingbirds earned her a Best Actress Nomination through the Planet Connections Awards. She also played leads in two seasons of classics at Theatre 1010 and toured the United States with TheatreworksUSA. tatianagomberg.com.

Nicholas GorhamNicholas Gorham (Joe) is a graduate of The American Academy of Dramatic Arts and has been performing in New York since the early part of the Century. After crossing the Canadian border, Nicholas had an awakening that theatre could exist without limitations and began to create his own work in the downtown Performance Art scene. Credits include The Goddess Ianna in Justin Bond Re:Galli Blonde (A Sissy Fix), Big Art Group’s Fleshtone and Nicholas Gorham: “One Drop Passing” at La MaMa, E.T.C. In 2011, Nicholas founded The Spectrum, a queer performance, rehearsal and art space in Brooklyn.

Regina BartkoffRegina Bartkoff (Mikey) recently appeared as the Nurse opposite Everett Quinton in a staged reading of Charles Ludlam’s Medea directed by Jonathan Warman at the Phoenix Theatre Ensemble. She acted and co-directed with Charles Schick in In the Bar of a Tokyo Hotel by Tennessee Williams at 292 Theatre. She played the role of Bea in Now the Cats with Jewelled Claws in the 2011 Provincetown Tennessee Williams Festival and at La MaMa. Regina has played lead roles in Anna Christie, Savage in Limbo and Medea at 292 Theatre.

face 2Jonathan Warman (Director) New York Theatre: New York premiere of Tennessee Williams’s Now the Cats with Jewelled Claws (La MaMa ETC, featuring Mink Stole and Everett Quinton), Andru’s Head (new musical, featuring Brooke Elliott (Lifetime’s “Drop Dead Diva”), NeoNeo Theatre), American Fabulous (NeoNeo Theatre). International: Dreams Reoccurring (Clubul CFR, Iasi, Romania; Nu Festival, Timisoara, Romania), Break (Dublin Gay Theatre Festival). Regional: Heads (Omaha Magic Theatre), The Strangest Kind of Romance (Provincetown Tennessee Williams Festival; Omnova Theater, Columbus, Mississippi; Theatre Sewanee, Tennessee). Notable assistant credits: Stage Directors & Choreographers Society 50th Anniversary Gala (Assistant to SDC Board President Karen Azenberg), Three Sisters (La MaMa ETC, dir. Richard Schechner). Proud member of SDC. He has served as Artistic Director of NeoNeo Theatre Company. For more info, see jonathanwarman.com.

News: I’m directing two “Ridiculous” masterpieces in March

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March 2013 is going to be one “ridiculous” month for me. Ridiculous Theatre that is! First off I’m thrilled to be reunited with the incomparable Everett Quinton, who will be playing the title role in a staged reading of Medea by Charles Ludlam that I am directing for the amazing Phoenix Theatre Ensemble, on Monday, March 18 at 8 pm. Everett (alternating with Black-Eyed Susan) created the role when he took over leadership of the Ridiculous Theatrical Company after Ludlam’s passing in 1987. Tickets available here.

Then I am going to fully stage – for one night only, Sunday, March 24 7pm –  Kitchenette by Ronald Tavel, one of the first “ridiculous theater” plays ever! Adapted from Tavel’s scenario for the Andy Warhol film “Kitchen”, Kitchenette hilariously spoofs the making of an avant-garde movie. Tickets available here.