Category Archives: Theatre
19th performance of Monkey added
All that monkey business about the biggest buzz not going to Monkey: Journey to the West might be a little premature. Tickets have been selling so well that Spoleto just announced yet another addition to the Monkey King’s performance schedule, the second since the festival began on May 22. The new date is June 5 [...]
Me and the Monkey
No matter how you feel about Monkey: Journey to the West, when you see him on the street, you take a picture. We were on our way to dinner, walking by the Sottile, when I spotted the Monkey King taking a smoke break (sidenote: the entire cast seems to smoke; the sidewalk outside the backstage [...]
Why he didn’t see Donna Uchizono
Donna Uchizono’s dance company gave a great performance tonight of Low and State of Heads. It was presented at the Emmett Robinson Theatre at the Simons Center for the Arts in the slot right before Taylor Mac. I asked Mac after his performance if he’d had a chance to see Uchizono. He said no. He [...]
Those cross-dressing Germans
At tonight’s performance by Taylor Mac, a member of the audience was invited up on stage to pick through Mac’s many articles of fabulousness to find the Mylar wrap. This was one of many funny shticks that Mac did in between touching ukulele songs and personal anecdotes about lost love and how good the world [...]
Nothing to fear
Taylor Mac, the New York performance artist whose buzz factor is quickly getting louder, a fact made evident today by the addition of a fourth show to his performance schedule, opens his first Spoleto run tonight at the Emmett Robinson Theatre.
He told CCP’s Jason Zwiker in an interview that he is especially fond of exploring [...]
The Fool’s Cap Map
In the interest of background information, I thought I’d post this image of the Fool’s Cap Map, a 16th-century artifact that reflects the worldview of cartographers in Renaissance Europe. I talk about the map at length is a feature on the Monkey King being a global comic hero of the 21st century. Taylor Mac [...]
New home for PURE?
After watching Vaud Rats Wednesday night, I talked to Rodney Rogers, co-founder of PURE Theatre, which presented K. Brian Neel in Vaud Rats for Piccolo Spoleto. The performance was in Lance Hall, about as small a space as I ever seen theater in. Afterward, a downpour gave us an excuse to stick around Lance Hall [...]
The show did go on, quietly
The rain held off long enough for the Nottingham Playhouse to preview The Burial at Thebes at the Cistern tonight (it opens tomorrow). Thebes is a new translation of Sophocles’ Antigone, the Greek tragedy, by Seamus Heaney, the Irish poet. What seemed to be a problem turned out not to be a problem at all.
Unfortunately, [...]
How YouTube is like vaudeville
K. Brian Neel was running a fever the entire time he was performing Vaud Rats on Wednesday night. I found this out afterward while we talked about his interest in the rich history of vaudeville.
As we talked about the play within the play aspect of his show, he asked me what I thought of the [...]
Who’s getting the most buzz?
Looks like Spoleto Festival should have booked more dates for Between the Devil and the Deep Blues Sea. People have been asking me all week if I’ve seen this funny, macabre, and brilliant bit of absurdist theater. Everyone says they loved it. No one — no one in my presence, that is — has expressed [...]
