Most of Marissa Mulder’s patter is not patter at all. Her spoken words introducing songs or connecting songs in “Tom … in His Words” are the words of Tom Waits. This performance choice for her current appearance at the Metropolitan Room results in an engaging evening of song where Ms. Mulder proves unequivocally that exquisite vocal interpretation is more about…
An important piece of theater aptly entitled “Hit the Wall” is consuming the small stage at The Barrow Street Theater in New York City’s West Village. Ike Holter’s new play examines the incidents which occurred at the birth of the gay movement at the nearby Stonewall Inn where riots erupted on the night of Judy Garland’s funeral on June 26th…
“Unless you are honest with yourself, you cannot be honest with the people who love you.” Sigmund Freud would have loved “Honky,” Greg Kalleres’s new play running at Urban Stages through April 14th. This play is chock full of repression, transference, hysteria, projection, and it makes people laugh. Freud loved humor and posited in his 1905 “Jokes and Their Relation…
Men (the male of the species, not the generic ‘humankind’) are often (always?) quite a burden to carry when they are among the living. Post mortem, these same men are often (in perpetuity?) even more of a burden to carry – for the living who remember them and for the dead who must share either Paradisio or Inferno with them….
A slice of gay life or for that matter any selective lifestyle is the scenario that plays out in J. D. Cerna’s solo show “Not as Cute as Picture” taking the stage at the historic Duplex in Greenwich Village. Rather than the common coming out or coming of age drama this falls more into the finding myself category in which…
“Homey: The boys, the ones you not only like, but trust. Term of endearment towards another signifying closeness. Examples: You homeys got my back, right? Hey, you will always be my homey.” (Urban Dictionary) Star-crossed homeys Abby (Maria Dizzia) and Zack (Greg Keller) transfer their struggling marriage of five years from the United States to Belleville, a colorful multi-ethnic neighborhood…
The trio of talent at The Metropolitan Room on Monday February 25, 2013 – Parker Scott, Wells Hanley, and Rubin Kodheli – creates a synchronicity of sound that outreaches perfection. There are times when the voices coming from these three sources are indistinguishable and easily could be one voice. We have said almost all that can be said about Parker…
When people want to express the total pointlessness of something, they sometimes say that thing is as silly as “arguing over how many angels could dance on the head of a pin.” The familiar phrase is also a rather cynical description of what might be considered a tedious concern with irrelevant details. For Caliban (a civilian version of Taliban perhaps),…
There was so much talent on the stage of the Metropolitan Room for Kevin Dozier’s “Love’s Never Lost” CD Launch that Kevin quipped, “I have no room to move.” Kevin’s new CD, produced by Paul Rolnick, features arrangements and musical direction by Alex Rybeck. Kevin said “The songs I’ve selected are about the many stages of love. They range from…
“So high you can’t get over it /So low you can’t get under it /So wide you can’t get ’round it /You gotta’ go in at the door.” – Traditional American Gospel Song In The New Group’s spellbinding production “Clive” at the Acorn Theatre, Clive the protagonist does all he can to avoid redemption (going in at the door), including…