THE BADASS RECORD COLLECTION Late-Night Series Hits The Brick 7/9

DMTheatrics and The Brick Theater, Inc. present THE BADASS RECORD COLLECTION , First in an exciting new Late-Night series at The Brick, from the director of BITCH MACBETH and THE SINISTER URGE!

Volume 1
Taking Liberties:
An evening of Elvis Costello
PERFORMANCES: July 9th - July 18th, Thursday at 10:30pm, Friday and Saturday at 11pm at The Brick, 575 Metropolitan Avenue, Williamsburg, Brooklyn one block from the Lorimer stop of the L train / Metropolitan stop of the G train

Tickets available at www.bricktheater.com or Theatermania (212-352-3101)
$15
Devised, Produced, and Directed by Frank Cwiklik
Musical Director, Adam Swiderski
Choreography By Becky Byers
Co-Producer, Michele Schlossberg

It's cabaret on steroids. It's your music collection come alive. It's all the things you see in your head when you hear the music. It's the Badass Record Collection, an open-ended series of musical extravaganzas, featuring live musical tributes to great composers, performers, and genres of 20th and 21st Century pop music! The inaugural entry in this new series of musical extravaganzas from indie theater impresario Frank Cwiklik and his acclaimed DMTheatrics, TAKING LIBERTIES, is a tribute to one of the most acclaimed songwriters and performers of the past thirty years, the legendary Elvis Costello.

The agonies and ecstasies of love, lust, and life, the ups and downs of friendships, relationships, and marriage, and the exquisite pains of heartbreak, all are beautifully portrayed in this selection of great compositions by music legend Elvis Costello. This show has been carefully curated by DMTheatrics' director and founder Frank Cwiklik, OOBR-award winning creator of Sugarbaby, the Vegas-themed Antony and Cleopatra, and the infamous Bitch Macbeth.

Reteaming Cwiklik with longtime conspirator Adam Swiderski and recent DMT arrival Becky Byers, TAKING LIBERTIES acts as both a history of the music of Costello, and the performance, musical, and visual styles of the past 50 years of entertainment, all performed with delicious gusto by Orgy of the Dead! star Carolyn Demisch, and a group of performers new to the DMT stage: Adam Enright, Aaron Fuksa, Colleen Horan, Elaine Moran, Evan Toth, and Brianna Tyson. Together, this powerhouse cast presents a live musical performance that is touching and invigorating, exciting and moving, hilariously funny and deeply disturbing - all that music can be, and all uniquely theatrical.

FRANK CWIKLIK (producer/director) has been pumping out loud, excessive, almost entirely pointless theater in various NYC venues for over 10 years, despite the pleas and entreaties of audiences and critics, and in defiance of several court orders and Federal regulations. Having started in the arts in his childhood, writing and directing school plays at the precocious age of 10, his talent has barely progressed since, though he has put on weight and gotten much crankier. With his needlessly gargantuan theater company, the roundly despised DMTheatrics, he has produced and/or directed over two dozen shows since 1999, and has worked as an actor and designer for dozens of shows for other companies in that time. His best-known works include the influential S&M futuristic fantasia Bitch Macbeth (whose recent third appearance at Williamsburg's Brick Theater smashed box office records and earned a 4-star review in Time Out New York); the controversial political satire Sugarbaby! (published in the 2004 NYTE Plays and Playwrights Collection); the smash-hit Vegas version of Antony and Cleopatra (winner 2003 OOBR Award for Outstanding Production); an infamous series of Ed Wood adaptations which played to sellout crowds at the legendary Todo Con Nada, as well as the Red Room and the St. Marks Studio Theater; and countless more. His immersive, eccentric, aggressive directorial style has earned him inexplicable praise from the Village Voice, the New York Times, Time Out New York, NYTheatre.com, Backstage, Stage Press Weekly, and (somehow) Popular Mechanics, and has influenced many directors working both on and off Broadway, none of whom have offered the courtesy of so much as a greeting card or thank-you note. Cwiklik's DM-Theatrics laboratories are busily concocting more of his unique and exhausting theatrical gauntlets, including Titus Andronicus, Scarlet Street, A Week in Wackystan, and more entries in the Badass Record Collection. Cwiklik and his wife Michele, who has co-produced and/or appeared in nearly all of DMT's productions, live with a scowling, temperamental midget named Donald who poops his pants and eats nearly non-stop -- Cwiklik is waiting for the test results to come back before committing to any trust funds or longterm living accommodations for the tiny interloper. More information, as well as nude photos of William Howard Taft, can be found at www.dm-theatrics.com.

It's cabaret on steroids. It's Greatest Hits albums done live. It's the Badass Record Collection, an open-ended series of musical extravaganzas, featuring tributes to great composers, performers, and genres of 20th and 21st Century pop music. Each night's themes will be selected by DMTheatrics founder and acclaimed director Frank Cwiklik from his collection of nearly 10,000 records, CDs, and even 78s of pop, rock, jazz, and esoterica. Not just cabarets, these are full performances, loud, high-energy blowout, big enough to entertain and maintain DMT's tradition of larger-than-life pop theater, they're sure to be the party shows of the century! Proposed composers and themes include evenings of music by Richard Thompson, David Bowie, Elvis Costello, Scott Walker and Kate Bush; stagings of classic pop/rock albums such as A Swingin' Affair, Siren, Fear of Music, and Transformer; an "AM Gold" evening of music from Jimmy Webb, Burt Bacharach, Lee Hazlewood, and others; and a comedy classics night inspired by Allan Sherman, Tom Lehrer, Al Yankovic, and other mad geniuses. Featuring the musical talents of both indie theater legends and up-and-coming talents, it's a collection of the greatest pop music of the past hundred years - it's the Badass Record Collection, and it's yours to explore! For more info, visit www.dm-theatrics.com.

The Brick Theater is located at 575 Metropolitan Avenue (between Union Avenue and Lorimer Street) in Williamsburg, Brooklyn on the L & G subway lines (L: Lorimer stop; G: Metropolitan stop). For more detailed directions & further information, see www.bricktheater.com. The Brick and its non-profit company, The Brick Theater, Inc. were founded in September of 2002 by Robert Honeywell and Michael Gardner. Formerly an auto-body shop, a storage space and a yoga center, this brick- walled garage was completely refurbished into a state-of-the-art theater complex, with a large sprung floor and professional lighting and sound package.

The Brick has been home to numerous critically acclaimed original productions, including three years of the New York Clown Theatre Festival, The Antidepressant Festival, The Nosemaker's Apprentice: Chronicles of a Medieval Plastic Surgeon, The Colonists, The Protestants, The Granduncle Quadrilogy, Lord Oxford Brings You the Second American Revolution, Live!, Richard Foreman's Harry in Love, The Film Festival: A Theater Festival (featuring Death at Film Forum and The Stubborn Illusion of Time), Babylon Babylon, Notes From Underground, Bitch Macbeth, The Debate Society's A Thought About Raya, Secrets History Remembers, The Pretentious Festival (including Every Play Ever Written and Macbeth Without Words), The Present Perfect, Bouffon Glass Menajoree, Strom Thurmond Is Not a Racist/Cleansed, The Death of Griffin Hunter, the Havel Festival, Sexadelic Cemetery, Greed: A Musical Love $tory, The Kung Fu Importance of Being Earnest, The $ellout Festival, Adventures of Caveman Robot, Total Faith in Cosmic Love, The Baby Jesus One-Act Jubilee, Memoirs of My Nervous Illness, The Moral Values Festival (featuring Dear Dubya, World Gone Wrong, My Year of Porn), Tupperware Orgy, Bizarre Science Fantasy, Who is Wilford Brimley? The Musical, Jenna is nuts, Habitat, In a Strange Room (based on William Faulkner's As I Lay Dying), Fallout Follies, Assurbanipal Babilla's Assyrian Monkey Fantasy and stagings of Chekhov's Three Sisters, O'Neill's Beyond the Horizon, Maria Irene Fornes' Abingdon Square and the Brooklyn premiere of legendary Polish playwright Stanislaw Witkiewicz's The Pragmatists.