Theater for the New City's award-winning Street Theater Company opens its 37th annual tour August 3 with "Sanitation, or Off the Grid," a rip-roaring musical which will tour City streets, parks and playgrounds throughout the five boroughs through September 15. The production, free to all New Yorkers, will have book, lyrics and direction by Crystal Field and musical score composed by Joseph Vernon Banks. (Schedule follows at bottom of this document.)
TNC's award-winning Street Theater always contains an elaborate assemblage of trap doors, giant puppets, smoke machines, masks, original choreography and a huge (9' x 12') running screen or "cranky" providing continuous movement behind the actors. The company of 30 actors, twelve crew members, two assistant directors and five live musicians shares the challenge of performing outside and holding a large, non-captive audience. The music varies in style from Bossa Nova to Hip Hop to Musical Comedy to Gilbert & Sullivan. Complex social issues are often presented through children's allegories, with children and neighborhood people as the heroes, making these free productions a popular form of family entertainment.Three friends--proud NYC Sanitation Workers from the Lower East Side--pool their resources and calculate their sick days to take a Mediterranean cruise for a well-earned vacation. They are on their way to paradise, but their departure is interrupted by Hurricane Sandy! A sanitation truck follows a fire truck to every emergency and these dauntless DOS workers rise to impromptu acts of heroism, like rescuing people stranded in buildings, removing abandoned cars attached to fallen power wires and taking disabled people to hospitals. Finally, after a proper sendoff from their neighborhood, off they go again. But what adventures await them? Their cruise ship breaks down, leaving them adrift in the Gulf of Mexico in a ship filled with no working toilets, no lights and --you guessed it--garbage. "Feels like we never left home," our heroes sigh.Pictured: Lenin Alivante, T. Scott Lilly, Mark Marcante. Photo Credit: Jonathan Slaff.
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