Alec Duffy News

MSMT's all-singing, all-dancing tribute to Irving Berlin, I Love a Piano, blew the Pickard Theater audience away at two Monday performances with its steady stream of classic hit tunes, its high energy choreography, and the dazzling virtuosity of its youthful cast. This was an afternoon and evening to sit back and revel in the rich history of American popular music and to celebrate a composer whose work provided the soundtrack for the American experience for almost seventy years. It is exciting to watch MSMT's cast of young professionals perform this material with so much connection and commitment. Though this is the music of past generations, the eleven-person ensemble of remarkable triple threat actors brings it vibrantly to life for a contemporary audience, affirming the truism that longevity is what makes great music.

Maine State Music Theatre (MSMT) will showcase the music of Irving Berlin with two performances of I Love a Piano on Monday, June 18 at 2:00 and 7:30 PM.

Writer/performer Kirya Yvonne Traber presents a theatrical mixtape at JACK, sharing songs of necessity and stories of longing. For this mix of concert and theater piece, Traber is backed by a four-piece band, with musical arrangements by Emma Alabaster. Featured musicians include Kala Brame (percussion), Alex Marcelo (piano), Emma Alabaster (bass), and Gwen Laster (viola), with a scenic installation by Jacqui Martinez and lighting design by Marika Kent. What We Needed features original music and text by Traber, and was created, in part, through the Lincoln Center Education Community Artist in Residence Program.

Philly favorite choreographer/performer Annie Wilson returns to JACK with At Home with the Humorless Bastard: an exploration of personal and collective grief that shifts the audience's perspective by bringing them onstage and casting them in the dance. Through the piece, she asks whether immediate and deep intimacy with a stranger is possible, and, if not, whether adding nudity, glitter, or amateur renditions of Charles Manson songs would help. Wilson takes aim at social structures that both allow and inhibit the deep connection many are aching for, constantly, relentlessly, like a low-frequency hum that's a little unsettling in the bowels. The Humorless Bastard pokes at those structures, letting them fill up with water, turning the volume up on that hum.

The Tank (Meghan Finn and Rosalind Grush, Artistic Directors) will present the New York Premiere of LEISURE, LABOR, LUST, written and directed by Sara Farrington at The Tank (312 West 36th Street between 8th and 9th Avenues), March 28-April 22. 

Playwright/performer Stacey Karen Robinson shares her new solo exploration mixing song, movement and her distinctive storytelling style. A seeker at the crossroads wrestles to be free; she shape shifts through the body, through the memory of many selves in a dynamic sojourn of heart & spirit.

Playwright/performer Karma Mayet shares stories of America's tortured relationship to race both personal and historical set within the frame of a game of Bid Whist with the audience. With a winning card guiding the choice of story, on any given night she may summon her own experiences moving from Chicago to an all-white town in Illinois, widening to passed-down tales of the Great Migration and the Pullman Porters, smack up against her own current experiences navigating New York microagressions. In this participatory piece, Mayet creates a wonderland of playful intellect, inhabited by humor that bites and characters that speak in twisted tongues. Race Card unpacks the musty traveling papers stuffed into the 21st century's history bags, and rifles through the audience's very own drawers as well, calling on them to join the fray of stage play with both cued and improvised live-ness at every turn.

JACK presents 690 wishes in concert by Justin Hicks and The HawtPlates with Charlotte Brathwaite, running November 1 - 3, 2017.

Part of JACK's year-long series, Reparations365 The performance collective RAKIA!, led by choreographer and dancer Rakia Seaborn, inverts playground routines into the language with which a trio of dancers communicates with the black women who died too soon. This highly-stylized immortality ritual hearkens back to a care-free time of middle school talent shows, Blue Magic hair grease & 'CrazySexyCool.' Part of JACK's Reparations365 series, myeyesdontcrynomore positions reparations as freedom from a never-ending fear of another black death. What if there were something else? Endless life, endless joy.

JACK presents 690 wishes in concert by Justin Hicks and The HawtPlates with Charlotte Brathwaite, running November 1 - 3, 2017.

JACK presents 'Your Healing is Killing Me: A Performance Manifesto' by Virginia Grise, running October 5 - 7, 2017.

Rarely has the lowly and much-maligned post-show talkback received as much attention as it has since it was revealed that David Mamet was prohibiting them during productions of his plays. Inspired by Mr. Mamet's decision while honoring his prohibition, in this series of public discussions critic and journalist Jeremy M. Barker and director Patrice Miller bring together diverse practitioners to explore issues raised by Mr. Mamet's long career through their own experiences. The guests for this second session in the series, on Sunday, Oct. 15, are writer Leonard Jacobs (The Clyde Fitch Report), writer Colleen Werthman and playwright Amina Henry. Each will explore artists' powers, limitations, and challenges in defining the experience of their works.

Black Girl Magic Show! is an absurdist dance theatre lecture by playwright/performer nicHi douglas on Black female identity. Utilizing African Diasporan histories, Black feminist theory, and a lot of stuff douglas made up, she attempts to unpack, re-pack, and de-pack the Black female experience in America as witnessed by one Black woman - The Professor. As the audience follows The Professor, they discover what might happen if the one Black girl without 'Black Girl Magic' takes matters into her own hands. Before the show ends, the audience experiences a TED-type talk, modern dance, a magic routine, and a concert, often simultaneously. And they probably see at least 20 wigs.

FOUR NIGHTS OF DREAM, composer/librettist Moto Osada's opera performed in its US premiere last week at the Japan Society, is based on a cornerstone of 20th century Japanese literature, 'Ten Nights of Dream' by Natsume Soseki. While the four stories Osada has chosen may seem stylized and foreign to the Western sensibility, there is no such difficulty in being drawn in by his interesting, dynamic score--by turns lyric and harshly modern--and the staging by Alec Duffy.

JACK presents 'Your Healing is Killing Me: A Performance Manifesto' by Virginia Grise, running October 5 - 7, 2017.

The dynamic classical trio Riot with Three Alison Davy, soprano, Javier Oviedo, saxophone, and Gene Rohrer, piano make a triumphant return to Catskill's intimate Bridge Street Theatre on Saturday September 30 at 7:30 pm with an eclectic evening of contemporary and classical chamber works entitled 'The Nature of Music'. In this exquisite and wide-ranging program, which includes works by Handel, Hoiby, Assad, Laitman, Arnold, and Borgia, the ensemble celebrates everything from the grandeur of the great outdoors to sugar addiction with a vibrant combination of unbridled joy and dazzling technical expertise.

Part of JACK's year-long series, Reparations365 through song, spontaneous art, projection, and essay, BLACK STREET explores the historical eradication and systematic destruction of an African American economy, education, and progressive labour force.

In celebration of Japan Society's 110th anniversary, the Society's Performing Arts Program presents the NOH-NOW Series featuring four extraordinary events in dance and theater: Luca Veggetti's Left-Right-Left, Hiroshi Sugimoto's Rikyu-Enoura, SITI Company's Hanjo and Satoshi Miyagi's Mugen Noh Othello; and the North American Premiere of Moto Osada's opera, Four Nights of Dream, which launches the Fall 2017 Season in September. These events bring together celebrated artists from the U.S. and Japan, delivering world class cultural offerings while continuing Japan Society's mission to deepen mutual understanding between the two nations into the Society's twelfth decade.

Japan Society is proud to present the North American premiere of Moto Osada's chamber opera Four Nights of Dream today, September 13, repeated on September 15 + 16 (7:30 pm). Conducted by Ken-David Masur, this striking new production inaugurates Japan Society's freshly renovated theater, marking the opening of the organization's 110th Anniversary season. Following its New York run, Four Nights of Dream will be presented by the prestigious Tokyo Bunka Kaikan performing arts center, which co-commissioned the production. In both cities, a diverse cast of New York-based singers will be accompanied by twelve musicians of the Tokyo Bunka Kaikan Chamber Orchestra. A cast list appears below.

Tokyo and New York City are the two home cities of composer Moto Osada, whose new chamber opera, FOUR NIGHTS OF DREAM will have its North American premiere at the Japan Society in Manhattan on September 13, directed by Alec Duffy.