What I've been doing when I'm not at work...

Sadly or maybe inevitably...I see theater and art and music. This week mostly theater...

A quick rundown:

Encores! Face the Music at City Center
Guttenburg the Musical!
Edward Scissorhands the Ballet at BAM
Serendib at Ensemble Studio Theatre
The Trachtenburg Family Slideshow Players/Corn Mo at The Canal Room

What I would have liked to have seen:
Propellor Company's Taming of the Shrew at BAM
Mika performing at any venue - he was at a few

Face the Music was a staging of a forgotten musical score that hasn't been performed for over 75 years. The score is not amazing, but the Encores! Project is. The show had some excellent tap dancing and a song called "I Say It's Spinach (And the Hell With It" so really considering I saw it for free - not too shabby. FYI when I was first offered the tickets to something with the title Face the Music for a second I was thought "MTV?" but no, definitely NOT MTV.

Guttenburg the Musical! was a show about two men who wrote a musical about Johann Guttenburg and wanted to get the show on Broadway. If you are thinking that sounds silly - it was, but in a completely fabulous way. The singing dead baby who died because his mother could not read and fed him jelly beans thinking they were medicine was only the beginning. I very much enjoyed this one-trick pony show, because the one trick was executed in an excellent fashion over and over again. FYI, when I first heard about the show I was really really hoping it was about Steve Guttenberg the 80s movie star, because THAT would be ridiculous.

Edward Scissorhands was disappointing but I was still glad I saw it because of a few wonderful set/costume moments. I'm sleepy so I'm not going into these right now.

Serendib was a show I saw because I knew the director, costume designer, lighting designer, producing manager, set designer, and paint charge working on the show. Us CMU kids we get around. The show was actually quite good - it is part of the Sloan Foundation's project to support new shows written about science and technology. This was a show about a Sri Lankan monkey research project, but really it was about people as well - as most plays are. It had puppet monkeys that were really well designed and used. The set was a really good use of the space as well. It was an enjoyable story and I am curious how it will tighten up over the next few weeks. New plays can be very tough, but this one had a very good creative team! I know, I've worked with all of them. :)

The Trachtenburg Family Slideshow Players and Corn Mo were different. Corn Mo was the opening act - he is from Dallas and is kind of what I think Mitch Hedberg would have sounded like if he'd sang more songs. Charming rambling combined with slightly silly piano songs proved to be a good mix. Corn Mo also played the accordion and sang one of the Italian arias from the 18 Italian Songs book that everyone who has ever taken voice lessons has. He also did a rockin' cover of Queen's "We are the Champions". The Trachtenburg Family Slideshow Players are a group of 3 bookish siblings that have collected slides from estate sales, garage sales, thrift shops, etc. and create songs based on the slides themselves. They did manage to get some kind of McDonald's corporate slide set from the 1970s which was pretty amazing. I think the IDEA of their band is great and they have the same "girl playing drums wistfully" schtick that the White Stripes used early on, but the execution could be better. I guess what I am saying is that if the execution had been more polished and the jokes a little tighter, I would have warmed up to it. I think that when you do go to school for theater you stop tolerating certain things that probably don't bother other people. These three siblings are also very hipster-y and sometimes I get a little bit hipstered out. But that all being said I LOVE THE IDEA of a slideshow band.

On Thursday I am seeing Curtains and sometime this weekend I will try and see Blackbird at MTC (where I work!). It's not really an Easter weekend play, but I figure I will fill the rest of the weekend with feeding Adam's cats while he is gone, museums, shopping, and Easter Sunday brunch with people who are Jewish.

Peace Yo.