Results tagged “stannswarehouse”

One of the most memorable plays we saw last year was The Walworth Farce, a pitch-black comedy by Irish playwright Enda Walsh. The story concerned a menacing father who every day forces his two sons to join him in performing a farcical play he wrote about a phony brain surgeon's attempt to cheat his estranged brother out of his inheritance. In that frenzied, hysterical production, the family's shabby apartment doubled as their stage, and all nine parts were played by the housebound men, as a sort of elaborate domestic ritual for an audience of none.

Tonight and Saturday night, the inimitable punk/avant-garde cabaret band Tiger Lillies return to St. Ann's Warehouse for two "Dark and Deviant" concerts, celebrating 20 years together as a band. The shows will highlight songs from the Lillies' award-winning show, Shockheaded Peter, along with numbers from their Grammy-nominated album The Gorey End , plus other deranged favorites spanning their extensive catalogue. Frontman Martyn Jacques, who plays accordion, trained himself as an opera singer with a castrati style while living above a strip club in London for seven years. Which explains a lot about this band! On his way to the airport in England, Jacques responded to some of our questions via e-mail.

     

If you don't know who Cynthia Hopkins is yet, you will sooner or later—the multi-instrumentalist-singer-songwriter-dancer-actor-playwright (I'm sure I'm missing something) with the distinctively sly voice ought to be headlining Webster Hall, not just opening for David Byrne. (Not that headlining St. Ann's Warehouse is anything to sneeze at, either.) Nevertheless, even if you think you know Cynthia Hopkins, you'll probably still be surprised by the deeply personal way she reveals herself in the unsparing second half of The Success of Failure (or, The Failure of Success), which concludes her convoluted and captivating Accidental Trilogy. But more on that later.

In the century and change since Henrik Ibsen's A Doll's House premiered, the play's feminist denunciation of male-dominated domesticity has gone from radical to rather quaint. But leave it to pioneering avant-garde theater company Mabou Mines to blow the dust of the classic with their ingeniously staged production, in which all male characters are played by actors whose heights range from 40 to 53 inches, and the women by actors almost six feet tall.

It’s hard to imagine a production of Macbeth with more sound and fury than the outré adaptation currently battering audiences on the Brooklyn waterfront in DUMBO. Two parts Shakespeare and one part Ridley Scott, this visionary spectacle is the work of Polish director Grzegorz Jarzyna and the TR Warszawa theater company; it’s being staged outdoors in the shadow of the Brooklyn Bridge with a cast of 32 actors on a 36-foot-high set built specifically for the production.

While moviegoers pack theaters for summer blockbusters like Iron Man and Indiana Jones, it’s refreshing to find big crowds flocking to an entirely different spectacle, one celebrating the Victorian-era phenomenon of do-it-yourself “toy theater” kits. The cavernous St. Ann’s Warehouse in DUMBO was packed on Saturday night for the eighth annual Toy Theater Festival, presented by Great Small Works, a company dedicated to coaxing big ideas out of tiny materials.

In The Walworth Farce, Enda Walsh’s pitch black comedy currently in from Ireland at St. Ann’s Warehouse, all the world’s a stage in a squalid council flat, and all the men and women merely amateur players. Dinny (Denis Conway), a heavyset man with an air of menace, is the author of a deliriously farcical play that he and his two sons, Blake (Garret Lombard) and Sean (Tadgh Murphy), perform every day for the pleasure of their triple-threat dad. His madcap opus stars a soi-disant brain surgeon named Dinny and concerns his pitiful scheme to cheat his estranged brother Paddy out of his inheritance.