As per usual, the University has an incredible number of opportunities for the performing arts this semester.  Peruse below for information, and don’t forget to check Facebook events for audition requirements! Break legs!

Black Theatre Ensemble (BTE) –

• Accepting student written One-Act Plays for Festival in the Spring
  • Plays due by February 15^th
  • Auditions the week of February 25th

Columbia Ballet Collaborative (CBC) -

• Auditions Jan 26^th from 1-4 pm in Studio 1, Barnard Hall

Columbia Musical Theatre Society

• The Light in the Piazza
  • Book by Craig Lucas, Music by Adam Guettel
  • Directed by Alex Hare
• Party Worth Crashing
  • Written by Kerrigan and Lowdermilk
  • Directed by Jeremy Stern
• Auditions in Hamilton Hall for both shows: Tuesday 1/22-Thursday 1/24,     8-11 pm

Many many more after the jump!

The fall production of theater group NOMADS (New and Original Material Authored and Directed by Students), American Ghosts, premiered last night in the Glicker-Milstein blackbox theatre, located on LL2 of the Diana Center; the show runs through Saturday, with performances beginning at 8 pm and running a little over an hour. Bwog’s Meandering Medium Marcus Levine reviews.

“What haunts you?” The creators of this project, Lorenzo Landini (CC ’13) and Alex Katz (CC ’14), prompted prospective writers with precisely this question. An exploration in five parts of what it means to be “haunted” in America, American Ghosts presents original work from five playwrights, whose work was selected from an initial pool of fifteen applicants. Each short (10-30 minute) piece presents a fully encapsulated world, while the musical, design, and directorial elements weave the disparate plots together into a thrilling ghost story which reaches into the past for clichéd references, while remaining squarely contemporary with our ever-ironic era.

Krista White’s Ward Seven starts off the production with a Sartre-esque interplay between three clearly deranged individuals. An explosive young girl, Matilda (Carly Ginsberg, BC ’15), an insecure army officer, Lieutenant Gumble (Eric Wimer CC ’16) and a senile old woman, Gertrude (Anika Benkov, CC ’16) await the arrival of the ever-mysterious Man in Black (Jonathan Gutterman, GS ’13). Ginsberg’s genuine temper-tantrums and focus-stealing expressiveness counter the innocent reserve and calm demeanor of Benkov, while Wimer’s curt but cordial army discipline would have been strengthened by dropping the inconsistent Southern drawl.

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At Columbia, theatre comes in all forms; from huge musical productions to the smallest student shows, Bwog loves theater!  This weekend, Blackbox Booster Roberta Barnett headed out for a Columbia University Players fall show: An Evening of One Acts.  

High above Ferris and Roone in Lerner is a small black box theater on Lerner’s fifth floor.  I probably have passed it hundreds of times, but this weekend I finally entered, poised to see the Columbia University Players in their production.

The production, An Evening of One Acts, consisted of three one-act plays ranging from drama to satire.  Each act, Post-Its (Notes on a Marriage), Medea, and This is a Play, managed to pack tons of entertainment into about twenty minutes each.

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Oversimplification of art

Join Art Editor (Extraordinaire) Alex Katz in bringing back Where Art Thou from its summer hiatus. We’ll be divulging the details about the must-sees of Columbia’s arts scene. If you’d like your event to appear on Where Art Thou, send an e-mail to events@bwog.com.

Ongoing

• Tomás Saraceno on the Roof: Cloud City on the roof the Metropolitan Museum of Art. A collection of large, interconnected modules investigating how we experience our environment. Free with CUID.
• 20at20: Discounted Off-Broadway Shows, the bi-annual discount offer celebrating Off-Broadway. Tickets for all 20at20 shows are only $20, starting 20 minutes before show time. $20
• Bound Unbound: Lin Tianmiao at the Asia Society Museum. The artist’s first major solo exhibition in the United States, it focuses on the human form subtly embodied in the work. $10. Free with valid CUID.

All the world's one of these, apparently

When a university’s performing arts community is so vast that it has its own governing board, it helps to have a comprehensive list of your opportunities. Below is a list of all official recognized CUPAL groups, their scheduled performance and audition dates. (Unisex tights/timeless wigs are optional on a case-by-case basis.)

BTE

• Funnyhouse of a Negro by Adrienne Kennedy

• Directed by Rebecca Clark
• AUDITIONS: TBA

KCST

• William Shakespeare’s “Romeo & Juliet”

• Directed by Elizabeth Power
• November 15th, 16th and 17th in the Glicker-Milstein Theatre
• AUDITIONS: September 4th-6th

• A New Project with Artistic Direction by Kyle Radler
• October 25th, 26th and 27th in the Austin E. Quigley Black Box
• AUDITIONS: September 4th-6th

What happens when you’ve graduated from the Columbia theater scene and can no longer book space in Lerner to put on plays? For Brian LaPerche (CC ’12), Cody Holiday Haefner (CC ’12), and Alison Goldberg (BC ’12), the next logical step is the NYC Fringe Festival. Bwog sat down with the playwright (Brian), director (Cody), and producer (Alison) of The Connected: Bundle #1, a play exploring “how technology binds us to one another worlds apart and separates us when we stand face to face to talk about real world deadlines.”

Bwog: What drew you to the project?
Cody:  I read Brian’s play and thought this was actually a really good play. So I told him he had to submit this to Fringe. He was a little resistant, but I was like, “No, you’re submitting this.” Because I thought it should be done.
Alison: I found out after it was accepted into the Fringe festival and jumped aboard.

Bwog: What is this play about?
Brian: Henry, the main character, finds pictures of a young factory worker on his new smart phone and tries to find a way to contact this factory worker while dealing with his brother, who is the CEO of the technology corporation who makes the phones, and his girlfriend, who is protesting that company for their labor practices.

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SPEARS: The Gospel According to Britney, Pat Blute’s musical which professed to pair The Greatest Story Ever Told with The Greatest Music Ever Written, ran for the last time at 8 pm last night, in Barnard’s Glicker-Milstein Theatre. Conor Skelding went.

On the jaded Columbia campus, SPEARS’s premise – using the music of Britney Spears to tell the story of Jesus Christ – appeared at first glance merely a parody. It was not. SPEARS took the often told story of Jesus’ birth and death and resurrected it with a new flair for the dramatic.

As pitched, SPEARS was “the gospel according to Britney.” A veritable opera, SPEARS may have lacked dialogue but by no means lacked plot. Sara Miller, choreographer, took it on herself to convey the plot through fantastic arrangements. Aiding her in her pursuit were the actor’s interpretations of Britney’s lyrics and minimal props (e.g. gold, frankincense, and myrrh etc.)

Britney’s songs were masterfully rearranged by Max Druz, musical director. By focusing on both well known and unfamiliar songs, Druz emphasizes the universal nature of both Britney and the gospels.

The question was, “how would Pat Blute’s vision land?” Like Britney’s career it had its ups and downs. A perfect tableau of the Last Supper was a major crowd pleaser; while pairings like that of the Stages of the Cross with a mash up of “Oops…I Did it Again” and “Hit Me Baby One More Time” left me feeling uncomfortable as I fell painfully silent.

Despite a large fundraising drive, I found the set and costumes strikingly humble. Yet, much like Jesus, these humble shrouds clothed something great. The cast’s enthusiasm was infectious and pervaded the show.

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Earlier today, Bwog sat down with Pat Blute. Blute, of BwogWeather and HardCore fame, has been of late consumed by the production of his new rock-opera, SPEARS: The Gospel According to Britney. Tickets go on sale at 5 pm today, and will sell out fast. Blute, director and creator, is pretty excited. Bwog sat down with him on the Steps to hash it out.

Blute: This is the interview for SPEARS: The Gospel According to Britney, the story of Jesus Christ, told to the music of Britney Spears, “The Greatest Story Ever Told, the Greatest Music Ever Written.”

Bwog: That’s such a great tagline. How did it come to you?

Blute: It’s an extremely self-explanatory tagline that tells you exactly what you are going to see. No surprises, no gimmicks, beyond that. There’s no dialogue and none of the lyrics are changed.

Bwog: That does sound wonderful. So how did you come up with the idea?

Blute: That’s a great question. So, I don’t remember how I really came up with the idea, but I can share some of its iterations. High school Spanish class, we did modismos, we had to come up with two things which contrasted, but which were similar. So I did Britney Spears and Jesus, and it worked out, and everyone gave a laugh. That was 12th grade. It then just became this running party joke, where I would tell people certain select scenes, and always get a laugh, or a “That works.”

Bwog: So when did it become serious?

Blute: It became serious when I talked to some people with certain connections, and they said, “You have to try this.” It was originally going to be a staged reading, but I didn’t like the idea of outside dialogue, so it literally is the Gospel according to Britney, and Britney alone. Her discography allows her to play both friend and foe, villain and hero, and in many ways it captures the motifs of the gospels.

Tactfulness, the concept, and the project, after the jump.

In order to procrastinate obsessively while counting down days ’til the finals grind, Bwog’s newest Performance Pundit Alex Taylor ventured over to sit in on the Theatre Department’s version of finals: the directors’ theses. Sit back, relax, and enjoy her review of the Barnard Senior Thesis Festival I.

Gloryday

Micheal LaChiusa’s “Gloryday” was done justice by director Cody Haefner CC’12 and his unbelievably talented cast. Upon entering the theater, as well as throughout the show, I was struck by the ingenuity of the staging. Strategically stacked black boxes and a faux-grass carpet created the desired image of the NYC skyline and Central Park simply but appropriately. The musicians sitting amongst the skyline added another interesting dimension, and the placement of the conductor struck me most of all, as it almost seemed as if he was the God all the characters were looking for. The score was played so well by Julliard-trained Yoshiaki Ko that I forgot he only had a flute and drums to back up his piano. The cast fit together flawlessly with all five actors both delivering in their individual songs and blending together nicely in group numbers. Kathryn Maslak BC’12 stood out as Aunt Monica, a militant atheist turned miracle searcher, drawing both laughter and tears through her performance as a fully developed character. Across the board, it was apparent that Haefner had placed a tremendous amount of trust in the actors; however, there were a few moments that lost me momentarily. Chris Silverberg CC’13 and Sam Mickel CC’14 pantomimed fake liquid and I caught myself distracted by it, and not focusing on the story. Overall, Gloryday is a treat for any musical theater fan. The singing and acting are on point, and the direction and staging complements the talents of the actors charmingly.

More on the theses, after the jump.

Photo courtesy of Luke Henderson

Last night, Bwog’s resident Midtown Maven Hope Silberstein made it all the way to 43rd Street to see a preview production of Caligula, directed by Ittai Orr, CC ’12—read on to find out if the trek was worth it. The showtimes are today, March 30, at 8 pm and March 31 at 3 pm and 8 pm. The theater is located at 300 W. 43rd Street (off of 8th Ave) on the 4th floor in The Little Times Square Theatre.

What would you say to someone who asked you for the moon? In Caligula by Albert Camus, we enter a world where to deny that request has grave repercussions, where the impossible has to become possible.

This play about the Roman emperor begins with the death of Drusilla, Caligula’s sister and lover. This event causes him to realize that “men die, and they are not happy.” This cheery sentiment incites the emperor to impart meaninglessness to every aspect of life, through a series of arbitrary executions and laws that become increasingly ridiculous and cruel.

But don’t see this play simply for its plot. What comes to mind at the mention of Camus are often words like existentialist, absurdist, and perhaps philosophical, and in this vein Caligula will not disappoint. We jump from comic to tragic to absurd and back to comic at a frenetic pace. Not only do we question the characters’ motives and feelings, but the play’s genre as well. The tyrannical (but is he a tyrant?) Roman emperor descends into madness (but is it madness?), and the intimacy of the black box theater adds to the claustrophobia and terror that Camus meant to tap into when he wrote this play after World War II.

Another reason to see this arresting show is the fact that it was translated into English by the play’s director, Ittai Orr, CC ’12, and assistant director, Marianne Barthélemy, BC ’14. The new translation comes out of a desire to replace the “stodgy 1950s British version that was all words and no heart,” says Orr. In fact, this play has in it a scene that hadn’t originally been translated into English, so it’s being performed in English for the first time in their staging. And for those who enjoy Abusrdists like Samuel Beckett, this new translation brings Camus closer to that style. The translators hope it “mirrors the original’s stark, direct speech and raw, unembellished poetry.” It was quite a treat to see a play whose language, while being performed, feels so modern, natural, and at the same time poetic.

Read more about Caligula after the jump.

Many great works of theatre are not completely autonomous, and in fact, are responses to other works. In Suzan-Lori Parks “Fucking A”, a dystopian molding of The Scarlet Letter is presented to produce a complex and intriguing work of new drama. Bwog’s Gabby Beans reports from Lerner 5.

As the audience settled into their seats in the Lerner Black Box Theater on the opening night of the Black Theatre Ensemble’s production of Suzan-Lori Parks’s “Fucking A”,  electric curiosity surged through the atmosphere. Would the piece be a comedy? Would it be a tragedy? Would it be a musical? As the lights dimmed, the audience couldn’t help but wonder what exactly “Fucking A” would be. However, after having watched the play, there is still no cut and dry label one can apply to this innovative, but ultimately uneven production.

This stylistic ambiguity however, is not entirely due to the choices made by the director (Nailah Robinson, CC ’12), cast, and crew. “Fucking A” is set in a dystopian city-state where characters alternate between contemporary English and TALK, a jarring colloquial dialect comprised of a mixture of several languages. The play includes songs, but the music is employed in a less “musical theatre” sense and in a more Brechtian one, underscoring emotional tensions and causing the audience to reevaluate the scenes they’ve just witnessed. The play chronicles its protagonist, Hester Smith (Jasmine Sudarkasa, CC ‘13), in her attempts to free her son from jail via payments to the governmental “Freedom Fund”, and the ensuing hardships that befall her as she is swept into a maelstrom of political and personal tragedy.

Columbia is home to a fascinating cast of characters, and gap year students are no exception. In Give Me a Break, we’ll give you the skinny on what some of your peers have done during their time off. In this edition, Bwog’s resident Taker of Roads Less Traveled, Sam Schipani, talked with Noah Robbins and Remy Zaken about their time in the business we call “show”—Broadway.  

Noah, as Eugene Morris Jerome

Mere days after Noah Robbins, CC ’14, got his Columbia acceptance letter in the mail, he was cast as Eugene, the wisecracking narrator and alter ego of playwright Neil Simon, in a Broadway production of Brighton Beach Memoirs.  “It was a good couple of days,” he admits.  To fully commit to the production, Noah chose to take a gap year, deferring his entry to the freshman class. He starred opposite Laurie Metcalf (Jackie Harris from Roseanne) and Jessica Hecht (Susan Bunch from Friends) as his mother and his aunt. “I, on the other hand, had just finished starring as Max Bialystock in my high school’s production of The Producers, so I felt like things were about even experience-wise,” Noah joked.

Despite rave reviews, poor ticket sales and and bad marketing forced Brighton Beach Memoirs to close shortly after it opened. Noah still relishes the experience, particularly when it comes to meeting his theater idols. While he was waiting for the elevator one day, his personal hero, Nathan Lane, stood beside him, preparing for his first rehearsal for The Addams Family. Noah stood there, sweating profusely and wrestling with the decision of whether or not to attempt and make eye contact with his Broadway idol, until the star exited the elevator. Noah found out shortly afterwards that Laurie Metcalf was a friend of Nathan Lane’s and she offered to introduce this new Broadway star to his inspiration. “Later that week, outside of the building, he waved to me on the street while I was in mid-conversation with someone else. I waved back and continued my conversation. No big deal.”

Nathan Lane isn’t the only celebrity Noah encountered during his gap year.  One night, the playwright of Brighton Beach Memoirs, Neil Simon, visited the cast. “No one knew why. We were all a little on edge about it, and we all hoped it wasn’t because he was unhappy with our performances.” It turns out Neil Simon had just rediscovered the brainstorming, stream-of-consciousness narratives written 30 years earlier that inspired Brighton Beach Memoirs, and he wanted to read them to the cast.  “It was absolutely incredible, and really moving. I still can’t believe any of it happened.”

Isn't she lovely?

Spring Awakening, a racy story revolving around teenage sexuality and the winner of eight Tony awards, has touched the hearts and streamed through the speakers of musical theater and alternative music aficionados alike. But while most of us were rocking out to “My Junk” and “The Bitch of Living” in our dorms, Remy was performing them live on Broadway. Remy played Thea, one of the German schoolgirls struggling with the woes of growing pains, alongside Lea Michele, Jenna Ushkowitz, Jonathan Groff (all of recent Glee fame), and many other talented actors.

Remy became involved with the show during her junior year in high school while it was still an Off-Broadway production. When the show transferred to Broadway the following fall, it became wildly successful. Faced with her love for singing and acting and the ever-increasing popularity of the production, Remy decided to defer a year of school.

Given her newfound musical theater fame, Remy had the opportunity to meet an impressive assortment of celebrities, including Tina Fey, Danny DeVito, and Stephen Spielberg. While working on the show, Remy learned the correct way to interact with a celebrity, and today, she generously shares some of her wisdom. “Genuinely tell them that you like/love their work, if you do. They’re very appreciative,” she advises. “Then, if you want, you can politely ask for a picture with them. They most likely will say yes. This doesn’t work if you’re interrupting them from something important, like eating, talking to their friends, or using the restroom.”

But behind the glitz and glamour of Broadway, there are always bloopers!  “One time during the hayloft scene, the hayloft ropes could not pull the bottom off of the stage, so Jon and Lea had to do ‘I Believe’ right in front of us,” Remy explains. “We had rehearsed the scene like this before, and we knew what to expect, but still, it was quite a shock to have them simulating sex literally inches away from us.”

Even Remy admits to flubbing her lines onstage. “It is the scariest feeling in the world because time seems to slow down, and you feel like everyone knows that you’re forgetting your lines, when in reality, it’s a minor hiccup,” she confesses. “I remember looking at Phoebe with huge deer-in-headlights eyes and thinking, ‘What’s my next line?!,’ and then it came back, just as quickly as I had forgotten. The brain is so weird.”

QuickTix exists to help you use your CUID and the TIC to the fullest (and save some money while you’re at it). It runs every other Wednesday.

Most popular events at the TIC:

• Columbia University Players present Chase Scenes: Oct 14th – 15th
• QUAM presents GenderF*ck: Qrave: Oct 15th
• Met Opera Satyagraha: Dec 1st
• Kenneth Cole Engagement Forum at Miller Theater: Oct 28th, 9:30 am and 1:30 pm
• Barnard Theatre’s Marisol: Oct 27th – Oct 29th

Campus events on sale now:

• CU Feel Good Bonsai People: Oct 20th, 6 pm, Lerner Hall Cinema, Free w/ CUID. Registration required
• Latino Heritage Month — Stand Up Comedy Night: Oct 20th, 8 pm, Diana Center Cafe, $3 w/ CUID. Tickets
• Latenite Fall Anthology: Oct 20th – 22nd, 11 pm (8 & 11 pm on the 22nd), Austin E. Quigley Black Box Theater, Free w/ CUID. Registration required
• Muslim Student Association — Fast-a-Thon: Oct 21st, Roone Arledge Auditorium, $2 -12. Tickets
• Cabaret Club —The Colored Museum: Oct 21st (8 pm), Oct 22nd (3 pm, 8 pm), Glicker-Milstein Theatre, $10 w/ CUID. Tickets

Off campus events on sale now:

• Morphoses Dance Company presents Bacchae at the Joyce Theatre: Oct 20th, 8 pm, Joyce Soho, $36. Tickets
• Cries and Whispers at BAM: Oct 29th, 7:30 pm, BAM Harvey Theater, $30. Tickets
• Venus in Fur on Broadway: Nov 10th, 8 pm, Samuel J. Friedman Theatre, $28. Tickets

The model for Muhammed Yunus’ microeconomic reform via Wikimedia Commons

Barnard's was a different kind of Lady Macbeth than this one

Bwog’s Thesp Crit Joshua Sorenshine caught the last show of the thesis festival last night:

This weekend, the Barnard theater department opened its doors for the annual thesis festival, giving audiences a performance that left this reviewer heartily satisfied. Both Alex Brinkman-Young’s, BC ’11 rendition of Tom Stoppard’s Cahoot’s Macbeth and Katie Lupica’s, CC ’11 sampling of Erik Ehn’s Saint Plays entertained and challenged the audience throughout the course of the evening.

The night began with Cahoot’s Macbeth. In a quaint, and slightly skewed home owned by our hostess, played by Tara Pacheco, CC ’13 we found a rag-tag group of actors furiously trying to put on a performance of Shakespeare’s Macbeth while constantly fighting off, around, and even over the interference of a particularly nasty police inspector, played by the fabulously funny Christina McCarver BC ’13. The abrupt transitions from the world of Macbeth to the hostess’ home and back were made possible by the talent of Lorenzo Landini, CC ’13 as Pavel Landovsky (playing Macbeth) and Ben Russell, CC ’11 as Cahoot (playing Banquo, Duncan, and Macduff). The pair worked well together, never faltering as characters within Macbeth or their struggle against the inspector. The play grew more absurd by the minute as all the characters “caught” the nonsense language “Dogg,” which is passed like a disease from person to person. Easy, the unfortunate lumber-delivery girl, played by the brilliant Bethanie Mangigian, BC ’11, was the source of the Dogg, and could not do her job until everyone caught her inconvenient linguistic disease. In the play’s final moments the entire cast speaks in Dogg and Brinkman-Young’s directing shines. Creating the final moments of a play without comprehensible language is no small feat, but Brinkman-Young accomplished it with grace, giving her actors strong motivations and utilizing the entire stage to leave us laughing and questioning the lengths to which we can go to make ourselves heard.

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Bwog’s Off-Off-But-Actually-On-Broadway Theater critic Matt Schantz reviews the semester’s first Black Box production:

As the lights went up in the Lerner Black Box theater, Rebecca Clark, CC ’13, invited the audience aboard the Celebrity Slave Ship and instructed them to fasten their shackles. The audience tensed, unsure if they should laugh or cringe. Much of the Black Theatre Ensemble’s production of The Colored Museum treads this line between comedic and grim, to great effect.

The Colored Museum, written by George C. Wolfe, tells the story of Black America’s struggle with its identity through a series of 10 satirical vignettes. The scenes range in length, style, and tone, and the three student directors do an excellent job pacing them. Slower pieces, such as the haunting “A Secret Soldier,” are couched between more comedic, punchy scenes. The entire play runs a little over an hour, making each vignette short and sweet.

The set is minimal; most scenes are adorned with little more than a boxes or a table. Costumes are more elaborate and just as effective, doing no more than contextualizing their respective characters. The lighting is simple. This leaves the audience to focus on the play’s greatest facets- the strong performances by each of its 12 actors and stellar directing.

The Colored Museum’s best moments lie in the extremes of the tragicomic spectrum. Jessica Johnson, CC ’11, and Ann-Kathryne Mills, CC ’14, had the audience in stitches with their sassy banter as two wigs in “The Hairpiece”- a feat all the more impressive considering their bodies were obscured, leaving them to act with only their inflection and facial expressions. Walter Jean-Jaques, CC ’14, provided another comedic highlight with his animated romp about stage as the caricature of an extremely disgruntled man. (more…)