NYIFF, NYMF, NAMT, MITF, SPF, ALF. New York’s overabundance of theater festivals has given us so many abbreviations, we probably qualify as an executive-branch agency. Do we really need another one? If you’re talkin’ Under the Radar, the answer is yes. First off, UTR is curated by Mark Russell, the former artistic director of P.S. 122. The man’s taste and knowledge of the cutting edge has matchless depth and breadth. When I met him (at JFK Airport, oddly enough—I was heading to Portland for a vacation and he was going there to curate PICA), we talked about this year’s UTR. Russell could barely contain his excitement, describing the various companies he hoped he could afford to bring to New York. Most of them are present in this year’s lineup: The TEAM (pictured), Reggie Watts, a Cambodian-Dutch collaboration on Pol Pot, and a Samuel Beckett work has been thrown in for good measure. With more than a dozen shows performing at the Public Theater and other venues for only $15, this is a festival that actually showcases the next wave of performance. Just as importantly, UTR is timed to coincide with the APAP Conference, when presenters from all over the world converge on New York to discover shows that are worth bringing to their venues. It thus provides a much-needed avenue for more outré theatre to reach the world at large. The Public’s website is a little tricky to navigate, so if you want a full list of shows, click here.

At last night’s Moth Ball, I approached esteemed actor John Turturro for a quick question regarding storytelling and got a lot more than I asked for. Below his diatribe against TONY and eventual change of heart.

Hi, I’m Jane Borden from Time Out New York.
Time Out New York is vicious.

Oh no! What did we do?
Why are your critics so mean? I used to buy your magazine but I think your critics are really really…extra mean.

Well, clearly you aren’t reading the Comedy section. Music? Film? Which critics are you talking about?
Across the board.

That can’t be; I don’t waste space on negative reviews.
It’s not ’cause they’re bad reviews. A bad review can be good—when it has some humanity to it. And when it has an engagement of what is being criticized. But I find some of the reviewers are really, really snide. I’ve been excoriated in your magazine many times—and I don’t hold that against them. But I find that overall—you can go on record with this—theater and movies are both extra mean. You know, the more you know about something, the more you know how hard it is to do something well.

I agree.
I’m from the school of thought that in the old days critics used to get slapped in the face with gloves. People use to duel with critics. And you know what? I understand it. Because you can say whatever you want and there’s no repercussion. You can be critical but you don’t have to be snide.

Again, I agree.
So yeah, I cancelled my subscription. I don’t like your magazine. Especially the Italian guy. Mike something or other.

Mike D’Angelo?
Yeah—Mike D’Angelo, that was the guy.

That was years ago! Dude, he’s been gone for years; there’s a reason why.
Really?

Yes. Come back to us, John! We want you.
Okay, I’ll tell you what: I’ll buy the next issue.

Salman Rushdie, alive and well

Downtown storytelling program The Moth proved how big its potatoes have grown at last night’s star-studded, second annual Moth Ball, cohosted by John Turturro and Garrison Keillor.

Among the night’s entertainment were a characteristically self-deprecating and vibrant tale from Keillor, a scholarship awarded to tenth-grader Tavar McKenzie by Lili Taylor, and a live competition between the GrandSLAM winners from New York and L.A. (although the winner, Josh Matthew Cereghino, was quite good, local boy Jim O’Grady was clearly robbed).

In honor of the art form on display, we asked Ira Glass, A.J. Jacobs, Simon Doonan, Salman Rushdie, Taylor, Turturro and Keillor to explain what live or oral storytelling can achieve that print cannot. Their answers beyond the jump.

But first, the quote of the night:
Before Keillor bestowed the Moth Raconteur Award on Rushdie, he introduced the novelist by saying, "He’s been married as many times as I have and perhaps for the same reasons: When you want to tell your best story over and over, and she gets that glazed look, and this other woman is so tickled to hear it…who can blame a man? Well, some people could."
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Piracy along the Barbary Coast is apparently alive and well, as some intrepid Somali buccaneers recently hijacked yet another ship off the coast of Africa and issued their demands. This latest grand theft boato got us wondering: Who were the greatest fictional scallywags of all time? Below is a compilation of cutthroats and thieves I’d want on my dream pirate ship.

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No, not Springsteen: Boss Hog. The mighty combo has just announced it’s playing Bowery Ballroom on December 17—the band’s first local appearance in eight years. I had given them up for dead, but I guess the dead walk among us. Which is awesome, and not just because zombies are inherently awesome. In our age of lame wanna-bes in guyliner, Boss Hog breathes rock & roll. And I mean it breathes it like some people breathe fire: Lighter fluid goes in, flames come out.

Fronted by the coolest married couple in rock history, Cristina Martinez and Jon Spencer, Boss Hog burst onto the NYC scene in 1989 out of the wreckage of several cult noise bands—the Honeymoon Killers, Pussy Galore and Unsane. Soon enough, its gigs had acquired legendary status for their sexy ferocity. My favorite stuff is from the band’s Amphetamine Reptile years in the late ’80s and early ’90s ("Hustler," oh yeah), when things were really unhinged garage chaos. Boss Hog moved on to DGC and put out a cleaner-sounding (albeit still kick-ass) self-titled album before releasing its swan song, 2000’s Whiteout, on In the Red. And now it’s back, as if the past eight years had not happened—if only! If, like me, you think this is the true spirit of rawk, go and buy your ticket right now.

In theater criticism, longevity matters. There is something to be said, yes, for the young Turk and the fresh take; but there is also value in the the seasoned veteran and the experienced eye.

Clive Barnes, who died this morning, played both of these roles during his long career. In his controversial tenure as chief theater critic at The New York Times, from 1965 through 1977, he championed experimental theater and rock musicals; during his subsequent 30-year tenure at the New York Post, he mellowed somewhat, but retained a distinctive and idiosyncratic taste. As he was the first to admit, his contribution to the field of dance was of greater importance than his work in theater. (The obituary in the Times is headlined, "Clive Barnes, Dance Critic, Dies at 81.") But to both fields, he brought a strong voice and a gracious presence.

After years of reading his byline in the papers, I recently got to know Clive better, thanks to our shared membership in the New York Drama Critics’ Circle. I have served as president of that group for the past three years, and Clive and I disagreed often about the direction the Circle should take; I have been in favor of expanding our mandate (to include online critics, for instance, and more special citations for excellent work), while he advocated a more conservative approach. But he was always gentlemanly in his disagreement, and always willing to take gentle but principled stands. (In this year’s balloting for Best Musical, he was the only critic to vote for A Catered Affair.)

In June 2007, Clive marked both his 80th birthday and his 40th straight year with the New York Drama Critic’ Circle—an all-time record. At that year’s ceremony for the Circle’s annual awards, at which he presented a prize to Tom Stoppard’s The Coast of Utopia, Clive spoke movingly. It was Stoppard’s seventh Circle award; his first had been for Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, way back in 1968. Clive had voted for him then, too.

That sort of continuity is to be treasured, and will be deeply missed by his friends in the Circle and his readers everywhere.

Ashlee Dupree talks with Diane Sawyer and you can read about it: now.

A publicity dream come true for Dupree? Sure.

But as Spitzer told us in his first post-scandal interview, "[New York is…] the place where no dream is too big to come true."

In just a few short years, Berlin’s Ralf Kollmann, left, and Anja Schneider have carried their Mobilee label to the top of the Berlin techno heap—which in that town, is a pretty damn big heap. They’ve done so by infusing their minimal-minded milieu with beats that flow with the smoothness of deep house, while still retaining the sense of otherworldliness that the best techno holds tight. In advance of Kollmann’s gig at Studio B’s Immerse party on Saturday 22, heres a little teaser: a subtle, spacey, slowly unfolding set from the label coleader himself.

One of us is fresh from a prestigious Gossip Girl panel. The other is back from vacation. Both are feeling a little blah. But In sickness or health, we hear the call and must blog about it.

Josh: so neither snot nor shine will keep you from weighing in.
Amy: yeah. bad cold.
J: got any medicine?
A: i’m just going to ride it out. more exhausted than anything else. how was your vacay?
J: too short. meanwhile, look at us talking about everything except GG. why did last night suck so much?
A: i kind of loved it and kind of hated it all in one.
J: the episode felt like it was written by dan: too nice, too many happy endings and too many serious conversations. what is there to love?
A: well, i’m glad that jenny is no longer a sad little hobo. the symbolic removing of the makeup.
J: and the crazy hair. but didn’t you want her to push that emancipation thing a little further?
A: i really didn’t.
J: BUT MOM! Read the rest of this entry »

Television’s newest overadvertised, Gideon Yago–helmed plaything—The IFC Media Project—is set to premiere tonight at 8pm. We (the media) were invited to a sneak peek earlier today in what was likely just an effort to help us better appreciate the Damoclean sword of progress poised over our bowed heads. Imminent doom took the form of a panel featuring Christopher Buckley, Pete Hamill, Bill Kristol and Yago, moderated by Internet empress Arianna Huffington. Many of us feral, half-starved journalists went only on the promise of a free lunch, but we stayed for Kristol’s defanged right-wing bombast and Yago’s (now more Park Slope than Williamsburg) doggedly outraged liberal muttering (so 2005!). Highlights after the break.

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Lissy Trullie, a much-buzzed local singer, played Santos Party House last night, sharing the bill with Adam Green and the room with beautiful young people in possession of Manhattan cheekbones and fancy skin ointments. In between sets, Mark Ronson—who else?—played records.

Trullie, as is often noted, looks more like a model than a guitar player. She is thin and boyish, with a short mop of blond hair and a deep, smoked-out voice, like Maya Rudolph imitating Donatella Versace. She seemed very confident performing. But what Trullie has in stage poise, she lacks in stage presence—she still cannot hold a crowd beyond a few minutes. More problematic, her songs, while tasteful and well styled, often seem lifeless; her voice is appealing yet limited. Immediate success will ruin her; failure will improve her. Or maybe I’m wrong.
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Print journalism is in trouble, but not, apparently, biopics about one of the grandest of grandes dames in the newspaper business. Variety reports that HBO is developing a biopic of Katharine Graham (above), who, as publisher of The Washington Post, led the paper as it reported the Watergate scandals that led to Richard Nixon’s resignation in 1974—a saga chronicled in All the President’s Men (1976). Joan Didion—whose own contributions as a journalist are unimpeachable—is slated to write the script, Robert Benton (Kramer vs. Kramer) to direct, and Laura Linney to star. Curiously, All the President’s Men, one of the finest films about the fourth estate, does not include a Katharine Graham character. For research purposes, Linney may want to take in repeated viewings of His Girl Friday (1940), featuring Rosalind Russell as Hildy Johnson, the most formidable lady journo of them all.

See for yourself:

Remember when you bought a Blu-ray player, and prayed to your respective god(s) that Criterion would jump on the Blu bandwagon? Then do you remember how the company that set the standard for how films should be presented in home-entertainment formats announced that its first wave of Blu-ray titles would be coming out in November? And how you jumped for joy, nearly landing on your cats (names: Orson and Truffaut) and you bounded over to your calendar to circle the dates—11/18 and 11/21? 

Then remember how you heard they’d been postponed, and you wept, and your cats laughed at you in their sneering, mocking feline way? (Memo to self: Kill those damned cats.) And—why, just this morning!—you saw that circled date on your calendar, and the wounds opened anew?

Well, there’s no need to fret, as Criterion has announced new dates for its initial Blu-ray offerings. The first four titles—The Third Man, Bottle Rocket, Chungking Express and The Man Who Fell to Earth—will now be released on December 16; a fifth title, Bertolucci’s The Last Emperor, will hit shelves on January 9, 2009. (There was originally another addition to the Criterion Blu brothers—Gregory Nava’s El Norte—but neither the press release nor the company’s website mentions a new date. We’re assuming details for that particular disc are still TBD.) So yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus, and that jolly old elf may bring you a Third Man disc for the holidays that looks better than anything you’ve ever seen before. Just so long as he doesn’t bring you a cuckoo clock instead…

Oh, and for those of us who haven’t quite got around to investing in a Blu-ray player yet, there’s still good news on the Criterion front: It’s having a 40-percent-off sale right now on select titles from its back catalog when you order directly from the site. If you’ve been waiting to nab that Berlin Alexanderplatz box set for under a gajillion dollars, now’s your chance.

Well, they did it: This year’s 24 Hour Plays went on without a hitch and raised $360,000 for Urban Arts Partnership. It’s almost midnight, and instead of cruising the after-party I’m home, blogging. So 2008.

 Watching the six finished works in a row and not in piecemeal installments was quite illuminating. The writers, who were working with specific actors in mind, tended to have them play sorta close to type, which makes sense when you think of it in context: Who has time to craft a completely new character in a few hours when you also have to worry about memorizing lines and blocking? You have to be realistic. Read the rest of this entry »

…the tough go to tech rehearsal. This process started at 4pm and each play gets a whopping 20 minutes to get through its cues onstage. Laura Bell Bundy and M. Ward, who will perform several songs together, get even less but zip through it like unflappable pros. So relaxed are they that Bundy does her entire sound check with a lollipop in her mouth. They sound great together, and clearly the move to country is a good one for her.

This whole 24 Hour Play experience strikes me as utterly American somehow. There’s a can-do spirit, the sense that everybody is getting together for a good cause. The plays’ styles and their staging also feel completely contemporary, for better or for worse—nobody’s written anything overly abstract (except maybe for Ellen Maddow) and nobody’s gone Regietheater in the staging department either; i.e., nobody took any liberties with the text or added gratuitous nudity or amputations or hobos humping each other in the background as the stock exchange burns or.…Sorry, was I thinking out loud again?

In the end, as with so much New York theater, this will be lifted up by the actors. While some have caught my eye more than others over the past twenty-something hours (looking at you, Diane Neal, Anthony Mackie, Rachel Dratch, Ben Shenkman and Pablo Schreiber), the whole ensemble is seriously up to snuff. Read the rest of this entry »

We hear that Too Much Memory, Rising Phoenix Rep’s Fringe hit, will transfer to New York Theatre Workshop for a three-week run in December. The show, cowritten by Keith Reddin and Meg Gibson and directed by Gibson, is a postmodern (and very contemporary) "adaptation of an adaptation of a retranslation" of Antigone. If, like me, you’re a little sick of postmodern adaptations of Greek tragedies (I studied them for an entire year in college) and worry that the best they can aspire to is a kind of Diet Cherry Chuck Mee, let me urge you to give this show a chance. I caught it in its Walkerspace incarnation during the last Fringe festival, and it’s quite good. Laura Heisler as Antigone (pictured) and Peter Jay Fernandez as Creon are especially powerful. The way Reddin and Gibson replace the Chorus with a very low-key and quite charming Narrator (played by Martin Moran, whose resemblance to Reddin is surely not coincidental) is surprisingly effective. TONY’s David Cote had this to say in his review of the show: "Earnest and fitfully engrossing…Too Much Memory helps you remember why we do these bloody old tragedies, again and again." The transfer features one cast change (Louis Cancelmi is no longer free due to the extension of Blasted) and the now de rigueur postshow discussions about the play and its attendant issues of political theater and adaptation.

Director Jessica Bauman is on the phone clarifying stage business with Terrence McNally. I didn’t realize director-playwright communication was allowed, but why not? That’s one of the advantages of working with live authors, I suppose. Of course then you have to deal with, you know, the author, but in this particular context everybody is so freakishly helpful and good-natured that cooperation is a given. I wish I could report on a spat or a diva turn, but alas, there’s nothing.

As I go on to the next rehearsal, I (temporarily) leave you with the kind of classic clip that lives on in theater memory. And that’s why we’re all in this together, ladies and gentlemen: entertainment at all cost!

I can now confirm with scientific certainty that one can live on coffee and muffins.

Back at the American Airlines Theatre, I come in just in time to see the Terrence McNally play on the actual stage. That’s one I read this morning but haven’t seen rehearsed yet. All four actors are off book, which seems like an incredible feat to me (unless I was caught in a breach of the space-time continuum on my lunch break and what felt like an hour actually was a day; stranger things have happened). Anyway, Cynthia Nixon and Maura Tierney are sitting around a table in what’s meant to be a teachers’ lounge. Justin Long and Jason Butler Harner pace around them. As I mentioned in an earlier post, McNally’s language is florid. Read the rest of this entry »

J.B. Poersch, executive director of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, does not write me nearly as much as he did a few weeks back, when my inbox was flooded with missives from Poersch, the Obamas, Joe Biden, David Plouffe and other fine souls with a penchant for sending group e-mails requesting money. But Poersch dropped a line this morning informing me that over in Minnesota, Al Franken currently trails slippery Norm Coleman by a mere 204 votes, hopefully to be unearthed in the recount. Obviously, a Senator Franken would be a wonderful thing for America, as well as for Minnesota, wherever that is.

I interviewed Franken in the fall of 2004, a couple of months before the fated Kerry election. Franken, who at the time was beginning his transition from comedian to politician, was the keynote speaker at CMJ that year; I conducted a “jukebox jury” with him, playing CDs by artists who were performing at the music festival. The interview was remarkably easy to arrange. Hours after making the request, CMJ’s publicist gave me Franken’s address and phone number. The night before the interview, Franken’s wife, Franni, called me on my cell phone to change the time, so that they could catch a flight to Iowa. The couple’s lack of pretense was impressive and rare. I am accustomed to dealing with musicians—the most coddled, swollen-headed group of humans you are likely to encounter. (A drummer whose band’s debut EP just received an 8.4 from Pitchfork would likely guard his personal information with more vigilance.)
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To better celebrate National Novel Writing Month (it exists, apparently), online publisher WEbook is hosting an event Thursday 20 at the Hungarian Pastry Shop. From 9am to 6pm, writers who bring their laptops (scrolls, typewriters, hammer, chisel and two tablets…whatever) and really try this time to finally finish that novel, short story, poem, screenplay, liberal screed, misunderstood religious allegory or preemptive obit will be able to fuel themselves with free coffee and pastries all day. And if there is one thing a poor writer needs more than perserverance, original plot twists, six-figure advances, publicity and luck—then that thing is free coffee. Lots and lots of free coffee.