FREE THEATER IN NYC

 ** FREE THEATER IN NYC ***

HOW DID I GET HERE?
Collaboratively written and directed by Tiffany Cruz—a Drama Club alum who began her journey with us at Rikers Island, became an apprentice upon release and has since become a cherished Drama Club teaching artist—this powerful production delves into the lives and stories of our apprentices, all of whom are formerly incarcerated or court-involved.

Sunday, March 30 · 4 - 5:30pm EDT. Doors at 3:30pm
St. Ann & the Holy Trinity Church
157 Montague Street Brooklyn, NY 11201
https://www.eventbrite.com/e/how-did-i-get-here-tickets-1234941416019?aff=ebdssbdestsearch


*** MRS LOMAN ~ 20% DISCOUNT ***

THROUGH FEBRUARY 15: Don't miss the acclaimed Off-Broadway premiere of MRS. LOMAN, a bold new play by Barbara Cassidy that imagines what Linda Loman from "Death of a Salesman" does after her husband commits suicide. Directed by Meghan Finn, this dark, biting critique of misogyny and racism in Miller’s iconic family drama runs through February 15 at Theatre Row (410 W 42nd St, New York, NY 10036). 

Discount tickets available with code EBLAST ~ tickets and info at www.mrsloman.com.


*** OPPORTUNITIES FOR PLAYWRIGHTS ***

The Strides Collective is currently accepting applications from queer playwrights in the Mid-Atlantic Region for our inaugural Strides Collective Commission (SCC). One selected playwright will receive a stipend of $500 and work closely with the Collective over the course of a year to develop their original idea for a full length, modern queer play, culminating in a produced staged reading of the new play in 2026.

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The Edward F. Albee Foundation maintains the William Flanagan Memorial Creative Persons Center (better known as "The Barn") in Montauk, Long Island, New York, as a residence for writers and visual artists of all media.

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FRESH WORDS-AN INTERNATIONAL LITERARY MAGAZINE is open for submissions for its Special One Minute Horror Plays Anthology titled 'SHHH! BREATHE SLOW!'

*** FOR MORE INFORMATION about these and other opportunities see the web site at https://www.nycplaywrights.org ***


*** LAURA BENANTI ***

In her dressing room at the Minetta Lane Theater, the actor Laura Benanti is still making changes to her rollicking one-woman show NOBODY CARES, even though it’s already six performances in to her 18-show run. The reason, I discover, is that her hard-nosed daughter Ella has some edits. Benanti had intended to run every joke by her seven-year-old, she explains, but one slipped through the cracks. “I didn’t think it would bother her because it’s actually not really about her,” she tells me. “And she was like, ‘You didn’t ask me if you could say that.'” But motherhood, and Benanti’s wrenching experience with postpartum depression, makes up only part of this show, which has the defiant, propulsive energy of a manifesto and a referendum.

More...
https://www.interviewmagazine.com/theater/in-her-one-woman-show-laura-benanti-bids-farewell-to-her-inner-ingenue

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There’s no love lost between SHE LOVES ME lovebirds, Laura Benanti and Zachary Levi.
Though they shared the Broadway stage in a successful and Tony Award-winning 2016 musical revival, Benanti made it clear in a new podcast interview that she was never a fan of Levi, who at the time was a successful TV star from NBC’s Chuck and on his way to movie stardom as the title character in DC’s Shazam! “I never liked him,” Benanti told Eric Williams on his That’s a Gay Ass Podcast. “Everyone was like, ‘He’s so great!’ And I was like, ‘No, he’s not. He’s sucking up all the fucking energy in this room. He wants to mansplain everybody’s part to them.'”

More...
https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/general-news/laura-benanti-slams-zachary-levi-anti-vax-gavin-creel-1236080043/

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It takes Henry Higgins six months to transform Eliza Doolittle from a “draggle-tailed guttersnipe” in “My Fair Lady” to a lady who can pass as a duchess at the Embassy Ball. Now, ten months after the opening of Lincoln Center’s fourth Broadway revival, the musical itself has been transformed, with the replacement of four of the principal roles – especially Laura Benanti as Eliza.

The show of course offers the same sumptuous design, lively choreography, and lush orchestrations, with the 15 songs (every single one of them memorable) lavishly backed by a 28-piece orchestra.

The performances of the original cast members who remain with the show have also deepened with detail, from Harry Hadden-Paton as Henry Higgins and Allan Corduner as his more kindly linguist-in-cahoots Colonel Pickering to Linda Mugleston as Higgins’ subtly exasperated secretary Mrs. Pierce. The production is if anything more deserving of the ten Tony nominations it received, and particularly costume designer Catherine Zuber’s Tony win (her ninth.)

More...
https://newyorktheater.me/2019/02/24/my-fair-lady-review-how-laura-benanti-as-eliza-changes-the-musical/

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After detouring into a pair of plays with supersize titles (Why Torture Is Wrong, and the People Who Love Them and In the Next Room, or the Vibrator Play), Laura Benanti has returned to her musical roots in Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown. As the adorably ditzy model Candela, the Tony-winning star totters around the stage in barely-there costumes, showing off her comedic and vocal chops in the show-stopping number “Model Behavior.” Less than a week before opening night, Benanti took time for a brief chat with Broadway.com.

Women on the Verge has had plenty of scrutiny leading up to opening night, but we haven’t heard about any real-life nervous breakdowns backstage.

More...
https://www.broadway.com/buzz/154186/whats-up-laura-benanti-dishing-about-women-on-the-verge-and-why-shes-in-her-best-shape-ever/

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Laura Benanti dreamed of one thing and one thing only- performing on Broadway so winning a Tony Award for her role in Gypsy was the most amazing dream come true and one of the happiest moments of her life. What people may not know is that early on in the rehearsal process she walked out feeling unsupported by the process and it wasn't until she had a deeply honest conversation with it's director, Arthur Laurents, that she returned and from that moment on it was the most joyous professional experience of her life. Find out how the two worked it out and why co- starring with Patti LuPone and Boyd Gaines was such an extraordinary experience on this episode of And The Award Goes To...

More...
https://www.broadwayworld.com/article/Podcast-Laura-Benanti-Talks-GYPSY-More-on-AND-THE-AWARD-GOES-TO-20200922

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Stephen Colbert celebrated the holidays on Monday’s episode of The Late Show by gifting viewers with what could have been Tony-winning actress Laura Benanti’s final appearance as Melania Trump while the First Lady is in the White House.

“Stephen, it’s like I keep telling my husband: Donald, it’s over,” Benanti-as-Melania said, addressing  speculation that the first lady is ready to move out of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue (and, perhaps, her marriage) despite President Donald Trump’s numerous and fruitless attempts to overturn the election. “We both know it ended a while ago. Now we just need to accept that and keep going until the prenup runs out.”

More...
https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2020/12/laura-benanti-melania-christmas-colbert

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Tony winner Laura Benanti (Gypsy) was on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert last night to play former (and perhaps future) First Lady Melania Trump. In the five-minute sketch, Melania is a party crasher at the Democratic National Convention, which just completed its second night at Chicago’s United Center with speeches by Bernie Sanders, Doug Emhoff, Michelle Obama, and Barack Obama. Benanti has played Melania before, although not much in the last four years. Her solo performance, Nobody Cares, is now available on Audible.
https://www.theatermania.com/news/laura-benanti-plays-melania-trump-at-the-dnc_1748037/

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Greetings NYCPlaywrights

*** FREE THEATER IN NYC ***

The Comedic Genius of Elaine May: A Discussion and Performance

Join us for an evening celebrating comedic force-of-nature Elaine May. A brilliant performer with the sensational duo Nichols and May, a pioneer of improvised comedy, and an iconoclastic Hollywood director, May has left an indelible mark on stage and screen. Elizabeth Alsop, professor of Film and Media Cultures at the CUNY Graduate Center, discusses her recent book on May’s cinema, offering insights into the four features May directed, from her auspicious debut, A New Leaf, to the infamous Ishtar. Philip Wiles, a doctoral student in Theatre and Performance at the Graduate Center, will discuss May’s role in the rise of improv, and the troupe Binder Full of Women will show how it’s done, live on stage. Edward Miller, professor of Film and Media Cultures and Theatre and Performance at the Graduate Center, moderates.

Wednesday, February 19 · 6:30pm EST

Elebash Recital Hall, The Graduate Center
365 5th Avenue New York, NY 10016

https://www.eventbrite.com/e/the-comedic-genius-of-elaine-may-a-discussion-and-performance-tickets-1223121402039?aff=ebdssbdestsearch


*** OPPORTUNITIES FOR PLAYWRIGHTS ***

Edmonds Driftwood Players is pleased to announce our theme and call for submissions for our 14th Annual Festival of Shorts. The Festival this year will be presented in five performances June 26-29, 2025, featuring eight shorts finalists that include multiple directors and casts. The theme for 2025 is “CROSSROADS: a choice or event that changed courses.” We would love to see both comedic and dramatic stories with uplifting endings.

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The MAC Theater Playwrights Incubator is a program for first-time playwrights to see their work realized on the stage.
Finding theaters to produce new or unpublished plays can be an obstacle for any new playwright. The MAC Theater Playwrights Incubator is a structured program that aims to discover and support, through workshop and production, new stage plays by first time, unpublished regional playwrights.

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Theatre Southwest of Houston, Texas is accepting entries for the 28th Annual Theatre Southwest Festival of Originals to be presented July 25th-August 9th, 2025. The TSW-FOO is FREE to enter and will once again be calling for short one act (20 minute) plays in any and all genres from all over the country and the world.

*** FOR MORE INFORMATION about these and other opportunities see the web site at https://www.nycplaywrights.org ***


*** BLUE MAN GROUP ***

After 17,800 shows and 82,150 gallons of paint, Blue Man Group is hanging up its bald caps at the Astor Place Theater for good on Sunday. It arrived there in 1991, when George H.W. Bush was president, cellphones were rare and the World Wide Web was two years away. (The group’s first profile in The New York Times existed only on paper.) In the generation since, the trio of hairless, earless, silent, blue-and-black clad performers, who spit paint and sculpt marshmallows, gobble Twinkies and drum in primary colors, unexpectedly became a culture-infiltrating sensation.

More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/30/theater/blue-man-group-new-york-closing-off-broadway.html

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On May 21, 1988, eight people carried a coffin into Central Park to conduct a “funeral for the ’80s.” Inside it were items meant to represent the culture of the decade: a Rambo doll, tiny figures wearing suits (yuppies), bags of a white substance resembling crack. The participants, most of whom had painted their skin blue, piled the objects into a metal drum along with some flash paper, which they lit on fire. They called themselves the Blue Man Group.

Within months, the group of Blue Men had been winnowed down to three: Chris Wink, Matt Goldman, and Phil Stanton. Over the next few years, with input from a circle of art-school kids and musicians, they would bring their constantly evolving act to many spots around the city — they played with vaudeville at King Tut’s Wah Wah Hut, experimented with flying paint at La MaMa, and eventually landed at Astor Place Theatre. The three characters were general outsiders, unfamiliar with our customs and unable to speak but endlessly curious and eager to connect; they also caught a heroic number of food items in their mouths. “The word on the street was we were nuts,” says Larry Heinemann, who played with the group on instruments including the Chapman Stick.

More...
https://www.vulture.com/article/blue-man-group-oral-history.html

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Fred Armisen on the Blue Man Group Make Out Parties | PARTY LEGENDS

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BMBJ9N3ygDA

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NYTimes review 1991

Blue Man makes an abstract painting on stage by pouring paint onto drums, drumming the hell out of it and catching the cascading spatters on canvas. Then he goes to an art show and deconstructs a fish.

Blue Man is the performance group that opens in "Tubes" at the Astor Place Theater tonight: three men with bald, cobalt-blue heads, outsiders who know just enough about the current culture to make hash of it in a hurry. The three blue men -- Matt Goldman, Phil Stanton and Chris Wink -- think of themselves on stage as a single entity that happens to have three bodies. Since Blue Man neither talks nor shows emotion, he expresses himself through art and music, which definitely reveal that something's been pent up a long time and needs to get out .

The fountains of paint, the food that spurts from the performers' jackets and is avidly glubbed up, the marshmallows and balls of paint they catch in their mouths and spit out as art, bring an element of untrammeled infantile sensuality, the pre-verbal joy of goo and finger painting, to the theater. With original music, deadpan sophistication and the biggest mess since the cafeteria scene in "Animal House," Blue Man reduces the late 20th century to a post-modern romp in a lunatic nursery school.

More...
https://www.nytimes.com/1991/11/17/theater/theater-high-tech-meets-goo-with-blue-man-group.html

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It was nothing like I have experienced during a show and more interactive than I anticipated. Walking in, the theater is almost whimsical with some oddities scattered, it is almost like getting a sneak peak of what is to come. The first few center rows I have heard are referred to as “splash seats”. Watch out if you sit there, you may get splashed with paint or hit with marshmallows or cereal. Ponchos are provided for these audience members and seems to be taken all in good fun. Expect the Blue Men not only to go out into the audience and pick a person to help and participate during a couple parts of the show, but to at one point, for everyone in the audience to get in on some black light-neon party action and streamers with fist-pumping moves and dance music.

More...
https://toronto.splashmags.com/index.php/2018/02/blue-man-group-review-an-exuberant-experience/

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What is the overall story that the Blue Men tell? Are they aliens? What are the Blue Men?

There are definitely different ways to look at it. In training and talking about it, we’ve specifically never allowed ourselves to land on one single answer. What I like to think of it as is that we’re these beings that are summoned by the audience itself. Who is the guy who talks about the different masks?

Joseph Campbell.

Exactly. So it’s this Joseph Campbell psychological analysis of the audience itself. So the Blue Man is reflecting the audience itself and the Blue Man is summoned by the audience itself. A primordial, psychological journey of the audience itself. Put more simply, you could think of it as, the color blue. It’s cased off that Yves Klein blue. That bright, bright cobalt that he created himself, and that he covered [a series of objects and paintings] with and nothing else. So the concept is that we emerged from a painting like that. Like our primordial soup is from the art world, and we are summoned by the audience to connect them and free them from this urban isolation. To have this single moment of connection.

More...
https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/the-ao-exit-interview-12-years-in-the-blue-man-group

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On Monday, Blue Man Group cast and crew members, along with members of the Chicago arts community, gathered near the Briar Street Theatre, 3133 N. Halsted St., to stage a demonstration in protest of the show’s closing.

In an ode to the Group’s first show in Central Park, “A Funeral for the ‘80s,” “A Funeral for the Blue Man Group” featured a procession carrying a makeshift coffin to and from the Briar from the Annoyance Theatre, 851 W. Belmont Ave., along with drums and other elements of the group’s signature percussion. Many of the protesters donned blue face paint and skull caps like the Blue Man Group performers. They eventually lit a small fire in a portable fire pit and roasted marshmallows on the pyre.

More...
https://blockclubchicago.org/2025/01/07/a-funeral-for-the-blue-man-group-chicago-says-farewell-to-iconic-performance-troupe/

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