Welcome to Wallindia

Go see Curtis' traffic island this weekend!

more pictures of major award winners

I know you must be sick of it by now, both of you who read this blog, but here are more pictures of us having memorable heart-warming times in Edinburgh. Lynsey, one of our SCAMP street team sent these to me. They warmed my teeny tiny heart.

Here we are at Oloroso the night we opened. The people you don't recognize are Sam from SCAMP (next to Joey), Alex a SCAMP actor (next to me, where he BELONGS!) and Lynsey (between Atticus and Craig).







Craig at the SCAMP Haggis Dinner at The Assembly Rooms. Funny, this is the only picture Lynsey sent from the haggis dinner. Actually, she seemed to have sent along a lot of pictures of Craig...interesting...



And these are at Star Bar after we won our award. See the glint of triumph in our eyes! Or is that just the glint of whisky...

Illumination Rounds

This play is by Josh Liveright who is one of our writers for The Minstrel Show and runs The Interart Annex where we perform many of our plays. He is an alumni of the ATL apprentice program, he is very good to The Shalimar, and he is from Maine! If you find yourself in need of art and culture Columbus Day weekend or the weekend after, go see it! Support theater!

Plus it stars an Australian actress I met in a sauna...





the interart theatre development series and zena group present

illumination rounds
a play by josh liveright

directed by paul smithyman

featuring mark schulte and freya fox

sets by anita fuchs
lights by lucrecia briceno
sound by david m. lawson
video by william cusick and alex koch
costumes and make-up by tarafawn marek
violence by judi lewis-ocker
stage manager, julie griffith

OCTOBER 4 to 15
thursdays through mondays at 8PM
10 PERFORMANCES ONLY!

interart annex
500 west 52nd street
corner of 52nd and 10th

reserve by return email or call 212 604 4505

suggested donation $15

SEEKING 2 INTERNS

Seeking Interns

Award winning NYC based theater company The Shalimar seeks 2 Productions Interns for fall/winter 2007 to work with Artistic Director Shoshona Currier. Please send resume and letter of interest to shoni@shalimarproductions.org.

Seeking two individuals who have an interest in theater administration, producing, or directing. This is a truly hands-on internship designed to give young theater artists the opportunity to learn about the day-to-day work of a small theater company. Past Shalimar interns have gone on to act, direct, and tour internationally with the company. Transportation stipend available.

Internship Requirements:
October 2007-January 2007

10 hours/wk of administrative work in Upper Manhattan office.
Duties Include: development research (grants, festivals, sponsorship,
etc...), organizational work (filing, copying, etc...), assisting in
seasonal mailings, helping to schedule readings, rehearsals,
performances, and workshops.

Minimum attendance of 3 rehearsals/wk.
Duties include: Assisting the director and stage manager in rehearsal, attending production meetings,assisting the dramaturge with research, taking rehearsal notes,
occasionally running rehearsals and/or warm-ups, actively
participating in the creation of the plays.

Participation in Shalimar Fundraisers
Duties include: Attending planning meetings, working on various fundraising committees, working at the events.

THE FALL SHOWS

Those Ones: A Modern Day Minstrel Show
November 29-December 16
at The Interart Annex
A controversial new take on our ever popular annual ten-minute play festival. It's "us vs. them" as writers confront stereotypes with ruthless candor and wit. Our modern interpretation of this old but not entirely forgotten form.
With new plays by Michael John Garces, Tommy Smith, Hilly Hicks Jr., Sharyn Rothstein, Josh Liveright and Nastaran Ahmadi.

Late and Live
November 29-December 16
at The Interart Annex
The Shalimar is thrilled to announce this brand spanking new late night series, with offerings from some of New York's most exciting theater artists. Schedule TBA.

MONDAY NEWS!

The talented and charismatic Michael Garces will be awarded the Princess Grace Statue this year. I am so impressed and amazed by this man. We've known Michael since we were wee apprentices at Actors Theatre of Louisville and he was in town for Humana directing When the Sea Drowns in Sand (renamed Havana is Waiting for its run at The Cherry Lane) by Eduardo Machado, whose thoughts about grad school I've been rereading lately (please draw your attention to my buddy Isaac's blog), and who I last saw in the lobby of the Intar/Interart building when Atticus and Justin and I were loading out our LA FEMME set to drive it to 59e59 and Eduardo was waiting for the elevator, which we were breaking, and he walked up to the second floor and got it unbroken for us.

Theater. Yow. Small world.

Michael is writing a play for our Minstrel Show. This is a post I intended to write a few days ago, when I first read about The Princess Grace Statue, but I wanted to wait until I heard back from Michael who emailed me today to assure me his Minstrel Play is on its way so now I can relax and blog about how thrilled I am that Michael is writing for us. Last year he wrote a piece called Over Exposed for 1000 Words which Mary Kate Burke directed and a few months prior to that I directed a short piece of his, entitled off season for Prospect Theater Company. It starred Pat Dempsey, Lori McNally, and Joey Williamson and was the hardest stream of consciousness text three actors have ever had to learn. Plus they performed drenched in water (in an old church where the only tap water was freezing cold), I believe Joey was shirtless, and all three of them faced the audience dead on the entire time. It was a terrifying piece of text about thrill seekers riding out Hurricane Katrina in which Joey had an incredible long impassioned speech about the exhilaration of fear that he never quite learned all the words of. Next time you see him say "Screamhole". He'll know what you mean. And he'll shake with terror and scream like a bichon.

All this is by way of saying Michael's writing is so exciting and so angry and so funny and scenes are often beautiful tapestries of poetry, with characters finishing each others' phrases, lines repeated, and varied, and changed, and then repeated again, they are intense and they are wordy. He plays with text in a hyper-real way. It sounds natural but it's heightened. It lives in our reality and just above it. It's beautiful to listen to, challenging to work on, and a bitch to memorize.

Of course his contributions to theater don't stop there. When we first met Michael he was primarily directing, and now he serves as the Artistic Director of Cornerstone in LA. And he is still finding the time to write for our little company here in New York.

I'm so grateful that we have the opportunities to work with artists like Michael. It enriches our company. By continuing to reach out to other artists besides the actors we always work with we are able to create diverse work instead of enjoying a teeny tiny Shalimar theater bubble. It's important to keep our own little artistic community strong and thriving and it's also incredibly important to continue to contribute to the larger theatrical community, which I hope we are able to achieve in our own ways.

All this is by way of saying CONGRATULATIONS MICHAEL! There is noone more deserving of that statue than you.

viva la liberation!

At one of our performances in Edinburgh we had 2 pieces of French press in the audience. One was this website. Husband found it through extensive googling and when he did a translation of the page found that for google "La Femme Est Morte" means "The Woman East Gold". That might be my next tattoo.

Please visit the site to see beautiful production shots of La Femme, actually shot during a performance!



On other fronts, I am still in Scotland. We are doing major preliminary work on the Minstrel Show as well as a few other projects, but mostly I am sleeping until noon, eating too much bacon, and glued to the news for any developments on whether Maddie was actually murdered by her parents. I'm on holiday, dammit.

Edinburgh Festivals Magazine review

La Femme est Morte Review
Written by Imogen Thomas
****

Fast-paced, physical and sexy, this frenzied interpretation of Phaedra is a thrilling theatrical rollercoaster. The dynamic, American cast presents a vibrant adaptation of the Greek tragedy, complete with exciting dances and a Greek chorus in the form of the Paparazzi, who perform covers of Take That and the Spice Girls songs, whilst adding a humorous touch of celebrity obsession to the piece. Although some of the numbers do sound like karaoke, this adds to the kitsch undertone of the piece, and on the whole this is an energetic and stylish musical-comic-tragedy.

La Femme est Morte
Pleasance
5 – 27 August
4pm

our first FIVE STAR REVIEW!

from SCOTSGAY!

THEATRE
La Femme Est Morte (Why I
Should Not Fuck My Son)
Pleasance Dome
*****
Amazingly raw and sexy production! This multi-faceted show is simply dripping with talent. A Greek morality play, a political message about the merits (or not) of war and a deep insight into the animal that is celebrity – both from the celebrity and papparazi perspective. Featuring wonderfully choreographed dances and comedy moments
like the Janet Jackson nipple incident, this production manages to combine the serious with the hilarious in an explosion of red-hot genius. I personally thought the 3 papparazi characters excelled in the show – firstly the outstandingly elegant female dancer/gymanist with a voice which rivals any I’ve heard in the charts; a stylish male with a beautiful voice and great hair, who throughout the production plays both guitar and a harp; and a hot punky looking girl who plays violin. A must-see show!

Jodie Fleming

OnstageScotland review

"Performances
that are pitch
perfect in tone
and style...
it's a blast"

La Femme est Morte or Why I Should Not Fuck My Son
Shalimar

Seneca's ancient Greek tragedy Phaedra done as a satire on American celeb and macho cultures, with pop songs and boxing – frankly this should have been a complete mess. Well it's not.

It's a constantly exhilarating, entertaining, surprising show, and the biggest surprise of all is that what you end up with is a powerful reading of Phaedra itself.

She's married to Theseus who is away fighting to impose American masculinity on wrong thinking infidels. In the meantime she falls in lust with her stepson Hippolytus (“I'm not his mother”, “She's not my mother”), under the constant gaze of a chorus of paparazzi. Then Theseus returns and it all turns very nasty indeed.

Throw in liberal use of a blood gun, boxing, mincemeat, the best mobile phone joke ever, terrific dancing, dialogue that switches from rhetoric to dude-speak in an instant and musical presentation that would grace any West End or Broadway stage and you have something very close to the top of my Fringe treat list.

You also have a company of eight, all of whom produce physical and vocal performances that are pitch perfect in tone and style from the very start to the very finish. Kim Gainer is a brittle, sexy Phaedra; Joe Cumutte a wondrously virginal dude Hippolytus; Atticus Rowe a frighteningly upright Theseus; Jen Taher glorious as the spin doctor from hell and Craig Peugh as best friend X powerfully delivers the traditional bad news messenger's speech while moving through the audience.

Last but most certainly not least are Joey Williamson, Laura Lee Anderson and Marissa Lupp as Tiresias and his paparazzi chorus, zapping out their musical numbers with precision of movement and terrific musicality.

Outstandingly well directed by Shoshona Currier, this young American company delivers one of the most successful mixing of theatrical style I've ever seen. It's a blast.

Victor Hallett

Culturewars review

I was lucky enough to meet the very smart and very sweet and often very drunk Mister Haydon at our splendid VIP bar. He is highly educated and really cool and had some great things to say about our show (which yes, always makes me love someone a little more than usual...). Below is what he wrote about our show on culturewars.org. He also has his own blog which is a great resource for the London theater scene. He wrote about us there too. And there. Read all his blogs, he's a total star.


La Femme est Morte
Pleasance, Edinburgh

Andrew Haydon
posted 28 August 2007

It seems to be a Fringe tradition in recent years for one American company to become toast of the town for the month. For the last couple of years it has been the T.E.A.M., and before that the Riot Group. This year’s undisputed winners must be Shalimar Theater, a New York-based group on their second British outing with their irreverent assault on the Phaedre story: La Femme est Morte – or why I should not fuck my son.

Bursting onto the stage like the kids from Fame turned sleazy ‘trailer trash’, they proceed to build the story using a clever mix of registers from ‘dude’-littered dialogue through to some pretty elevated poetic declamation. The action is frequently punctuated or commented upon using a brilliant selection of trashy pop classics. The overall effect is like classical tragedy moulded from cultural detritus. The action of the piece itself has been loosely relocated to contemporary America, so the central royal characters – Theseus, Phaedre and Hippolytus, are modern celebs continually dogged by paparazzi while Oenone becomes Phaedre’s PR manager or image consultant.

It’s a neat aesthetic decision that enables the company to make a wry comparison between Classical tragedy and the modern world’s obsession with celebrities’ car-crash lives. The piece also uses Theseus’ role as a warrior to advance some not-very-veiled criticisms of the US war effort: ‘We’ve ‘liberated’ Crete!’ While I could quite happily never see another anti-war play, this being a US-based company, it at least avoids the usual lazy anti-American slurs which usually come with the territory.

What really lifts this show several notches above its competitors is the subtle use and sheer range of the pop-cultural quotation deployed by Shoshona Currier’s sharp script: Phaedre compares her early love of Theseus to ‘Katie watching Tom in Risky Business’; there are allusions to Britney, Paris and Diana (no, not the Greek goddess); there’s even a blink-and-you’ll miss it visual reference to Janet Jackson’s ‘wardrobe malfunction’. These manage at once to be very funny and neat comments on the poverty of our modern celebrity culture. The music is deployed in a similar fashion. 'Back for Good' and 'Two Become One' (Take That and the Spice Girls respectively - pay attention) are both milked for all the schmaltz they can yield as incidental music. Elsewhere a whole-cast performance of 'My Humps' is both funny and raunchy as a reconciliation scene, while Guns and Roses’s 'Don’t Cry' played on a harp deals neatly delivers the play’s own funeral scene.

And while maybe not all the performances from the energetic and, frankly, sexy cast are technically perfect, there are more than enough jokes, ideas and sheer enthusiasm here to cover for any occasional lapses. Revelling in trash and kitsch while dealing with a classical text is a simple idea, but the way it is treated here, as a powerful and acute commentary on our media-dominated lives is something very special indeed.