The film is a poignant, lyrical and occasionally eye-opening documentary about musician Leonard Cohen and muse Marianne Ihlen that is doomed to disappoint its intended audience on one or more levels, even while they lap it up.
There isn’t much more detail in which a reviewer of White Rabbit Red Rabbit can indulge without spoiling its content. It is structured to be performed as a “cold reading” by a different actor every night – an actor who has neither read the script nor ever seen a performance of the play. Thousands of actors have risen to the challenge over the past decade, some of them quite famous, and not every one has relished such a raw experience of “winging it.” There’s some room for improv built into the script, but mostly it requires a close and exact reading. Following the author’s instructions to the letter is essential to the message he’s trying to convey.
When the call for original short plays went out, the Theatre received 49 submissions and selected ten. These are fully staged productions, not mere readings, and are collectively dubbed “The Love/ Death Plays.”
Mounting some of the Bard’s more obscure, rarely seen plays seems to be trending among our region’s purveyors of summertime Shakespeare. The latest to jump on the repertoire-expansion bandwagon is the Bird-on-a-Cliff Theatre Company, whose offering for this 24th season of the Woodstock Shakespeare Festival is a true outlier: Pericles, Prince of Tyre.
On rare occasions, a documentary film tells a story so engaging at the heart level that it could have been a folk song. In the case of Alex Holmes’ Maiden — currently screening at Upstate Films, and coming to the Rosendale Theatre August 9 — it’s a variant on the classic tale of a bold English lass who runs away to sea to escape a wicked stepparent. Only this time, instead of cutting off her lovely locks and disguising herself as a cabin boy, this “female rambling sailor” acquires her own ship and recruits a whole crew of similarly adventurous young women to beat the lads at their own game.
Through Aug. 18: Shear Madness has an interesting history. It’s essentially a food-free stage version of the now-ubiquitous participatory phenomenon known as murder mystery dinner theater, which itself is rooted in games that became popular in Great Britain beginning in the late 19th century, following a notorious 1860 child-killing known as the Road Hill Murder.
An abandoned paper mill from the late 19th century that has been of late a waterfront canvas at Tina Chorvas Park for graffiti has been fenced off and slated as the future permanent home for the nomadic puppeteers of the Arm of the Sea Theater and an educational site for children.
Sunday, July 21: The Great Hack follows the inscrutable tracks of Brittany Kaiser, the ambiguous, complicated, brilliant and downright-Shakespearean figure whose actions at various times can be said to have both created and cracked the whole damn affair.
The Irish-born Jessie Buckley came in second on a BBC vocal talent show called I’d Do Anything, but she’s now one of the stars of this year’s HBO hit miniseries Chernobyl. Buckley plays a working-class 23-year-old unwed mother of two from Glasgow who’s obsessed with American country music.
Thursday-Sunday, July 11-28: Though dense with the rapid-fire witty banter for which the playwright is renowned, Blithe Spirit’s tone is as lightweight as ectoplasm, treating the subject of death so casually that British audiences demoralized by their losses in World War II found the play a welcome tonic. Its West End run ran for 1,997 performances, setting a record at the time for non-musicals, and it quickly moved on to Broadway.