Best Of New Orleans Blog

When I attended closing night of the play, Someone Bought the House on the Island, at Marigny Theatre, I did not know in advance that the play was adapted from a novel. But soon into the play, I came to that conclusion myself. I also suspected that the playwright and novelist are the same person. Why? Because certain technical gaffs in the script were committed by someone with a fiction writer’s perspective on storytelling. My suspicion was confirmed in the after-show talkback with the author, Ken Anderson. The story itself is fine, if you like gay melodrama, which I do. But my main observation about Someone Bought the House on the Island is that the script is an awkward adaptation of fiction, and may have been accomplished better by someone other than the novelist himself.

For example, too often, the protagonist breaks out of scene to read from a dog-eared journal, long descriptive passages and direct narration that the playwright wanted to preserve from his novel, but could find no other way to dramatize, I suppose. These interruptions stop the drama dead each time. We writers fall in love with our own words, and are loathe to cut them. My unasked for advice (you knew it was coming): cut ‘em anyway. Like the Titans of old, we eat our own children. Besides, if you can’t dramatize it, then how is it drama? (more…)

For one night only, the annual performance art festival, DramaRama! runs at the Contemporary Art Center. Saturday, April 19 6pm to midnight. For only $12, you can sample from the smorgasborg of area talents in theatre, dance, and performance art. Every usable space at the CAC is a stage. Select from a menu of 5 or 6 simultaneous performances, scheduled in 15-minute increments. Didn’t like the last thing? Cross the hallway.

FYI, look for my name on the schedule again this year. My cast of voice actors performs an excerpt from my radio play–the climactic 15 minutes of ORIGIN! You can see me making live sound effects by walking on boards in high heel shoes, running in kitty little to simulate gravel. My carpenter friend, Brian Tarney, created a cool creaking door effect.

Hope I see ya in the audience. If so, say howdy afterwards.

by Frederick Mead

For all the yapping I do about New Orleans theatre, it’s about time I put up or shut up. Tonight’s the night! Thursday, April 10 at 8:30pm, Mona Rogers in Person opens a 4-night run at the Sidearm Gallery. See actors Michael Martin, Elizabeth McCarthy, Frederick Mead (that’s me!), Mary Pauley, and Holly Walker transform into different incarnations of the burlesque queen, Mona Rogers.

Mona Rogers in Person is a 90-minute, one-woman play interpreted by 5 male and female actors. The play is a verbally and physically explosive exploration of womanhood gone beserk, a nightmarishly hilarious story about a woman with a media-instilled appetite for fame. Can you tell I’m having a good time? Written by the late brother of famed songstress Diamanda Galas, playwright Phillip-Dimitri Galas described Mona Rogers in Person as “avant-vaudeville”. His script is an incantatory collage designed for high-voltage performance. It debuted in 1985 at the La Jolly Museum of Contemporary Art.

The New Orleans premier of Mona Rogers in Person is directed by Agnes de Garron, a New York performance artist, choreographer, and puppeteer. A founding member of the San Francisco performance/social activist group, The Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, Agnes received the 2007 “Legend of the Year” award from the Fresh Fruit Festival in New York.

TICKETS:
Call for reservations: 504 218 8379. Regular ticket price is $12, and discounts are available to students, seniors, and returning customers. (more…)

by Frederick Mead

Sometimes a play keeps me up at night, thinking about it, wondering what the author meant, feeling my way through my objections, trying to form words to express my thoughts about it. Calme au Blanc is one of those plays. I stayed up late afterwards, and continue to struggle with it even now as I write this review.

Louis Crowder is an emerging New Orleans playwright to watch out for. I’m rooting for him, but do have criticisms. Calme au Blanc is the third play of his that I’ve seen. The first 2 were one-acts performed together at Marigny Theatre last season as Cobalt Blue, Disaster Number 1604, Parts 1 and 2 (a title I’m not too fond of). Aside from the general objection to “yet another Katrina play”, I had strong criticisms about the one-acts last season, about the histrionic writing and clumsy direction. Some of my criticisms about the writing still apply to this third play, but overall Calme au Blanc is a stronger piece of work than the one-acts, more mature and better directed. The playwright directed the one-acts himself last year. (more…)

by Frederick Mead

I work for the foundation that produces the Big Easy Entertainment Awards, which include separate award events for Theatre, Popular Music, and Classical Arts (opera, dance, and Classical music). I also serve on the nominating committee for theatre awards. Here’s an insider’s low-down on the theatre awards process.

WHAT IS THE BIG EASY AWARD FOUNDATION?
Yes, there really is a foundation. It was founded 20 years ago by Gambit Weekly publisher, Margo DuBos, as a 501c3 non-profit. The purpose of the foundation is to promote education in the performing arts in the Greater New Orleans area. The Foundation awards several grants each year, about $2000-3500 each, to projects that teach performance skills or nurture young talent. Our full official name is The Foundation for Entertainment Development and Education, but we are best known as The Big Easy Awards Foundation. (more…)

I shook hands with director Wilbert L. Williams after A Soldier’s Play to congratulate him on such a fine casting job. Lately, I’ve come to appreciate more how critical casting is to the success a production.

For example, veteran actor and Big Easy Theatre Award winner, Harold X. Evans, gives a disquieting performance in the play’s most difficult role, as a black man prejudiced against other black people, especially the “Yah suh, Massah, step-n-fetchit type” (his words). Evans, an army sergeant, is hated by his all-black soldiers, and his murder causes little shock or remorse. Yet, his murder and its investigation are the crux of A Soldier’s Play. (more…)

A trailerpark is an unlikely setting for a Musical. But for director Sean Patterson, a trailerpark is an all-too familiar setting, having spent the last 2 years with his now-wife, Cammie West, in a FEMA trailer. With toxic trailers currently in the headlines, The Great American Trailer Park Musical is both timely and wildly high-larious. The Jefferson Performing Arts Society presents The Great American Trailer Park Musical at their Westwego Performing Arts Theatre, a surprisingly nice venue that underwent a facelift just prior to Katrina. Thankfully, the same contractor returned to fix it after the storm. (more…)

If you missed last year’s underground theatre event: The Palanquin Diaries, Confessions of a Mardi Gras Queen, you have one more weekend to catch the encore. Assuming of course that you like nudity, snakes, rock music, and can find the venue. But where the heck is the Backyard Ballroom?

Like most things bohemian, the Backyard Ballroom is located in the Bywater. On St Claude and Gallier, next to an empty lot, the large, strately house and its backyard are owned by the playwright, Otter, who co-produced Palanquin Diaries with her partner, Chris Rudge, owner of the Bywater’s Bacchanal wine store. He personally ran back and forth between the backyard and his wine store to “deliver beer”, since he is only licensed to sell alcohol out of the one location.

I brought blankets, assuming the backyard would be cold. Turns out, there’s an indoor theatre space back there. The Bywater is host to a number of new gallery/performance venues these days, such as SideArm Gallery, Barrister’s Gallery, Hi Ho Lounge, and Bacchanal. The Backyard Ballroom offers a narrow stage, curtains, lights and lightboard, sound. And the electrical looked up to code. Even the exits were visibly marked. New Orleans needs more low-cost theatre options, and Backyard Ballroom is one of the better ones, if you can attract an audience that “far” into the Bywater. (more…)

Each semester, after my students and I have written some rap songs (myspace.com/mrmichaelsclass), the second half of my ‘Music Writing’ class entails teaching them to write album reviews. Their writing is generally hilarious and mean — the kids mostly dismiss anything not fed to them via Clear Channel — but the reviews also boast some perfect snappy, laconic insights, descriptions and assertions that only kids could conjure. In a batch of reviews published by Gambit magazine in September of 2006, the kids critiqued a demo album by The BadOff, a modern yet almost imperceptibly retro, heavy guitar-rock band from New Orleans:

“They sound a hot mess to me. Their instrumentation sounds like biker boys driving down the road. I like the beat. Why? Because you can use it to make other songs. I don’t like that the beat is louder than the singer. Why? Because I would like to hear the singer’s words. The singer sounds like someone in a graveyard singing about a dead loved one. He sings like he knows how to sing, and he sings songs that you can dance to a lot. He sings like he’s been a singer for a while.”

Only now have The Bad Off finished the recordings my students mildly dogged. Their album Lady Day will be available for the first time this Sunday night, at One Eyed Jacks. (more…)

Louisiana Organ Procurement Agency, or LOPA, are the brave souls who approach a grieving family within 24 hours after a loved-one’s death to ask for organ donation. Can you imagine that job? I can, because for 3 afternoons last week I reacted to the awful news of a loved-one’s death, over and over again. As an actor, I dramatized scenes that simulate real-world scenarios, so that the LOPA grief counselors could practice their craft in a safe environment.

The scenes were specifically designed to be difficult for the counselors; and thus, as an actor, difficult for me. My wife and I could not have children, and our adopted daughter was struck by a drunk driver on her way home from the school. It just so happened that the grief counselor who approached us was 6 months pregnant. DANG. I was a Fundamentalist Baptist who could not accept the death of my teenage son because Pastor RJ promised that my boy, Steve-O, would rise up at 10am. And then at 10am, the grief counselor had to approach me for organ donation. SHITE. I was a teenage son who’s mother died, and at 18, am legal next-of-kin; but if I consent to organ donation, my step-father will kick me out. FRAK. (more…)

Every Christmas season, Papa Noel, the Cajun/Creole version of Santa Claus, magically transports famous personalities from New Orleans history to the present day. Some personalities are generally known today, locally and outside New Orleans, such as Andrew Jackson, Captain Jean Lafitte, and the Widow Paris (aka Marie Laveau). But other persons are less known although equally important to Louisiana cultural history, such as C. C. Antoine, Free Man of Color and 2-term Lt Governor. The company even includes a strolling accordionist, Count Guido, a Vaudevillian who popularized the accordion in North America.

The Living History characters stroll the French Quarter Thursday through Christmas Day, yes, Christmas Day, 11am to 4pm (3pm 12/24-25), often along Royal street, visiting hotel lobbies, restaurants, and places like the Cabildo and Historic New Orleans Collection. They are immediately noticeable, not only for their painstakingly accurate 19th century attire designed by Veronica Russell, but also for the slow pace they walk. The world was slower back in the day. (more…)

Actor Michael Martin performs as the charming Bachelor in New Orleans, a one-man show developed from an idiosyncratic 1950s tour guide of the French Quarter. In eloquent and picaresque language, the Bachelor expounds on topics of interest to playboy or playgirl visitors, such as, the signature cocktails of the city and Antoines, his favorite restaurant. The Bachelor offers (more…)

Grants are available for performing arts organizations who offer educational programs in the greater New Orleans area. The Foundation for Entertainment Development and Education, the folks who bring us the Big Easy Awards for music and theatre for the past 20 years, also offer grants for projects that focus on education in the performing arts. Past recipients include NOCCA, All Kinds of Theatre, and the Fred J. Palmisano Memorial Scholarship Fund at UNO Dept of Drama.

Application deadline is December 14. Email a description of your project and the amount you are requesting to Gloria Powers, Executive Director of the Foundation.

The New Orleans Opera has been getting creative to appeal to new audiences. It’s adopted the ideas of a New York group to present Opera on Tap, a gathering of opera fans in barrooms with previews of upcoming shows. Last Wednesday, the group toasted Puccini at the Rusty Nail (Formerly the Mermaid Lounge). The group is presenting Il Trittico, a trio of one-act operas (recast in New Orleans settings) by Puccini, next weekend (Nov. 16-18) at Tulane’s McAlister Auditorium. As a special offer, the opera is offering first-time opera goers $20 tickets. Opera virgins need only call the opera ticket line (529-3000) to reserve a seat and get the special price. Any seat in the house is available at the special rate, so call early.

What if Judas Iscariot did not commit suicide? And instead he married, became a farmer, and wrote a Gospel? Sounds like the kind of theater production that would earn a grant. Cuz you know, it’s serious, and it challenges stuff, like, assumptions. Maybe Judas Iscariot isn’t really such a bad guy after all. Wasn’t he just used by God? Maybe Judas deserves our pity, if not, say, our veneration? Yep, this production company will travel (more…)

The common theme of the 9 playlets that comprise Root [Cel.lar] seems to be “the basement”, that is, 7 of the playlets are set in a basement, 1 in Hell, and 1 by Rob Tsarov is just plain dark, like a cellar. I like these thematic presentations of short plays by local playwrights, like the recent Beignet Plays at Le Chat Noir. Even if 1 or 2 suck, you’re bound to see something good. And there was good work to see (more…)