EXTRA CRITICUM

Performer Profile: Dandy Darkly

What to say about my new friend, Dandy Darkly?  It might be easier to let others... for example, Woman About Town Magazine called him "A Gothic, gay monologist" while the Triskelion Arts Center called him  "The Dr. Seuss of Perversion!"

The Villager Newspaper said that he's "An utterly unique and potentially fatal cocktail of mince and menace that's not to be believed... even once he's been seen!" and recently, Time Out picked his last show as "One of Five Things To Do". He's

Dandy Darkly is a master storyteller who mixes the erotic .. and the macabre.. and this Saturday night March 30th at Dixon Place, he'll present a Dandy Darkly’s Easter Blister Variety Event with an all star lineup of storytelling and burlesque style acts!

Our Brain Hungers for Narrative

As a storyteller I pay a lot of attention to types of narrative – the various ways stories can be told.

Narrative is perhaps the fundamental way our species organizes experience. Event “A” causes event “B” which causes event “C” etc. etc. That’s what narrative is – a causal relationship between events. You can think of it as a series of dominoes falling. Even when in real life events occur in proximity but independently, our strong impulse is to invent a causal connection anyway, because that’s just how we’re wired to see the world. We like order; cause and effect. To our genetically endowed brains, chaos and nonsense are not our friends.

"Girls" and the sitcom fantasy of being rescued from yourself

Girls is the antithesis of the modern sitcom, most notably in the way it depicts sex as awkward and only intermittently satisfying — as opposed to the happy, off-screen "banging" that's talked about on shows like How I Met Your Mother and is only occasionally disrupted by cute-as-a-puppy instances of impotence. This week's second-season finale closes with a skewed take on a romantic comedy cliché, as Adam responds to a phone call of distress from Hannah by dashing out of his apartment at night without a shirt on, taking the subway to her place, breaking down her front door, and lifting her out of bed in his arms.

Meanwhile on Filmmaker Magazine: An Article About Web Series

An article I wrote for Filmmaker Magazine, Five Different Roads to a Web Series, is now online and ready for your eyeballs. I interviewed five filmmakers who turned their films (and a TV pilot) into web series. One of those filmmakers is Jacob Hensberry, whose Kickstarter campaign for his film, Planet X, was covered here and here.

Performer Profile: Kylie Edmond

Producing events in New York City is always a challenge especially when I need to book performing talent of one kind or another week in and week out, 52 weeks a year.

But, I love it. 

Puppets Ask Us Not to Steal That Song

Impoverishment is the default condition of most theatre artists, including playwrights, composers and lyricists. Very few make a living from their art and many struggle to make ends meet and lack health insurance. This sad state of affairs was well aired in 2010 by the book Outrageous Fortune which documented how the economics of theatre disadvantage writers.

Performer Profile: Dwight Thomas Vaughn

A few months ago I posted my first "performer profile" (of Roger Anthony "Yolanda" Mapes). The idea is to ask several performers a stock set of questions and get to know them a little bit better.

Today I'm profiling singer Dwight Thomas Vaughn. I met him as Tom, a singer from a social group made up of many performing artists looking to get more out of their creative lives.

Tom made a clear intention of what he wanted to achieve and, a year and many gigs later, he's booked a show at Iridium. And, as you can see in the video below, he's singing his lungs out and having a lot of fun line dancing around New York City. You can't ask for more than that.