Word: off-broadway
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...three bullet-headed blue men with the deadpan insouciance of Buster Keaton have changed hardly at all. They still do the trademark bits from their quirky, eight-year-old off-Broadway show: tubes of paint are poured onto a drum, and the resulting splashes form instant abstract art; an audience member is dragged onstage to join the Blue Men in a Twinkie banquet, which gets icky when the cream filling bursts out of their stomachs. But the stage at the Luxor Hotel, where Blue Man Group has been playing since March, is four times the size of the troupe...
Having just started previews for a May 18 off-Broadway opening, Kaufman and company are still trying to pare down the play's bulky three-hour length. But the work's passion and power are clearly in evidence. On a stage populated mainly by wooden chairs and tables, eight actors talk directly to the audience, describing the interviews they did and re-creating them at the same time. There are choice, often harrowing details: the bartender recalling that the two killers paid for their pitcher of beer entirely in dimes and quarters; a deputy sheriff noting that the only place...
...theater has been through its AIDS phase; why not Alzheimer's disease? In this off-Broadway work, Lonergan (This Is Our Youth) depicts the sad mental decline of his grandmother, just as she is about to be evicted from her Greenwich Village art gallery. The play is slight and doesn't rise above its autobiographical confines, but there are some astute observations of the family's conflicted reactions. And Eileen Heckart gives a brave, touching performance as a woman whose conversation first wobbles, then drifts and finally careers full speed on a long, lonely track to nowhere...
...being beaten to the boards by The Wild Party, version B, with book, music and lyrics by less highly touted young composer Andrew Lippa (who contributed some bouncy new numbers to the recent Broadway revival of You're a Good Man, Charlie Brown). His show is being staged off-Broadway, at the Manhattan Theatre Club, but has been optioned by two Rent producers, who want to move it to Broadway. That could mean some confusing conversations with the Telecharge operator...
...charged, not by the size of the screen but by the energy of the audience. Coliseums, football stadiums, rock concerts--to be a part of the action, as opposed to just being a voyeur, is as old as the ritual of performance. Yet bigger does not necessarily mean better. Off-Broadway theater is doing very well right now, and the physical intimacy of the live event has a lot to do with its success. Feeling that your presence affects the event may become more and more important as we look to be entertained in the 21st century...