Bwog’s Dane Cook ventured into Riverside Theater to attend last night’s performance of Black Snow.

The intrigue of Black Snow took hold even before the play began. As the audience filed past to take their seats, a young woman cautioned everyone entering the theater, “Don’t forget your package. It’s here waiting for you.” Standing beside a messy table strewn with documents, she gestured toward several metal pails, each filled with small brown envelopes that read, “Keep in your pocket. Keep closed. You’ll know when to open…”

This unexpected introduction sets the tone for the rest of the production, which follows Sergei, an aspiring writer in Soviet Russia, on a dark journey into a confounding world both comically cruel and utterly unusual. Disappointed by unfavorable reactions to his first novel, Sergei pursues the opportunity to become a playwright and sets out to engage the Russian theater scene. While struggling to make ends meet, he confronts marvelously zany characters and scenarios of dreamlike absurdity. And although he battles desperately to hang on, ultimately his fate spirals out of control.

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Taking a break from finals studying, Bwog’s North Pole Bureau Chief Sean Zimmermann reports from the production of “XMAS! 4: Shalom Alone” last night about the story of one little Jewish Santa:

As the audience walked in to Roone, the first thing to notice was the loud dance music filling the auditorium. Lady Gaga, who usually isn’t associated with holiday cheer, was a surprising choice and a stark contrast to the musicians warming up wearing Santa hats. However, “surprising” is indeed a good overall characterization of the musical. Surprising due to its very small budget, surprising due to its limited showings, and surprising due to just how good it turned out to be.

Ollie Klausberg, played by Brian LaPerche, opened the musical by giving a reading from the Torah during his Bar Mitzvah. However, the nervous Ollie wets himself while reading and runs off stage. After being comforted by his pagan friend Amethyst (Emily Feinstein), an elf named Marty (Reni Calister) greets Ollie and informs him that he is the grandson of Santa and needs to travel to the North Pole. Ollie, after some encouragement from Amethyst, agrees.

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In my defense, there is no way I could have known what to expect last night as I entered the Lerner Black Box Theater to see Black Theater Ensemble’s production of Purlie Victorious.  Spiral notebook held high, pencil behind my ear, and grinning insincerely as I am wont to do, I strode into the room and proudly proclaimed that I was the Bwog reviewer—when everyone in the room stopped dead in their tracks to greet me.  Within a minute of taking my seat, the producer and a member of the cast had introduced themselves, excitedly telling me about the Ensemble’s mission and that, despite the fact that I would be alone in the audience, I should feel free to laugh; the play is, after all, a comedy.  Though the dress rehearsal hadn’t yet begun, the energy in the room was palpable, and the friendliness and excitement of the cast and crew was infectious.  I quickly tucked away my pencil and spiral notebook, and a genuine smile broke across my face; “I am an idiot,” I thought.  I tell this story because I strongly recommend that you attend Purlie Victorious, and that you do so without reservations.

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Bill Clinton may be a tough act to follow, but the cast and crew of The Secret Garden seem to be handling the Roone Arledge stage quite well – or at least they’re putting on a good show. Hannah Goldstein reports from the (secret) final dress rehearsal.

You might say the ‘Secret’ is out of the Box: the passing of Columbia Musical Theatre Society’s biannual black box show, has left the Secret Garden as this semester’s main stage production. At their last dress rehearsal before a two-night run, the cast presented a small audience (including Lucy Simon, the composer of the original score, no less) with a somewhat unconventional twist on the old classic. The performance marks the culmination of the Columbia Musical Theater Society’s long proposal and approval process that lead first-time director Mary Jo Holuba, BC ’12, to take on the non-traditional project.

Unlike the story you may remember, the show is more thematic than plot-driven. Holuba emphasized healing as the driving theme by re-envisioning traditionally inert entities as dancing people: ghosts, plants, and exotic memories take on human form and remained a constant force onstage throughout the two-and-a-half hour performance, whether shifting silently in the background or executing wild turns center stage at movements of high tension. The dancing was, for the most part, entrancing, but the presence of the dancers occasionally distracted from what plot action did occur between the speaking characters as they acted out a story about young Mary Lennox, who comes to life after the death of her parents in an unlikely garden at an English estate. Though the set was fairly minimalist and the pit claims a sizeable part of the stage space, the blocking and choreography easily filled the rest of the space, making for an interesting but occasionally overstimulating show, at least in the visual realm. The music, however, was fitting, well-executed, and effective – ironically most noticeably so when the stage was most crowded.

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Last night Sarah Camiscoli attended Bat Boy along with a mob of eager Columbia students that filled Lerner Black Box to the rim. Thankfully, several poor souls abandoned their spots on opening night, offering Bwog a spot in the audience to review the sold out show.

“The way of sin is death, sweetheart,” preaches Jill Shackner, as elf-eared and vampire-fanged Bat Boy Ricky Schweitzer springs into her quaint three-bedroom house. With a brilliant production team and the return of the performing talent of last year’s Varsity Show, the “virgin territory”—as coined by director Nina Pedrad—of this student run production was more than a success. Despite what Nina may claim, it seemed apparent that the cast and production team had been around the block as the cast opened the show with a riveting performance of “Hold Me, Bat Boy.” Before reaching the confines of Lerner Black Box, Bat Boy began as the story of a half-boy, half-bat discovered in cave published on the a 1992 cover of Weekly World News. Soon after, there was a book written by Keythe Farley and Brian Flemming, a musical composed, and thus, the sin of the “Bat Boy” was born.

Set in the farm country of the Deep South that just can’t be “rid of Christian charity,” Bat Boy, cleverly points to the triviality of town elections, the oppressiveness of religious authority, and the overwhelming popularity of cowboy boots. Ricky Schweitzer, Bat Boy or, as Meredith Taylor calls him, “Edgar”, brilliantly unveils the misery of a dysfunctional marriage, the triteness of small town south, and the simplicity of “any twit” receiving a Columbia degree as he evolves from a primitive birdlike creature into a stand up religious man who comes to understand the existential significance of a navel. In the same vein, Remy Zaken, as Bat Boy’s secretly incestuous sister Shelley, enthralled students as she, Jill Shackner, and the live orchestra directed by Evan Johnston revealed the need for a bigger box to accommodate their musical talent in “A Three Bedroom House.”

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Feeling emotionally burdened, Bwog’s Catharsis Bureau Chief, Claire Sabel, sought release last night in CU Players’ production of Sophokles’ Elektra.  And according to her review, the trip was more than worthwhile.

It is one thing to read the great works of Greek drama in Lit Hum, and quite another to bring them to life on stage – but CU Players’ production of Elektra, directed by Brian Bené, is a truly brave attempt at tackling Sophocles’ very difficult tragedy.  Lasting a tightly packed 90 minutes with no intermission, the performance can at times be laborious, but is ultimately extremely rewarding.

As Bené points out, the central themes of Elektra - suffering, loss, revenge, and the desire for justice – are all very modern ones which make the play both extremely accessible and uncomfortably relevant.  Thus, after having read virtually all of its modern translations, CU Players decided to adopt one of the most contemporary versions available – that of Anne Carson, published in 2001. Carson’s Elektra is so desperate and trapped by the fate of her family that the only course of action left to her is to lash out and ‘make noise’; a notable and distinctive feature of this version, as explained in the preface to the play which is helpfully included in the program, is Carson’s decision to transliterate the lamenting shouts of the characters, so that the audience hears “Oimoi!” instead of the expected “Alas!” Read more…

Black Box Correspondent Mark Hay attended last night’s performance of NOMADS’s latest production:

Your correspondent arrived early to last night’s production of “The (Love) Story of Myrtle Willoughby and Willough Myrtleby (and the Neighbors)” to attend its Opening Gala—mainly due to the promise of free food—where I happened to meet Kurt Kanazawa (CC’11), president of NOMADS (New and Original Material Authored and Directed by Students, the group behind the production).  He spoke briefly on his intent to bring the group into more exciting and experimental grounds, such as by adding an element of smell to theater and doing a play in ASL.

Not to sound stodgy, but when artistic undergrads use the word “experimental” to describe their work, red flags go off. I entered the theater with great skepticism, expecting possibly a strangled take on “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” or some long, painful indie experience. To Mr. Kanazawa, and especially to writer Cassandra Adair (BC’12) and director Katie Lupica (CC’11), your reviewer owes you a sincere and profound apology for my doubts. Read more…

Like many of you, last night the staff of the Blue and White attended the 115th Annual Varsity Show, “The Gates of Wrath.”

The Varsity Show should not be, as most people say, about collectively making fun of ourselves and our school. It’s about collectively doing something—anything—together. And last night, at the premiere of the 115th Annual Varsity Show, we spent three hours doing just that. From 8 p.m. to 11 p.m., the hundreds who gathered in Roone for last night’s sold-out performance met a cast of familiar Columbia stereotypes (a dishonest but well-intentioned i-banker, tragically underutilized SCEG types, etc.) as well as those who aren’t such perennial Morningside fixtures (a marriage-crazed debutante, a would-be Broadway star cursed with a gift for physics.) In the past, unrealistic characters have been created with great success in Varsity Shows—recall the ritzy GS character in the 2006 show and the creepy old man who lived in Carman in the 2007 show—but this year, it just happens that they weren’t funny imaginary characters (except for Patrick Blute’s spirited and charismatic portrayal of a megalomaniacal Dean Quigley, who bears little resemblance to the real thing). Enjoyable moments came mostly from minor characters and small quips tossed in, but these moments of hilarity were largely independent from the plot and the characters. Read more…

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Thespian tracker Liz Naiden sends Bwog this dispatch from the spring showing of LateNite Theater, playing tonight and tomorrow at 11 p.m.

As the LateNite crowd stumbled in they may or may not have had time to engage in thoughtful conversation with the giant computer screen projected onto the back wall of Lerner’s Black Box theater.

If they got through their programs at a near sober rate, they probably spent at least 10 minutes watching the “man behind the curtain” typing inside jokes for people in the audience, insulting his own taste in music, and displaying his private AIM conversations.

It only got more absurd from there. Read more…

Bwog contributor Allison Grossman brings us an eyewitness account from the 4th Annual Egg and Peacock, which took place in the Lerner Black Box last night.

If you missed yesterday’s caffeine-fueled theatrical marathon, known as the Egg and Peacock festival, you missed two and a half hours of delightful snuggie references (sleeved blankets, Oprah-style), famous particle colliders, and talking statues. Starting at midnight on Saturday, eight short pieces were written, rehearsed and produced by an 8:00 PM curtain in the Lerner Black Box. The resulting pieces ran the gamut from the hilariously absurd to the eerily dramatic with common threads and themes running throughout. The night’s highlights are as follows:

Waiting for Godot to Shut the Fuck Up, like its namesake, consisted of people sitting around talking about life. The pessimistic Steven, played by Stewart Partin Jon Kaplan, has just finished composing his living will. He mulls over various aspects of life and death, including death by Dunkin Donuts coffee, with friends in his apartment. As their conversation proceeds, snarky pop culture references abound. Although he relies heavily on cultural absurdities for laughs, Adam Nover’s sharp script is delivered with great comedic timing, causing hysterical laughter. It is difficult to forget Sam Klug’s deadpan delivery of, “I’m a cervix man,” or the absurd pantomime of a Lassie-Hellen Keller crossover TV show. Their banter is cut short when Steven chokes on a popcorn kernel and is visited by Death, who informs him that it is not yet his time, and tells him that the true cause of his death will be, as previously suspected, burns from a Dunkin Donuts coffee cup.

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