Maxamoo’s Hot List: Beyond Broadway in May
A preview of what we’re looking forward to beyond Broadway in New York City theater this month.
Fly By Night is a romantic musical about a melancholy sandwich maker and two sisters during the Northeast blackout of 1965. It has a great cast, featuring Adam Chanler-Berat (Peter and the Starcatcher), Patti Murin (Love’s Labour’s Lost, Lysistrata Jones), and Allison Case (Hair, Hands on a Hardbody). Performances start May 16th and it officially opens at Playwrights Horizons on June 10th. Hear more about it on this week’s Maxamoo podcast.
Funny…Sheesh Productions and Ivy Theatre Company present two productions, in rep, at Tada Theater, starting May 24, 2014. The Feminism of a Soft Merlot or (How the Donkey Got Punched) by Michelin Auger explores female sexuality via two friends – the sexually-adventurous Kareena, who tries her hand at monogamy, and the sexually-inhibited Sam, who experiments in a relationship with a pornographer. Doubles Crossed: The Ballad of Rodrigo by Jason S. Grossman reimagines the film noir crime dramas of the 1940s and 1950s and recent neonoir films, such as Memento and L.A. Confidential. It includes all of the classic detective story elements: mobsters, cops, and a femme fatal.
A Fable at Cherry Lane Theatre is an epic play about the adventures of an idealistic man and the characters he meets on a journey to right a long-forgotten wrong. It is written by David Van Asselt, the co-founder and artistic director of Rattlestick Playwrights Theater, with music by Elizabeth Swados, and directed by Daniel Talbott, the literary manager at Rattlestick. Performances begin May 3 and it officially opens May 22nd. Hear more about it on this week’s Maxamoo podcast.
Jane the Plain by August Schulenburg is a world premiere presented by Flux Theatre Ensemble. Jane the Plain, a simple high school girl, suddenly becomes popular following an encounter with a mysterious goddess. When a second god appears, the battle for high school social status gets mixed with a much larger, cosmic, battle. Performances begin May 9th at the 4th Street Theatre. Hear more about it on this week’s Maxamoo podcast.
Dubbed as a “radical performance community,” Reverend Billy and the Stop Shopping Choir are activist-performers who target big banks and big agriculture for their contributions to climate change. Reverend Billy and his choir are appearing at Joe’s Pub at The Public Theater on Sundays at 2 pm starting May 4th. The theme of the performance is the extinction of honeybees. Hear more about it on this week’s Maxamoo podcast.
Public Studio is a new program from The Public Theater dedicated to staging new plays. Importantly, the tickets to these plays are only $10 each. The first two productions are The Urban Retreat by A. Zell Williams, about a failed writer who is hired to write a biography for a famous rapper, and Manahatta by Mary Kathryn Nagle, about a Native American woman who reconnects with her ancestral land when she moves to New York to work as a banker.