July 8 - 25; Wednesday - Saturday, at 8:00 pm.
Tickets are: $20, available at 212-409-8662 or ordinarytheater.com.
Twelve21 is located at 12 West 21st Street, between 5th & 6th Avenues (accessible from the F train at 23rd Street).
After a sold out workshop production at the Sage Theater this past winter, The Kraine Theater presents the World Premiere of THANK YOU FOR BEING A FRIEND: THE MUSICAL. This unauthorized musical parody inspired by the beloved TV sitcom "The Golden Girls," features book by Nick Brennan, lyrics by Luke Jones and music by Jeff Thomson. Previews began May 24 with opening night on May 31. Following weeks of sold-out houses, three weeks have been added to the limited run.
In THANK YOU FOR BEING A FRIEND: THE MUSICAL, four women over 60 (Blanchette, the varicose-veined vixen; Dorthea, the brainy ball-buster; Roz, the lovable airhead; and Sophie, the wisecracking spitfire) are spending their golden years together in a bungalow in Miami. But when gay pop superstar Lance Bass moves next door, his loud outdoor sex parties keep the quartet of cheesecake-loving retirees awake. The solution pits the gays against the girls at the annual Shady Oaks Retirement Home Talent Show: if the women win, then no more sex parties; if the gays garner top prize, the sassy seniors must serve as the party's clean-up crew. Singing, dancing and hilarity ensues!
This wholly unauthorized parody features original music plus parodies of songs from your favorite Broadway musicals including Dreamgirls, Chicago and 9 to 5. Directed by Nick Brennan, the production stars Lavinia Draper (Therapy Thursdays), Chad Ryan, Nick Brennan (Facts of Life: The Lost Episode), Brad Loekle (Sirius XM Radio's Morning Jolt), Jody Wood and Luke Jones with choreography by Justin Wingenroth and design by Luke Jones.
The magic of the theater lives onÑthe unspoken contract that Wilder, and Polin, make explicit. It's about all of us gathered in a dark room, agreeing to imagine that the cardboard and tinfoil are real, in a way the real real world can't begin to match." -- Valley Advocate (Northampton, MA)
Inspired by Thornton Wilder's 1938 drama of everyday existence, The Ordinary Theater will present the World Premiere of THE JOYS OF FANTASY. Playwright/director Mitchell Polin re-mixes Wilder's classic ideas with literary, theatrical, musical and visual arts innovations to create a wholly original theater experience. This site-specific multimedia production will be presented for a limited engagement beginning July 8 at Twelve21, an 8,000 square foot event space in Chelsea.
THE JOYS OF FANTASY is the story of one woman's search for independence. Grover's Corners has been terrorized and its inhabitants are working to survive as their lives have been thrust into the 21st century. Under the guidance of a narrator, THE JOYS OF FANTASY engages acts of gratuitous violence, imagination, memory, love, and sacrifice as the ironic billboards left over from the industrial garbage heap of the twentieth century. It creates a stage experience that approximates watching life go by with a remote in your hand.
THE JOYS OF FANTASY stars Kim Brandt, Michael Cross Burke, Caroline Gart, Teri Incampo, Claire Kavanah and Scott Troost with video by Jenks Whittenburg and Griffin Richardson, set design by Elisa Griego, lighting by Blu, and original music by Tungsten74.
The Ordinary Theater, founded in New York in 1998, uses non-narrative structures to explore theoretical issues of performance. Merging multiple styles into collages that mimic the pace and structure of a television remote, Ordinary Theater remixes found texts, improvisational music, mimetic and non-mimetic acting, and real-time video to create theater that challenges contemporary media perceptions and realities. The Ordinary Theater has performed in New York, Philadelphia, Los Angeles, Moscow and elsewhere, and now resides in Northampton, Massachusettes. Past productions have been inspired by Faust, A Doll's House, The Adding Machine and Finnegan's Wake. THE JOYS OF FANTASY was originally presented in April 2009 at The Northampton Academy of Music under the title Our Town Revisited.
Mitchell Polin, artistic director of the Ordinary Theater, is a NYC-based director and playwright whose work focuses on the notion of the "re-mix" as a formalized theatrical tool of process and structure. Falling somewhere between "Happenings," rituals and rock concerts, his works combine live music, song, video, found texts, movement, and storytelling into a fluid landscape of performance. His directed works have appeared at LaMama, Stella Adler Conservatory, Bank Street Theater, Joyce Soho, and Philadelphia Fringe Festival, among others.