The Nostalgicks
Mar. 31st, 2003 10:08 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
magidFriday (and Saturday) night Industrial Theatre put on a production they called The Nostalgicks (not knowing the show The Fantasticks, I don't know if they used anything other than the vague reference to the show). All I knew going in was that it was a free thing they'd made up.
I arrived at the Old Leverett Library to find it wasn't in the space they'd used for the last production, but the mirror room to that. Still a flight of stairs down, but the rest looked different. Some of that was due to how the room was set up, with little tables and small lights hanging over those, a guy off to one side playing the guitar and singing. It felt rather like a cafe or something, not a theater. There was a raised place in front, in front of the huge walk-in fireplace on one wall. That had a stool and a music stand sort of podium on it, and that was that.
There weren't any tables free when I arrived, and I wasn't sure about sharing a table, either, since I wasn't sure if seats were saved for other people, etc. I wasn't going to be having snacks anyway, so I grabbed a folding chair from the side of the room, chose a place with good sightlines to set it up. Coincidentally, I saw Satan (well, at least, the actor who played him in 7 x 7) at the next table.
The songs ended, and there was an intro, so we finally got to find out what the show was. It turned out to be original songs by the guitar-player in between read pieces by some of the actors. In general, I thought the songs pleasant, but nothing particularly special or gripping, so I was more interested in the spoken word pieces. Each of them were about turning points of some sort in their lives, worked up into a piece ("story" doesn't feel like the right word) a couple of pages long, and read aloud. Sort of a cross between WWD and a story-reading. Since all the readers were actors as well, the pieces were read very well, with a good feel for the timing.
The first piece was called "Mud in My Eye" (I think), about being a younger brother, and how, once in particular, things played out when his brother didn't (as expected) break wind on him, but did something rather more... obviously productive from that end of him. I was rather surprised by the whole piece, which everyone else seemed to find hysterically funny; I think I'm not as appreciative as most of bathroom humor. Still, it was well written, and not bad at all, just not as funny as everyone else seemed to think.
The second piece was "Portrait", which was more surreal than the other pieces, about the different colors a girl saw the people and pets in her life, the colors she put on her portrait to portray these pieces. Lots of pet dogs. It was more of a mood piece, I thought, than a turning point. It was my least favorite of the ones I heard.
The next piece was to have been the one other woman performing that night, but it was skipped: the actor had been put on bed rest for the remaining 1.5 weeks until the baby is likely to arrive...
"Six Stupid Things I Did in New York" was about a theater guy out of college moving to New York (from Massachusetts), and finding work off Broadway... running the theater in a private school in Riverdale, which, technically, was a couple of blocks off Broadway :-). He learned a lot during that job, including how there can be small communities within the hugeness of NYC, such as around certain small Irish pubs. Fun, well-read.
And the last piece was really great, "Plain Street". It's about when the guy first saw pictures of breasts, when he was in third grade and he and his pals were walking along Plain Street (a street where anything could happen, since it had all sorts of shops, etc) and found a magazine. Really well done, very funny.
A short show, but interesting. Sounds like I missed a really good WWD, though; hard choices...
I arrived at the Old Leverett Library to find it wasn't in the space they'd used for the last production, but the mirror room to that. Still a flight of stairs down, but the rest looked different. Some of that was due to how the room was set up, with little tables and small lights hanging over those, a guy off to one side playing the guitar and singing. It felt rather like a cafe or something, not a theater. There was a raised place in front, in front of the huge walk-in fireplace on one wall. That had a stool and a music stand sort of podium on it, and that was that.
There weren't any tables free when I arrived, and I wasn't sure about sharing a table, either, since I wasn't sure if seats were saved for other people, etc. I wasn't going to be having snacks anyway, so I grabbed a folding chair from the side of the room, chose a place with good sightlines to set it up. Coincidentally, I saw Satan (well, at least, the actor who played him in 7 x 7) at the next table.
The songs ended, and there was an intro, so we finally got to find out what the show was. It turned out to be original songs by the guitar-player in between read pieces by some of the actors. In general, I thought the songs pleasant, but nothing particularly special or gripping, so I was more interested in the spoken word pieces. Each of them were about turning points of some sort in their lives, worked up into a piece ("story" doesn't feel like the right word) a couple of pages long, and read aloud. Sort of a cross between WWD and a story-reading. Since all the readers were actors as well, the pieces were read very well, with a good feel for the timing.
The first piece was called "Mud in My Eye" (I think), about being a younger brother, and how, once in particular, things played out when his brother didn't (as expected) break wind on him, but did something rather more... obviously productive from that end of him. I was rather surprised by the whole piece, which everyone else seemed to find hysterically funny; I think I'm not as appreciative as most of bathroom humor. Still, it was well written, and not bad at all, just not as funny as everyone else seemed to think.
The second piece was "Portrait", which was more surreal than the other pieces, about the different colors a girl saw the people and pets in her life, the colors she put on her portrait to portray these pieces. Lots of pet dogs. It was more of a mood piece, I thought, than a turning point. It was my least favorite of the ones I heard.
The next piece was to have been the one other woman performing that night, but it was skipped: the actor had been put on bed rest for the remaining 1.5 weeks until the baby is likely to arrive...
"Six Stupid Things I Did in New York" was about a theater guy out of college moving to New York (from Massachusetts), and finding work off Broadway... running the theater in a private school in Riverdale, which, technically, was a couple of blocks off Broadway :-). He learned a lot during that job, including how there can be small communities within the hugeness of NYC, such as around certain small Irish pubs. Fun, well-read.
And the last piece was really great, "Plain Street". It's about when the guy first saw pictures of breasts, when he was in third grade and he and his pals were walking along Plain Street (a street where anything could happen, since it had all sorts of shops, etc) and found a magazine. Really well done, very funny.
A short show, but interesting. Sounds like I missed a really good WWD, though; hard choices...