Archive: Arts & Entertainment

Smart Talk SMART TALK
By  Dr. Parley Speake

IF WE DO NOT SUCCEED… I miss Dan Quayle. Having served as Vice President of the United States, he, like most V.P.s, was as soon forgotten as last year’s American Idol runner up, but in these parts, he’s a folk hero.

Here at the Institute for the Linguistically Impaired, we enjoyed using him as a poster boy. He raised awareness of boneheaded language, properly known as cerebroporosis.

One summer, Mayor Luke Johnson invited Quayle to the Underbelly Festival to honor him for his forthrightness and inspiration. And he actually showed up. He didn’t get many of these invitations.

At the gala picnic in Legua Loco County Park at Moot Point, where the River Rio turns south, Mayor Johnson presented a plaque inscribed with his favorite Quayle quotation: If we do not succeed, we run the risk of failure.

Words to live by.

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Kitchen Sink series presents a world premiere production of a new one-act play by local artists:

“Oatmeal and a Cigarette” is the story of Billy, a thirty year-old man who believes he is three. He lives with his “mother,” Claire, who is actually his older brother and who has been caring for him for twenty-seven years. Billy’s babysitter, Jane, a grad student, is trying to get him to want to grow up, leave the apartment and become a self-sufficient independent man. Her efforts are hampered by Claire, who sees the world outside the apartment as a place full of limitless danger.

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June 11, 2007 (ITHACA, NY) – From Wednesday June 13th through Saturday, June 16th, the first of six family-friendly plays will bounce onto the Hangar Theatre stage. The Hangar’s KIDDSTUFF season begins with a modern take on the classic Aesop fable, The Ant & the Grasshopper, showing all four days at 10 am and Noon.

The annual Downtown Ithaca Summer Concert Series, a staple seasonal event on Thursday evenings in downtown Ithaca, kicks off this Thursday, June 7th at the Bernie Milton Pavilion with the Tarbox Ramblers performing their signature alternative primal swamp blues.

This Boston-based band is a staple of Rounder Records, and their 2004 release, A Fix Back East, has been critically acclaimed by Rolling Stone Magazine. In 2001 the band toured with legendary Led Zeppelin front-man, Robert Plant, and in 2002 their self-titled debut CD was featured on the BBC’s list of the year’s top ten albums. Expressing the need to follow the musical traditions of hillbilly music and Delta blues reinterpreted towards the modern world, they have been compared to alt-country favorite Wilco, and are a great match for Ithaca’s music loving crowd.

ITHACA, NY: On June 21, 2007, the Kitchen Theatre Company (KTC) brings its 2006-07 / 16th Season to a close with David Wiltse’s A Marriage Minuet, a comedy about marriage, midlife and the pursuit of art and commerce. Sponsored by Foster Custom Kitchens and Emerson Power Transmission, this play begins with two previews on Thursday June 21st at 7:30pm and Friday, June 22nd at 8:00pm and opens on June 23rd. It closes July 15, 2007.

A womanizing, best-selling pulp novelist, a college professor whose esoteric literary efforts never sell and the women married to these ersatz friends enter a pas de quatre, dancing dangerously around each other with tantalizing and telling results. In the spirit of commedia dell’arte, David Wiltse’s fast-paced comedy explores communication and attraction, letting the audience in on his characters’ deliciously outrageous inner thoughts, which often undercut and contradict what the intended listener hears. Why not change partners and dance with me?

This summer, five professional productions—a hit Broadway drama, two beloved musicals, a world-premiere plucked from the history books, and a comedic send-up of the classics—will make up the Hangar Theatre’s 2007 Mainstage Season. From June 6th to September 2nd, the Hangar will present Doubt, Disney’s Beauty and the Beast, Hair, Bleeding Kansas, and All the Great Books (abridged).

Mystery, suspicion, and uncertainty take center stage as the Hangar Theatre begins its 2007 season with John Patrick Shanley’s Doubt. From June 6th to the 16th the Hangar presents the regional premiere of the award winning play that follows Sister Aloysius as she walks a moral tight-rope between the certainty of her convictions and the nagging possibility that her reservations are misplaced. The fast-paced and intricate script will leave audiences laying blame and switching sides even after they leave the theatre.

Smart Talk SMART TALK
By Dr. Will S. Sert

HUMAN ECOLOGY: We’re happy this phrase hasn’t spread too widely. Maybe we at the Institute for the Linguistically Impaired can help shame it out of existence.

During the early seventies, Earth Day 1 helped beget political correctness. In the heat of idealistic fervor, Bedspring Tech’s Home Economics Department became to Human Ecology Department. Home Ec to Hum Ec.

The Los Libidos academic community was once again comfortably smug. They had seized the magic word, ecology, and made it theirs.

But the new department name has ever since begged the question, since when are humans not part of ecology?

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June 6, 2007 (ITHACA, NY) – The Hangar Theatre announced today—the first day of its 2007 season—that current Artistic Director, Kevin Moriarty, will be leaving the organization when the season ends on September 2nd. Effective September 4th, Moriarty will take over as the new Artistic Director of the Dallas Theatre Center in Dallas, Texas. He will remain Artistic Director at the Hangar throughout the summer and will personally direct two of this season’s mainstage productions: the musical “happening” Hair and the world premiere of Bleeding Kansas.

The decision to leave his post at the Hangar after a successful seven-year tenure was not an easy one for Moriarty. “The opportunity offered to me by the Dallas Theatre Center was simply too great to pass up,” he says. “I’m honored that they’ve selected me as their leader and am thrilled about the opportunities that await me there as I embark on this new journey in my artistic life.” One of the leading regional theatres in the country, DTC produces new, contemporary, and classical plays to an audience of more than 90,000 patrons annually.