what are your top 5 theater experiences since you moved to nyc? or the most memorable for whatever reason.
Oh wow good question! These are the first 5 that came to mind, so, in no particular order:
Cromer’s Our Town. It’s so odd that I have a vivid memory of sitting on a rock outside the theater, eating ice cream and watching the pride parade, and then going into Our Town and the mood in the theater was just so loving. And then they revealed the kitchen and I can’t even explain how amazing it was for the show to have been one thing all along and then suddenly slam you into something else.
YOUARENOWHERE at 3 Legged Dog. 3LD is GREAT with mixing theater and tech, but I’d never seen it combined in such a way that we were all chattering and confused and had to get everyone we knew to see it. Also Andrew Schneider whispered in my ear because I “looked interesting” and I will treasure that forever.
Hamilton at The Public. I know it sounds like a cop-out but we saw it the second week of previews at The Public. So there was next-to-no information out there, very few people had seen it yet, so we went in basically blind. And by the time we hit “My Shot” there was just this energy that we were seeing something really really special.
My first night at Too Much Light Makes the Baby Go Blind. I was a little underage kid hanging out at the punk club when I was in high school, and going to TML felt like that all over again. Then my boyfriend got dragged onstage to slow-dance with Dylan Marron. And I wanted to go back again and again.
Circle Mirror Transformation was the show that got me interested in Annie Baker, and then the rest of 13P. The theme here seems to be “I didn’t know theater could do THAT,” and CMT, which I expected to be the typical self-referential actor bullshit type of theater we see from time to time, somehow transcended all of that and was somehow about nothing and everything at the same time. The final scene of that play is still one of the finest bits of acting/staging/dialogue coming together I’ve maybe ever seen.
