#verbatim-performance

#verbatim-performance

The point of cinematic realism is the inner life, and the miracle of movies is their power to portray subjectivity, though few filmmakers manage to attain that power—even despite their best efforts.

Matthew Macfadyen started his career in a 1998 TV film adaptation of Wuthering Heights as Hareton Earnshaw, Heathcliff's whipped dog, and has been giving us brilliant incarnations of beta cucks ever since.

Under the ABS challenge system, a team begins each game with two challenges. If a player gets an umpire's call overturned, their team retains the challenge. In effect, this means a team has unlimited challenges until they get two wrong.

"Cinematic Immunity" offers a workers'-eye view of Hollywood on the Hudson, revealing the intricate dynamics of filmmaking in New York City from 1954 to 9/11.

I started in stand-up because it felt like the most direct way to connect with people. There's no filter. You go on stage, and you find out very quickly if something works. That shaped everything for me. It forced me to be honest. If you're not honest, the audience knows. That idea still drives how I work today.

The illicit thrill of hidden desires definitely propels Night Stage, a riveting queer noir about an up-and-coming actor Matias and an aspiring politician Rafael who begin hooking up in public spaces.

Molochnikov, who is 33, tall, and good-looking in the Jonathan Groff vein, greeted the audience the night I saw Seagull, personally thanking us for coming to see what he called 'my story.'

The thing is an almost-four-hour-long continuous explosion - actors dancing, grappling, and hurling furniture; the director present onstage ripping pieces out of the set; paint and blood and flowers and feathers everywhere.

I landed Oct. 5, and we started work Oct. 6, so it was like jump straight in. And when it's your day off, it's like, 'OK, I just need to shop and clean and relax.' Nearly six months in, the actor is slowly familiarizing himself with New York neighborhood by neighborhood, including the West Village, which he says he recently explored with his girlfriend.

Manic Street Creature is gig theatre in its purest form. Kirsty Patrick Ward (The Rat Trap) directs a story about a musician breaking onto the London scene, told as a musical set. Olivier Award-winner Maimuna Memon (Standing at the Sky's Edge) leads a tour-de-force about young love, creative ambition and mental health.

Anyone who spends untold hours surfing the Web for humorous content will eventually find the work of one Vladimir Shmondenko, a prankster who goes by the name Anatoly. He's developed a faithful following, and, as far as I can tell, makes a comfortable living entirely from his TikTok and YouTube videos.

Worries, fears, hang-ups, and desires are translated through highly skilled puppetry, as interview scenes cast puppet couples talking about their sex lives. Written by Mark Down of Blind Summit, a cohort of exceptional makers and puppeteers expanding the definition of a puppet, this collaboration with the UK's National Survey of Sexual Attitudes and Lifestyles pulls from real-life conversations to get puppets talking dirty.

Spalding Gray used to perform a show called Interviewing the Audience. The celebrated monologist would invite a stranger he had met in the lobby to join him on stage. Through a sequence of innocuous questions, he would get them to open up about their lives. At one performance, a guest broke the audience's hearts by talking about her daughter's murder. At benefit nights, people living with HIV shared their tales. Other times, the anecdotes would be eccentric or amusing.