Stone Soup: January 26 at Club Oberon

Brought to you by those two lovely ladies from New Exhibition Room. Stone Soup is their fundraising event. This is the second one they had--the first's proceeds went to producing Shh!! and presenting it for free, as in you don't have to pay you just walk in and maybe give a donation but if you're too broke or too cheap you don't have to.

Tuesday's Stone Soup is to raise money for their next production, Candyland, and to take Shh!! to the New York Fringe Festival.

It's a great night out. Put on your coolest, hippest clothes and get over to Club Oberon.

Tuesday, January 26, 2010
8:00pm - 11:00pm
Club Oberon
2 Arrow Street
Cambridge, MA

Banish those January blues with a hearty dose of our annual potluck feast of the imagination - Stone Soup. Our midwinter theatrical brings together a sampling of local artists creating a healthy helping of musical and theatrical wonders to warm your generous spirits.

What’s in our soup? We’ve brought together the drunken song stylings of The Steamy Bohemians, a pinch of The Movement Workshop Groups’ rock n’ roll meets flamenco piece Wanderlust. Then we’re gonna turn up the heat with the Macabre Cabaret 47 Ways To Die from Aimee Rose Ranger and Veroncia Barron. Then we’re gonna introduce you to The Prions – featuring Chuong Pham, Molly Schreiber and Alex Simoes, and of course we’re gonna spice it nice with UnAmerika’s Sweetheart Karin Webb. And you know who’s stirin’ our pot? The one and only Mary Dolan! Soup’s on people, come and get it!

After the performance stay for dancing! All proceeds from this performance will support our next free original production, Candyland, and the entry of our first show, Shh! into the New York Fringe Festival.

Tickets are $15 in advance, $20 at the door.
Get tix here.

Cool stuff to do this weekend

I don't follow the Patriots, Bruins, Celtics, or Red Sox, don't own a TV, and I have an extremely short attention span. Here are a couple of things that caught my eye that I might be checking out this weekend.

First, buddy Jason will be playing in the Boston Celtic Music Festival. After living in Boston for 29 years, I think I've heard enough Celtic music to last for the rest of my life. Like when I was living in Athens, Ohio, enough of the bluegrass. But something like the BCM will attract the best of the best, there's nothing like watching people at the top of the game who are really passionate about what they're doing. I'll try to hook up with Jason on Saturday. He's backing Kyte MacKillop and Friends.

A. Nora Long, a co-founder of the New Exhibition Room, via Facebook did a shoutout on Bent Wit Cabaret this Sunday at the Oberon Theater in Cambridge. From their site: Every Second Sunday of the month from January through May 2010, Axe To Ice Productions brings you the cabaret to end all cabarets! Find a funny arrangement of ever-changing multimedia artists trying to work out some kind of theme for you... Bawdy, beautiful, delicious, and disastrous- always come expecting the unexpected! Hosted by Mary Dolan and and UnAmeriKa's Sweetheart Karin Webb!

Axe To Ice was created by the two cabaret-producing, gender-bending, clown-like character actors Karin Webb and Jill Gibson. The company seeks to create, support, and produce art that causes an audience to question and to think, to be struck in the moment, and to bring their experiences into action in their own communities.

A bit more: From the team that brought the smashing successes “Mary Dolan Presents…Vaudeville!” and “Boiling Point Burlesque” comes a series so warped and smart it could only be dubbed “Bent Wit”! January 10th marks the premiere of this monthly engagement of variety shows at Club Oberon, each in turn bringing a new theme for our artists to dismantle and put back together, and led by the live House Band, Elephant Tango Ensemble.

And speaking of New Exhibition Room, they'll be presenting another Stone Soup: A Hearty Theatrical on Tuesday, January 26 at Oberon. Get ur tix here.

Don't keep NXR's Shh quiet. Great new theater in Boston.

I checked out Shh!, New Exhibition Room's latest production, free at Playwright's Platform. Go see it, and not just because it's free, which is amazing. Normally you'd be shelling out somewhere around 25 bucks for theater of this caliber.

Shh! examines censorship. It's all, as they say in this Web 2.0 world, original content. NXR auditioned an ensemble and together they collaborated to write and make this show. Original content, to my way of thinking, is the way to go in this world. I mean, do we really need another production of Best Little Whorehouse in Texas? How about breaking some new ground, people?

Shh! is not the end-all word on censorship. I don't think they meant it to be that. Shh! is a series of skits that are very fast-paced, high-energy, and very entertaining with the idea of censorship sometimes obviously and sometimes-not-so obviously holding them together. Sometimes the role of censorship in our society is right out there, as when Shh! lays out the history of censorship in America. And sometimes it's a bit more subtle, as with a series surrounding a nudist, that seem to address the idea of self-censorship. Almost always, though, Shh! goes for the humor, which makes for a very entertaining night. Shock isn't the intent here at all.

Since it is theater and it was written by the cast and producers, Shh!, as you'd expect, has quite the liberal viewpoint toward censorship. Except for one skit where a conservative suburbanite gives a quiet, impassioned, serious argument towards censorship, never does Shh! explore whether censorship has its place in our lives, which might have been an interesting take, given the obvious talent that appears in the show. One wonders what the ensemble, given its obvious intelligence and creativity, would have come up with when challenged with that question.

Bottom line? Go see it, and not just because it's free. At the very least, Shh! is highly entertaining. Prepared to be entertained (there's that word again), and maybe shocked or challenged depending on your own sensibilities.

NXR represents some of the new, younger voices in theater that seem to be growing in the Boston area. Just like years ago when young comics like Jay Leno, Steven Wright, Denis Leary, and Lenny Clark were honing their skills at area clubs and later defined the Boston comic, groups like NXR seem to be doing the same with their performances. If anything, for free, you just might see a bit of Boston theater history in the making.

Shh! is free, but you still need a ticket to get in. Get them here.

New Exhibition Room: Shh!! -- orignal theater in Boston

From Nora Long, one of the founders of New Exhibition Room in Boston.

Hey Everyone I know (pretty much)

I wanted to take this opportunity to personally invite you to my theatre company’s first show. We’ve worked fairly hard over the last 6 weeks to make a quirky, frenetic exploration of censorship. Everything in the show is true or an abstraction of something true, so I think the show is equal parts hilarious and terrifying. There will likely be nudity, gratuitous violence and definitely adult language and content, so this might not be the best show to bring grandma to. It would be great to see you. For those of you who are too far away to come, I thought you might be interested in what I’ve been up to.

Also, it’s free, it’s T-accessible, and there will be cookies afterwards – what more could you ask for in a night at the theatre? Get tix here.

You are, of course, welcome anytime, but it would be particularly awesome to have some friendly faces (and voices) in the house opening weekend (July 9-11). A few members of the press will be coming, so we want to make sure they see the best possible show, which is, in large part do to the audience.

In addition to the show, there will be a reading of a new play each Saturday at 4PM. The writers include John J. King, Theo Goodell and Rachel Kelsey. These readings are also free, and a great opportunity to hear some new work by some of the most talented local writers we know.

Feel free to forward this email around.

Hope to see you there.

Lots of love,
Nora

PS. If you haven’t seen it already, my baby sister made a couple of killer videos of our rehearsals. Check them out.





New Exhibition Room presents Shh!
July 9-25, 2009
http://www.brownpapertickets.com/event/69085