New York Critic

Of all the holidays’ manifestations of The Nutcracker , Nutcracker Rouge , from Company XIV and AMDM Productions, has to be one of the most delicious! Ballet with pasties and thongs! There are a lot of other features as well – modern dance, tap, song, gymnastics, burlesque… It’s racy, risqué, delightful, a Nutcracker like no other. The dance centers on Marie Claire, danced by Laura Careless, who receives a gift of the familiar nutcracker. We watch as she passes through a series of scenes, a riff on The Nutcracker , combining high culture and pop culture. We hear The Waltz of the Flowers and The Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy , but we also hear We’ve Got your Love To Keep Us Warm (Irving Berlin’s I've Got My Love To Keep Me Warm ) and the barbershop song Lollipop (“ Lollipop, Lollipop, Oh Lolli-Lolli-Lolli Lollipop”). Not to mention the scatting! The production is conceived, choreographed and directed by Austin McCormick. He keeps things moving deftly through the various ...

Trish Harnetiaux’ play How to Get into Buildings jumps around in time – backward and forward (of course). New Georges produced it recently at The Brick in Brooklyn. The main story – it’s not a plot, really – concerns a motivational speaker, Roger, who meets a woman, Lucy, at a convention center where he’s speaking. Her distinguishing characteristic is that she gets call-back phone calls from a new age psychic. The second story is even more insubstantial, merely a portrait of a couple who end up, for some reason, in a duel with each other, pistols in hand. The play is set in several locations – a roadside where there’s a car accident, a conference center where Roger meets Lucy, a restaurant where the partnered couple exchange resentful banter. There are a few other places, ill-defined, and the final duel seems to take place nowhere in particular. The set consists of red curtains and some folding chairs leaning against the wall. The script is enormously creative. In this ...