If the story in my head is accurate, it goes that Toadies frontman Todd Lewis was raised by religious zealots and punished in tiny closets and other frightening Ingmar Bergman scenes. Achieving adulthood Lewis escaped the house with his heart and brain – if not his soul – on fire. Fleeing to some place in Texas he started a band, they wrote a song whose meaning nobody could totally comprehend – or at least explain to me – and everyone said was about vampires. A friend summarizes Rubberneck with a chuckle: I am angry and I don’t love Jesus.
Read full work »

The Vagabond Theatre Ensemble presents The Wendy Complex by Jeremy Bloom at the Access Theater, 380 Broadway, April 3-6.

The Vagabond Theatre Ensemble’s “inaugural production” was a play entitled The Wendy Complex which was performed seven times between April 3–6. The Access Theater, “on” Broadway but in Tribeca, was up four flights of stairs; then was found a large space made small by audience seating, which enveloped all but one corner of the room for the play’s production. The Theater’s stage was itself given a feeling of limitless (or expanding) dimension by a series of hanging cords of bulbs (like enormous fly traps) forming two walls for players to escape an ongoing scene but not the eye of the audience. One hopes the deft Ensemble’s proceeding productions will not escape this eye, either.
Read full work »