Lesbian.com : Connecting lesbians worldwide | theatre

Lesbian Love Octagon is back on stage

Sidney — Wed, 05 Jun 2013 12:00:46 +0000

(Photo: Liz Liguori)

BY STEPHANIE SCHROEDER
Curve

With songs such as “Ubiquitous Ex-Girlfriend,” “Butch on the Inside” and “Vibration Salvation,” the musical play “Lesbian Love Octagon” captures the high-energy activism and collective consciousness of lesbian culture in the late 1990s. Set in a “wimmin’s” bookstore on the Lower East Side of New York City, a lesbian bar in Park Slope, Brooklyn, and other lesbian hotspots in and around New York City, the “Lesbian Love Octagon” reprise is sure to become an off-off Broadway sensation if its sold-out limited run in 2010 is any indication. The re-tooled musical will go live this June for a month’s worth of theatrical performances in New York City, with high hopes of subsequent runs in Los Angeles and San Francisco.

Filled with references to ’90s cultural markers such as women’s studies, radical feminism and “Bitch Magazine,” iconic musicians Ani DiFranco, Kathleen Hanna, and Sleater-Kinney, and with an ode to the ’90s online dating site PlanetOut.com aptly titled “WWWDOT”, “Lesbian Love Octagon” covers a lot of lush lesbian herstory. “Where else can you find lesbians on stage singing about Adrienne Rich… and falling in love with a girl?” Kressal asks.

“Lesbian Love Octagon” will run June 5th – 29th at the Kraine Theater, 85 E 4th Street in NYC. For more information, log onto www.lesbianthemusical.com

Spring to Action: Gay youth, city officials team up for theater project

Sidney — Sat, 20 Apr 2013 18:00:27 +0000

BY GLENNISHA MORGAN
Huffington Post Gay Voices

A three-day festival will use live theater to prompt policy change as lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer (LGBTQ) homeless youth perform plays inspired by their own challenges and are joined onstage by city officials, professional actors and audience members to identify legislative solutions. The festival titled “Spring to Action Festival 2013” is the brainchild of Theatre of the Oppressed NYC (TONYC).

The festival takes place May 17-19, 2013 at the Church of Saint Luke in the Fields located in Greenwich Village. There will be performances created by ensembles from The Hetrick-Martin Institute, The Ali Forney Center andThe Door.”There’s going to be lots of music and dancing with the actors,” Katy Rubin, the troupe’s founding artistic director, said.

Cindy McCain to play lesbian in pro-gay play

Sidney — Wed, 10 Apr 2013 14:00:08 +0000

Meghan, left, and Cindy McCain pose for the NoH8 campaign

BY JEANETTE OBALDIA
dot429

Cindy McCain has kept a low profile since her husband, Senator John McCain, ran for president in 2008, but she’s stepping back into the spotlight in a most surprising way. She will be starring in Phoenix’s production of “8,” a pro-LGBT play depicting the story of Prop 8 in California. The play was created by LGBT activist Dustin Lance Black, who won Academy Awards in screenwriting for Milk.

As if starring in the liberal play wasn’t enough, McCain will play a lesbian alongside Nicole Stanton, wife of Phoenix Mayor Greg Stanton. The two will play the couple, Kris Perry and Sandra Stier, who are plaintiffs in the famous case against Proposition 8.

Dyke drama (really)! ‘Lesbian Love Octagon’ hits NY

Sidney — Fri, 25 Jan 2013 16:00:22 +0000

BY SID MARCH
Lesbian.com

Tuesday nights are good nights to talk about lesbian theater. There’s not much else going on in the hipster town of Hudson, a small city on the river a couple hours north of New York, where “Lesbian Love Octagon” creator Kimberlea Kressal and her wife live. I meet Kressal in what seems to be an unassuming winebar, dark and empty save the trio of 20-somethings who arrive in flamboyant outfits, top hats and all. It’s fitting. We are here to talk theater, aren’t we?

She gives me a slick looking CD. The cover is black and pink with hot cast members (some wearing glasses almost great as Kressal’s own rhinestone-studded retro-chic pair) crowded into a bar. This CD is like queer theater geek gold, packed with demo tracks from “The Lesbian Love Octagon: A Musical Comedy About Dyke Drama.” Filled with catchy, classic Broadway style showtunes, music penned by Will Larche, it’s like a blast from Broadway past – only the topics are indisputably and most delightfully modern-day gay.

“The Lesbian Love Octagon,” aka Lesbian The Musical, is about a group of eight friends (seven lesbians, one transguy: a web of exes and exes’ exes) set in late 90s New York City. The show has been a long time in the works: Kressal started writing in 2001 and Larche got involved shortly after. In 2009, after multiple stops and starts, the long anticipated, first staged reading was held at the WOW Cafe, a Lower East Side black box theatre with heavy ties to the lesbian community. A month later, there was an encore at Dixon Place during Hot Fest, and by 2010, the crew had nailed a four night run at the Kraine Theater, one of the numerous theater hotspots crowded onto East Fourth Street. More than a decade after its conception, Kressal and company are ready for the big time. “The Lesbian Love Octagon” is scheduled to run at the Kraine again this June 5 – 29, its closing night coinciding with the date of NYC’s annual Dyke March.

Running a lesbian musical comedy in New York City during Pride is, potentially, brilliant. Countless queer tourists, a media focus on LGBTQ events in the city and a community out in droves to take in the best of the best: if that’s not a formula for some time in the spotlight, what is?

“People always say lesbians don’t go to the theater but 76% of theater-goers are women and all lesbians are women. If they’re not coming, it’s because there are no stories about them. How many times do you want to go watch stories that don’t include you?” Kressal asks. She acknowledges, too, the importance of pushing to have our own stories told. “Strangers have already emailed me saying they’re coming to New York just to see the show. They know that where they live, something like this isn’t going to happen.”

With three major LGBTQ-oriented shows, “Five Lesbians Eating a Quiche,” “Forever Dusty” and “Hit the Wall” currently buzzing in NYC, now could be the perfect time to pitch a viable lesbian Off-Broadway show, but it won’t be cheap. Even teamed up with Horse Trade Theater Group and Wreckio Ensemble, Kressal herself still has to raise $25,000 for the June run. During the week following the demo release party at the Dalloway on January 29, the cast will be shooting a music video for the song “Drink to Being Single,” and then a special video for their IndieGogo page, filmed at – where else? – Henrietta Hudson. Despite all previous performances being sold out and the excitement brewing in New York’s lesbian social circles, there is still a lot to be done.

“America is ready to embrace gay characters and stories. There’s room for us both as story tellers and as subjects in art and theater.” Kressal notes that gay men have been heavily present, and often visible, in theater for the last couple decades, but commercially, lesbian is “new.” Plus, she reminds me, as we break from our work-talk to order more wine in treacherously tall stemmed glasses, lesbians are fiercely loyal to their community. We aren’t going to let this potential piece of history just slip through the cracks, are we?

“The Lesbian Love Octagon” Demo Release Party will be held at the Dalloway (525 Broom St., NYC), owned by celesbians Kim Stolz and Amanda Leigh Dunn, on Tuesday January 29 from 6-9. A donation of any size gets you a copy of the demo CD. Put on your snazziest specs and grab your girlfriend, your ex and her ex, too. This is a party not to be missed!

The post Dyke drama (really)! ‘Lesbian Love Octagon’ hits NY first appeared on Lesbian.com.

Lesbian takes center stage in “Letter to Harvey Milk”

candy — Thu, 20 Dec 2012 10:05:58 +0000

Leslie Kritzer in “Letter to Harvey Milk”

BY LAUREN LOGIUDICE
Curve

You may assume that with a title like “Letter to Harvey Milk,” the main arc of this play would center around a gay male character, most obviously Harvey Milk, but this musical thwarts convention and presents us with a story about an intergenerational friendship between a butcher and a teacher. That one of the characters in that equation is an out lesbian writing teacher named Barbara Katsef (played by Leslie Kritzer) is beside the point; there is more to this dame than her pink-triangle shirt. Barbara is a refreshingly fully-formed character who happens to be gay. Not surprisingly, with earnest, genuine characters, “Letter to Harvey Milk,” directed by David Schechter, has universal appeal. In fact, it came away from this year’s New York Musical Theater Festival with five honors, one being the Most Promising Musical award.

Laura I. Kramer, composer; Ellen M. Schwartz, lyricist; and Jerry James, book writer, demonstrated a formula for how get a lesbian character into a mainstream production: make the character choice an organic one (no pun intended). The musical began its journey at the prestigious BMI Lehman Engel Musical Theater Workshop, a program for new musicals from which has sprung many of the great Broadway smash hits, including “Ragtime,” “Avenue Q,” and “A Chorus Line.” During the second year of BMI Kramer picked up the lesbian-themed short story collection “Letter to Harvey Milk” by Leslea Newman and started writing songs based on a story idea inspired by the book. Schwartz was interested in collaborating from this early point.

‘One Night with Janis Joplin’ paints compelling portrait of the Queen of Rock ‘n’ Roll

candy — Fri, 28 Sep 2012 11:58:10 +0000

BY JOEY DIGUGLIELMO
Washington Blade

Classic rock fans love pondering what might have become of the greats had they lived. If you really know the history and their personalities, informed prognosticating on what might have been likely makes for great barstool conversation.

For Janis Joplin, it’s hard to say. With a woman so known for her give-it-everything — detractors called it histrionic — delivery, what kind of singer and performer would she have become had she not ODed in 1970?