Posts from — May 2010

TDF’s Open Doors program graduates its latest group of theatre and dance lovers

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Sahr Nngaujah could very well win a Tony Award for his exceptional performance as Nigerian musician and political activist Fela Kuti in the new Broadway musical Fela!, but on Monday night, a high school student stole his thunder.

While he was making a speech at this year’s graduation ceremony for Theatre Development Fund’s Open Doors Program, Moses Mayungbo, a student at Talent Unlimited High School, asked the crowd if they’d like to see him perform Fela!’s opening monologue. The audience, who was gathered in the auditorium at the Professional Performing Arts School in Manhattan, encouraged him to show what he could do.

For a moment, the kid was Fela, strutting and flirting and boldly announcing his role in history. When he finished, hundreds of people, including students, teachers, and luminaries of theatre and dance, leapt to their feet.

But they weren’t just celebrating his performance. They were celebrating the joy that always accompanies the Open Doors program.

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As you enter Second Stage on 43rd Street, you might get the sensation of being ten blocks south at Madison Square Garden. Hip-hop music booms, glitzy t-shirts are for sale, and a WWE-style wrestling ring sits center stage, all awaiting The Elaborate Entrance of Chad Deity, a new play by Kristoffer Diaz that premiered last year at Chicago’s Victory Gardens Theater and was recently named as finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.

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Welcome to Building Character, TDF’s ongoing series about actors and how they create their roles

As an actor, how do you play someone that you really, really aren’t?

Just ask Lisa Brescia. She’s never been a ruthlessly efficient, slightly vampy assassin who seduces men before injecting them with poison, but that’s the perfect description of Lucy, her character in the the new comedy Killing Women.

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The downtown troupe’s latest show finds a vital use for technology

“At this point, the video projections will go there, across two cabin doors,” says Paul Zimet, founder of the theatre troupe Talking Band and writer-director of their latest show New Islands: Archipelago.

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TDF recently caught up with playwright and actress Claudia Shear, well-known to theatre audiences for Dirty Blonde and for the semi-autobiographical solo show Blown Sideways Through Life. Shear is currently in previews at New York Theatre Workshop with Restoration, about a Brooklyn art restorer who travels to Florence to restore Michelangelo’s David.

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