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TNC'S
AWARD-WINNING STREET THEATER COMPANY ALL PERFORMANCES ARE FREE TO THE PUBLIC!!! Theater for the New City's award-winning Street Theater Company opens its 33rd annual tour August 1 with "Tally Ho!, or Navigating the Future" a rip-roaring musical which will tour City streets, parks and playgrounds throughout the five boroughs through September 13. The production, free to all New Yorkers, has book, lyrics and direction by Crystal Field and musical score composed by David Tice. (Schedule follows at bottom of this document.) ABOUT TNC STREET THEATER ABOUT THE SHOW ABOUT THE AUTHORS In 1971, Ms. Field became a protégé of Robert Nichols, founder of the Judson Poets Theater in Manhattan. It is an interesting historic note that ""The Expressway" by Robert Nichols, directed by Crystal Field (a Street theater satire about Robert Moses' plan for a throughway to run across Little Italy from the West Side Highway to the FDR Drive). It was actually the first production of Joseph Papp's New York Shakespeare Festival. Nichols wrote street theater plays for TNC in its early years, but as time went on, wrote scenarios and only the first lines of songs, leaving Field to "fill in the blanks." When Nichols announced his retirement to Vermont in 1975, he urged Field to "write your own." The undertaking, while stressful at first, became the impetus for her to express her own topical political philosophy and to immerse her plays in that special brand of humor referred to often as "that brainy slapstick." Her first complete work was "Mama Liberty's Bicentennial Party" (1976), in honor of the 200th anniversary of the American Revolution. Field has written and directed a completely new opera for the TNC Street Theater company each successive year. She collaborated for eleven years with composer Mark Hardwick, whose "Pump Boys and Dinettes" and "Oil City Symphony" were inspired by his street theater work with Ms. Field. At the time of his death from AIDS in 1994, he was writing a clown musical with Field called "On the Road," which was never finished. One long-running actor in TNC street theater was Tim Robbins, who was a member of the company for six years in the 1970s, from age twelve to 18. The Village Halloween Parade, which TNC produced single-handedly for the Parade's first two years, grew out of the procession which preceded each Street Theater production. Ralph Lee, who created the Parade with Ms. Field, was chief designer for TNC's Street Theater for four years before the Village Halloween Parade began. Field has also written for TNC's annual Halloween Ball and for an annual Yuletime pageant that was performed outdoors for 2,000 children on the Saturday before Christmas. She has written two full-length indoor plays, "Upstate" and "One Director Against His Cast." She is Executive Director of TNC. Composer David Tice scored last year's street theater production, "It's the Economy Stupid! or The Turning Point." He received a masters degree in composition and piano at the University of Michigan School of Music. For three summers he was repetiteur and choral director at the Jandor International Opera Seminar in Ghent, Belgium. In 1971 he appeared in the very first play ever done at TNC, “Dracula:Sabbat.” Since then, he has been active as a composer in NY experimental theater, composing scores for such shows as “Radio Wisdom” (Richard Foreman), “Owls in the Ivy” (Arthur Williams), “Dead Wrong!” (Jeffrey Herman), “Twenty-four Inches” (Robert Patrick) and “The Tree Artist” (Rosalyn Drexler). All but "Dead Wrong" were presented by TNC; he received ASCAP awards for the last two. Tice has acted in numerous films and television dramas, notably Woody Allen’s “The Purple Rose of Cairo,” in which he appears as a bemused waiter. He has accompanied singers such as Matti Lehtinen, Leyna Gabriele, William McGrath, Dorothy Coulter and Ron Bottcher and accompanies soprano Clamma Dale in the CD “Unforgotten,” which is in current release. Saturday,
August 1st - 2PM - Manhattan Sunday,
August 2nd - 2PM - Manhattan Saturday,
August 8th - 2PM - Manhattan Sunday,
August 9th - 2PM - Brooklyn Friday,
August 14th - 8PM - Brooklyn Saturday,
August 15th - 2PM - Manhattan Sunday,
August 16th - 2PM - Manhattan Saturday,
August 22nd - 2PM - Brooklyn Sunday,
August 23rd - 2PM - Queens Saturday,
August 29th - 2PM - Bronx Sunday,
August 30th - 2PM - Manhattan Saturday,
September 12th - 2PM - Staten Island Sunday,
September 13th - 2PM - Manhattan ABOUT TNC STREET THEATER TNC's STREET THEATER 2008 - IT'S THE ECONOMY, STUPID All Photos by Ariel Hessing |
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