Entrepreneur, director, actress, mime, author and theatre owner CHERYL KING is moving her acclaimed STAGE LEFT STUDIO to Chelsea. The new address of the STUDIO is 214 West 30th Street between 7th and 8th Avenues. On the sixth floor.
The inaugural production will be Irish author/performer ED MALONE'S highly acclaimed "THREE IRISH WIDOWS versus THE REST OF THE WORLD" which opens on Thursday, September 9th as part of this year's 1st Irish Festival.
STAGE LEFT STUDIO opened at its origin
Al West 37th Street address in January of 2006 where Ms. King produced and/or directed over 200 nights of theatre annually, five nights a week, forty weeks a year including three of the city's most successful Festivals (The Left Out Festival, The Women At Work Festival and The Mama Drama Festival).
Her own show "FORBIDDEN KISS" has been selling out monthly for over five years.
She is currently developing a new two-character comedy with TC Corwin entitled "THE DUBBERS" about two voiceover artists who meet at the film studio where they have been hired to dub foreign sex films in English. The show's developmental readings have become sold-out events.
Ed Malone's "THREE IRISH WIDOWS versus THE REST OF THE WORLD" will run through September 17th.
"THREE IRISH WIDOWS versus THE REST OF THE WORLD" will never play in Cork City, County Cork, Ireland. NEVER. That's where Mrs. Malone, author/performer Ed Malone's mother lives. This is a play about Mrs. Malone, her sister and her sister-in-law, three Irish widows, the men that got them that way and what the widows did with their newfound freedom. Of the thirty-four (34) characters
Mr. Malone plays at hyper-space-break-neck speed, the three widows are the triangle of hypnotic focus throughout the evening. Not that his
Michael Jackson isn't stunning. He is. Or the tree he portrays isn't convincing. It is. But it is the three widows declaration of independence that shakes the world and kidnaps an audience. Their names are MAURA, BREDA and MARGARET. They live in Ireland because that is where they were born. During the 80's and the 90's they existed for their husbands. They cooked for their husbands. They cleaned, shopped, organized and entertained for their husbands. And sometime between the husbands beating them, ignoring them and taking them for granted; the husbands died; two of cancer and one driving drunk into the tree Ed Malone so convincingly plays at the top of the show. The widows arranged the funerals then they arranged to go to Pat, the hairdresser, Tony, the travel agent and to America to find some real men. What happened to the widows in America is the stuff of which great shows are spun.
Ed Malone, actor, writer and clown, was born in Cork City in southern Ireland. He obtained diplomas in theater performance and improvisation from the London College of School and Music. In 2005 he attended the prestigious Ecole Jacques Lecoq in Paris, France. the following year he trained for one year with the legendary french clown Philippe Gaulier, completing an intensive diploma in performance encompassing clowning, expressive masks, acrobatics, and mime. Gaulier is best know in America as the man who trained the English clown Sacha bara cohen (the creator of 'Bruno' and 'Borat') Ed's first solo show, The Self Obsessed Tragedy of Ed Malone, was a huge national success in Ireland, touring the country to great acclaim, The Irish Times described it as 'The theatrical highlight of 2006' This play was later performed along with its sequel The Self Obsessed Tragedy of Ed Malone Chapter 2 , to sell out runs in New York City at Stage Left Studios in March 2009. Ed's third solo piece The Three Irish Widows Versus the Rest of the World is currently receiving critical and cult acclaim (nytheatre.com: 'Do yourself a favor go see this play!') Ed is in the process right now of adapting the play for film.
Cheryl King is the owner, and artistic and managing director, of Stage Left Studio, the only solo show repertory theatre in NYC. She was resident acting coach at All My Children, the Emmy-winning daytime drama at ABC, from 2007-2010. Her performance background includes multiple careers, in vaudeville/burlesque, mime, 13 years in standup comedy and 15 years in theatre in NYC. Her internationally acclaimed solo show, "not a nice girl", has had runs Off-Broadway in NYC, in Los Angeles and Ft. Collins, CO. Her television credits include ABC's 20/20, and Faking It on TLC, in an episode that was also featured on Oprah!
She created and performs in Forbidden Kiss, an erotica series with a cast of 8 artists, and regular guest stars, all who contribute original material. This celebrated show has been running at Stage Left for five years, and won for Stage Left the title "New York's Best Sexy Theatre" from the Village Voice. In 2010, her theater was featured in tdf "Stages" and the NY Times referred to her as "the matriarch of the Off-Off Broadway solo scene." Back Stage commissioned her to write an article on the craft of acting in a solo show for their April 2010 edition.
She formed her own
Production Company, Cheryl King Productions, in 2000, and has produced several acting retreats, over 300 showcases, and three years of V-Day events. She is the creator of the Left Out Festival, an annual festival of gay performance art, which has been presented since 2008, and is a benefit for Bailey House and GMHC. For her work in promoting gay performance, she was chosen as one of the 100 Women We Love in GO Magazine's June 2008 Annual Pride Issue. In November 2008 she was chosen "Person of the Year" by nytheatre.com. She also created the Women At Work Festival, which will have its fourth year at Stage Left in October 2010, and which contributes funds to Friends of Niger, the Young Girls Scholarship Fund. Ms. King has curated solo shows for the Estrogenius Festival at ManhattanTheatreSource since 2005. In October 2010 she will inaugurate the Mama Drama Festival, a festival of theater about mothers, at Stage Left.
Her innovative Body Language workshop has been a big success since 1998 and she has served as an expert consultant for books and magazine articles, including a major feature in WWD, the magazine. Ms. King is co-writer of the full-length play, Arturo's Window, which has been presented as a staged reading at several NY theatres, and has been offered a main stage production at the York Theatre in NYC. She also wrote the one-act "Art/Sex" which was presented at Stage Left in 2009, and is currently working with TC Corwin on a new one-act called "The Dubbers" which will premiere in the winter of 2010. She coaches adults and children privately, teaches an acting class in her technique called Whole Body Acting, teaches weekly writing workshops, and has written a book about her approach to playwriting, called "Writing Your Heart Out."
She is currently directing a staged reading of Post-Apocalypse by Lisa Haviland, and preparing to perform a staged reading of Dianne and Me by Ron Fromstein, in the Mama Drama Festival at Stage Left, also in October. She is a contributing writer to
Glenn Alterman's "Creating Your Own Monologue" and the arts paper Soul of the American Actor. She is an advisory board member of ARIA and a member of the
Dramatists Guild and National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences. In 2009-2010, she directed solo show artist
Frank Blocker in his Drama Desk-nominated Southern Gothic Novel;
Taren Sterry, in her show 180 Days, currently touring the US; and Joe Hutcheson, in his play Miss Magnolia Beaumont goes to Provincetown, which earned rave reviews in the 2010 New York Fringe Festival. She also directed the shows of Theresa Gambacorta, Cyndi Freeman, Marlene Nichols, Beth Bongar, Karen Thibodeau, Cheryl Smallman, Susan Rankus and River Huston.