Joe's Pub: Young Jean Lee, Patrick Stump, MAKU Sound System & More
By: Gabrielle Sierra Mar. 09, 2011
Joe's Pub at The Public Theater debuted in October 1998 and has quickly became one of New York City's most celebrated and in-demand showcase venues for live music and performance. With its genre-blind booking and vast diversity of interests, the stage at Joe's Pub gives voice to a world of varied and stellar artists.
JUST ADDED
ENID ELLEN, NATH ANN CARRERA, NICHOLAS GORHAM: AN EQUINOX CELEBRATION
Friday, March 25 at 11:30 PM; $14
Giving a voice to Mother Nature, David Mramor is Enid Ellen. A dreaded poet in hooker boots with Greg Potter on piano will welcome the spring Equinox Friday March 25th at 11:30pm. Nath Ann Carrera and Nicholas Gorham will join the duo in full ceremony.
"There are pockets of wonderful performers, like David Mramor. There are bright lights everywhere, but it is harder."- John Cameron Mitchel Next Magazine on the disappearance of Shortbus-era New York
Monday, April 4 at 9:30 PM; $20
"Natalie Joy Johnson sings with a purity of spirit." - The New York Times
You've seen her on Broadway. You've seen her light up the screen as Kristen Bell's co-star in the largely unseen art film "When In Rome." You've seen her passed out in various gutters throughout New York City. Now, Natalie Joy Johnson returns to conquer the filthiest gutter of them all - Joe's Pub. Under the micro-managing direction of has-been-that-never-was, John Hill (her co-star in "bare: a pop opera written in lowercase letters") Ms. Johnson is on a mission to corrupt you, touch you 'down there', melt your heart, and pretty much fuck you up.
Angela Di Carlo: JUST TO BE POLITE
Tuesday, April 5 at 9:30 PM; $15
Comedic downtown songstress Angela Di Carlo delivers an up-beat, high energy evening of original songs and bawdy wit. Backed by her band the Tight White Collars, she performs fresh tracks from her newly minted EP, Just to Be Polite. Ms Di Carlo's music spans many genres including country, rock, and even teen angst ballads which are delivered with a spontaneity and style all her own. With special surprise guests! An evening sure to entertain and offend.
Angela Di Carlo debuted her first solo show of original songs, "Ange Rampage" last year at The Abron's Underground and with "Ange Rampage: Uptown!" at The Triad Theater. She is one of the founding members of the variety trio "Lady Lady Lady" which was first produced by Deitch Projects which then had a limited run at The Zipper Factory Theater in 2008. Ms. Di Carlo wrote all of the songs she performed including the theme song for the show. Ms. Di Carlo is also the creator of "The Ang Show" a live talk show complete with commercials and songs written by Ms. Di Carlo that was twice produced at the Deitch Projects/Fischerspooner Salon in Williamsburg. Other performances include all 8 of Adam Dugas's non-traditional holiday extravaganza, "Chaos & Candy" including Mr. Dugas' Easter pageant, Vernal Hoodoo at The Box, and performing with Cathy Cervenka's Maddonnathon at BB King's and Moheghan Sun Casino. Ms. Di Carlo can currently be seen portraying notoriously unscrupulous gossip columnist Mizti Lou on Linda Simpson's photo novella, Bitches in the Sky.com
APRIL 8-10
LIZ QUELER and Seth Farber present THE EDNA PROJECT
Friday, April 8 at 7:30 PM; $16
The poetry of Edna St. Vincent Millay set to music by Liz Queler and Seth Farber.
"Liz Queler and Seth Farber not only created marvelous songs using the lyric poetry of Edna St. Vincent Millay, they then developed a performance style for them that illuminates the room and enlightens the audience. This isn't just another group doing just another bunch of tunes. What Queler and Farber denote from the mind of Millay is an emotional experience that sings to the very heart of human connections." - Peter Bergman, Executive Director, Edna St. Vincent Millay Society
sami.the.great
Friday, April 8 at 11:30 PM; $12
Sami Akbari, known musically as sami.the.great, is driven by her overwhelming desire to write and play music. The Village Voice described Sami's music as "Moody pop songs that vibe Dido, Tori Amos and Fiona Apple." New York Cool magazine said her sound was "ethereally lovely," and she was named Best Independent Artist of the Week by Best Buy. Her most recent EP, Nothing Left to See, not only reveals the trajectory of Sami's songwriting career, but also her deft combination of emotion and wit, of melancholy and humor. Like her live show, the album reflects the notion that great things come in small packages and showcases a small-framed singer whose impassioned voice fills the spaces and lives around her. Sami's first full-length album is slated for release on Bold Love Records this summer.
PATRICK STUMP of Fall Out Boy
Saturday, April 9 - Monday, April 11 at 7:30 PM; $20
Patrick Stump is gearing up for his debut solo release, SOUL PUNK, out February 2011. After years of touring and recording as singer and multi-instrumentalist for Fall Out Boy, Stump wrote and recorded SOUL PUNK throughout 2010. About the title, he reveals, "Neither I nor my music seem comfortably defined by the DIY punk or R&B/hip-hop scenes- I feel like I operate between the margins. I want to contribute to the musical vernacular of both. I'm just as pissed off as I was while screaming in punk bands, but I feel like I'm directing it into something positive and centered around love."
Committed to nurturing the devoted fanbase he has acquired throughout this career, Stump has invited fans to choose between two versions of a track on SOUL PUNK. Fans are asked to select which version of the song "Spotlight" they prefer - the more uptempo version titled "New Regrets" or the more melancholy "Oh Nostalgia". The winning version will end up on SOUL PUNK. To vote go to www.patrickstump.com.
In addition to producing the album, as well as writing all the music and lyrics, Stump played all instruments on the recording, which include drums, bass, electric and acoustic guitars, piano, analog synths, drum kit, marching drums, percussion, trumpet, valve trombone, alto and tenor saxophones, mandolin, guitelele, and manipulating various found sounds and ambient noises. The songs hit on a variety of themes, including his love for his hometown of Chicago in "This City," a scathing treatise about materialism on "Greed," and a reminiscent musing on naïve sexuality on "Allie."
Prior to SOUL PUNK, Patrick Stump was the lead singer and composer for Fall Out Boy, which earned a Grammy nod along with commercial and critical success. Stump has performed over 1200 shows and recorded five albums with FOB since their inception in 2001. Stump is also an accomplished producer and writer who has worked with Bruno Mars, Timbaland, Cobra Starship, Daryl Hall, Lupe Fiasco and more. For more info, please go to www.patrickstump.com.
YOUNG Jean Lee AND FUTURE WIFE: WE'RE GONNA DIE
Friday & Saturday, April 1 & 2 at 7:00 PM
Friday & Saturday, April 8 & 9 at 9:30 PM;
Sunday & Monday, April 17 & 18 at 9:30PM
Friday & Saturday, April 22 & 23 at 9:30 PM
Friday, April 29 at 9:30 PM & Saturday April 30 at 7:00 & 9:30 PM
All Shows: $30 seated / $25 standing
"The clearest indication that the avant-garde isn't dead, and has never been funnier." - New York Magazine
"She offers the pleasure of brazen theatrical inventiveness." - The New Yorker
13P (in association with Young Jean Lee's Theater Company) presents WE'RE GONNA DIE, written and performed by YOUNG Jean Lee, music by FUTURE WIFE, music direction by TIM SIMMONDS, choreography by FAYE DRISCOLL, directed by Paul Lazar.
FUTURE WIFE is MIKE HANF, NICK JENKINS, BEN KUPSTAS, YOUNG Jean Lee, and TIM SIMMONDS
In WE'RE GONNA DIE, provocative theater artist Young Jean Lee explores human vulnerability with her hilariously disorienting signature style. Surrendering her usual practice of casting larger-than-life superstars, Lee sets out to make a show that any ordinary person could perform. Using herself as a guinea pig, non-performer Lee takes the stage herself along with her band, Future Wife, to tell stories and sing songs about our shared human weakness and failure. Join Lee and Future Wife for an evening of heartbreak, despair, aging, sickness, and death. You may be miserable, but you won't be alone.
Lee (P#11), a Co-Founder of 13P, Performs a Show about Human Weakness and Failure, Directed by Paul Lazar and Backed by Her Band, Future Wife
Throughout her career of internationally acclaimed shows, provocative playwright-director Young Jean Lee has maintained the modus operandi that has guided her professional undertakings from the outset: Creating the show she feels least comfortable creating. Having continually taken up exceptionally challenging subject matter-e.g., black identity in The Shipment, and, most recently, her father's terminal illness in LEAR-she is using her 13P production to stretch even further. Accustomed to writing parts for and directing accomplished, larger-than-life actors, Lee will set out to create a show about ordinary human failings that an ordinary person could perform, while employing a genre that traditionally depends most heavily on star-power and charisma: the one-person cabaret show. Moreover, Lee (a non-performer) will use herself as a test case and take the stage herself, directed by Paul Lazar and joined by her new band, Future Wife, as she tells stories and sings songs about shared human failure, sickness, aging, and death, all in her hilariously disorienting signature style. 13P, the award-winning collective of American Playwrights Lee helped to found, in association with Young Jean Lee's Theater Company, will present the world premiere of the show, We're Gonna Die, April 1-30 at Joe's Pub.
We're Gonna Die is the 11th production from 13P, which Lee and 12 other playwrights co-founded in 2003 to produce one play by each of its members-and then disband. We're Gonna Die exemplifies the kind of risk-taking the collective was formed to foster, and which Lee always embraces. "I've found that the best way to make theater that unsettles and challenges my audience is to do things that make me uncomfortable," says Lee. "I'm constantly trying to find value in unexpected places. My work is about struggling to achieve something in the face of failure and incompetence and not knowing. The discomfort and awkwardness involved in watching this struggle reflects the truth of my experience."
Although she has little experience performing, and an inherent dislike of being onstage, Lee acts, sings, and dances throughout We're Gonna Die. The show features her band Future Wife, which she recently formed with Brooklyn-based, British singer-songwriter Tim Simmonds, who also contributed music to Lee's most recent show, LEAR. The group, which features collaborators Mike Hanf, Nick Jenkins and Ben Kupstas, in addition to Lee and Simmonds, just made their live debut on February 11 at the Stone, as part of a month of programming curated by Lou Reed and Laurie Anderson. As an early preview of We're Gonna Die, the band released the song "I'm Spending Christmas Alone" to acclaim last December.
We're Gonna Die was developed in part through a residency at the National Theater Institute at the Eugene O'Neill Theater Center, and through the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council's Swing Space program (space at 14 Wall Street is donated by Capstone Equities), and is presented with support from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and the New York State Council on the Arts, a state agency.
About Young Jean Lee
Young Jean Lee was named by American Theatre magazine as one of the 25 artists who will shape the American theater over the next 25 years. She's been called "a rising star" by the New York Times and "one of the best experimental playwrights in America" by Time Out New York. She was born in Korea in 1974 and moved to the United States when she was two years old. She grew up in Pullman, WA and attended college at UC Berkeley, where she majored in English. Immediately after college, she enterEd Berkeley's English PhD program, where she studied Shakespeare for six years before moving to New York to become a playwright in 2002. Since then, she has directed her plays at Soho Rep (LEAR; THE APPEAL), The Kitchen (THE SHIPMENT), The Public Theater (CHURCH), P.S. 122 (CHURCH; PULLMAN, WA), HERE Arts Center (SONGS OF THE DRAGONS FLYING TO HEAVEN), and the Ontological-Hysteric Theater (GROUNDWORK OF THE METAPHYSIC OF MORALS). She has worked with Radiohole and the National Theater of the United States of America. She is a member of New Dramatists and 13P, has done residencies at Yaddo, the MacDowell Colony, the Ucross Foundation, and Hedgebrook, and has an MFA from Mac Wellman's playwriting program at Brooklyn College. Her plays have been published in New Downtown Now (an anthology edited by Mac Wellman and herself), in Three Plays by Young Jean Lee (Samuel French), American Theatre magazine (September 2007), a collection of all of her plays entitled Songs of the Dragons Flying to Heaven and Other Plays (Theatre Communications Group), and THE SHIPMENT and LEAR (Theatre Communications Group, June 2010). She and her company have been the recipients of grants from the Creative Capital Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Trust for Mutual Understanding, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, MAP / Doris Duke Charitable Foundation Creative Exploration Fund, Tobin Foundation for Theater Arts Grant, Edith Lutyens and Norman Bel Geddes Foundation Grant, Arts Presenters/Ford Foundation Creative Capacity Grant, New York State Council on the Arts, the MAP Fund, the Greenwall Foundation, the Jerome Foundation, and the Foundation for Contemporary Arts. Her work has been invited to tour to venues in London, Paris, Vienna, Hannover, Berlin, Zurich, Brussels, Antwerp, Budapest, Sydney, Bergen, Oslo, Trondheim, Rotterdam, Salamanca, Toulouse, Chicago, Chapel Hill, Portland, Seattle, Philadelphia, Austin, Columbus, Pittsburgh, Boston, Williamstown, and Minneapolis. Young Jean is currently under commission from Plan B/Paramount Pictures, Lincoln Center Theater, Playwrights Horizons, and the Oregon Shakespeare Festival. Young Jean has taught master classes in playwriting at NYU/Tisch and the Eugene O'Neill Theater Center. She is the artistic director of Young Jean Lee's Theater Company, was a finalist for the 2010 Susan Smith Blackburn Prize for THE SHIPMENT, a recipient of the 2009 Brooklyn College Young Alumni Award, the ZKB Patronage Prize 2007 of the Zurich Theater Spektakel, a 2007 Emerging Playwright OBIE Award, a 2010 fellowship in Playwriting from NYFA, and a 2010 Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
For more information, visit www.youngjeanlee.org.
About 13P
The 13 playwrights of 13P (13 Playwrights, Inc.) are Sheila Callaghan, Erin Courtney, Madeleine George, Rob Handel, Ann Marie Healy, Julia Jarcho, Young Jean Lee, Winter Miller, Sarah Ruhl, Kate E. Ryan, Lucy Thurber, Anne Washburn, and Gary Winter.
They chose the order of their 13 productions at their first gathering in fall 2003. The process for each production begins with a meeting between the playwright, executive producer, and managing director. The playwright is asked to dream out loud about her ideal venue, director, cast, and other collaborators for the play. 13P orients itself around each playwright within the framework: The artistic director takes full artistic responsibility for the company during her tenure, and they make every effort to realize the playwright's wishes.
Awarding 13P an OBIE in 2005, the committee wrote, "Not since Circle Repertory have we seen playwrights in New York forging a home for each other."
For more information, please visit www.13P.org
M.A.K.U SOUND SYSTEM
Saturday, April 9 at 11:30 PM; $15
"...a Colombian fusion band with a kick-ass percussion section" - Jace Clayton (a.k.a. DJ /rupture), WNYC Culture
M.A.K.U. Sound System, the best of roots rock, mixes Afro-Colombian drumming with an eclectic variety of urban and gypsy vibes, with blaring brass and distorted guitar sounds. This 8-musician ensemble presents a show full of pure energy, explosive drumming, and Latin American flavor.
AGA ZARYAN
Sunday, April 10 at 9:30 PM; $15
"This recording by arguably Poland's most interesting jazz vocalist of the younger generation is truly moving". - Newsweek
The album "Picking Up The Pieces" rendered her the First - Playboy
Gifted vocalist Aga Zaryan conveys the finest of the history of jazz to today's audiences, continuing the traditions of great artists like Shirley Horn, Carmen McRae and Joni Mitchell. Aga was named Jazz Vocalist of The Year in the European Jazz Forum Magazine's yearly Jazz Top readers' poll in 2007, 2008, 2009 and 2010. Her latest album "Looking Walking Being" was released with a prestigious Blue Note Records label.
TICKETS
Online at joespub.com
Phone 212-967-7555,
In Person At The Public Theater Box Office (1 PM to 6 PM), or at the Joe's Pub Box Office from (6 PM to 10 PM) both located at 425 Lafayette Street, NYC
For table reservations please call 212-539-8778. Purchase of tickets does NOT guarantee a table reservation; you must call to reserve seats. Seating, as well as standing-room, is available only on a first-come, first-served basis for all shows without a dinner reservation. Two drink or $12 food minimum per person is standard.
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