Molly Pope, Randy Harrison, et al. Star in OUR HIT PARADE at Joe's Pub, 3/30

Joe's Pub presents OUR HIT PARADE on Wednesday, March 30 at 9:30 PM, featuring Randy Harrison, John Roberts, Molly Pope, Erin Markey, Eye Of The Tiger, Jenn Harris, Billy Eichner & Natalie Joy Johnson. Our Hit Parade is a live top-ten countdown show created by Tony nominee and Obie winner Kenny Mellman (Kiki & Herb), carnal chanteuse Bridget Everett (At Least It's Pink at Ars Nova), pop song opera impresario Neal Medlyn (Neal Medlyn's Unpronounceable Symbol at P.S. 122), producer and MTV cameraman Brendan Kennedy, and writers Ada Calhoun and Peter Schjeldahl.

The show is inspired by the musical sketch series "Your Hit Parade" that ran on radio and then television from 1935 to 1959. On that show, cast members performed the week's most popular songs as comically literal skits. In this show, the hosts and special guest stars from the local performance scene present their renditions of current popular hits live on stage!

The following shows are also set to play Joe's Pub:

THE LOVE SHOW
Thursday, April 14 at 11:30 PM; $12 in advance / $15 at the door

The Love Show gets the sexy goin' with their tightly choreographed and costumed numbers, theatrical appeal and gorgeous girls and boys. A little cabaret, a little ballet and a whole lotta rock and roll, The Love Show has entertained all audiences from the glitzy nightclub life to the gritty downtown theater. Classically trained dancers and detailed choreography tell a story with every number... a story both intimate and universal. The Love Show has worked for such clients as Vogue Magazine and Cointreau liqueur, and rocked stages ranging from CBGB's Gallery to The New York Burlesque Festival. The Love Show has also appeared with the glitterati on Patrick McMullan's website and been seen on The Insider.

"[T]he always impressive director/choreographer/impresario Angela Harriell... manages to create some of the most eclectic performances out there. Her group of talented dancers and artists from... The Love Show continue to create the kind of work that has to be seen to be believed." -- Michael Roderick, BroadwayWorld.com

APRIL 17-20
YOUNG Jean Lee AND FUTURE WIFE: WE'RE GONNA DIE

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.

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.

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

 

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