THE COLONISTS (A Puppet Show) Comes to Brick Theatre 4/25-5/24

The Colonists is a lyrical visual fantasy, in which audiences are invited to enter the alien world of the bee. Developed in Bangkok by Nick Jones and Raja Azar, co-creators of the hit show Jollyship the Whiz-Bang, and developed through a Children's Show Grant by the Jim Henson Foundation, The Colonists tells the story of a forest community, overrun by a strange insect force they can't understand. Using electricified puppets, small-scale pyrotechnics and the music of Shooby Taylor the Human Horn, among others, The Colonists is a rite of spring to delight children and adults alike.

Terrible Baby Theater Co. was created in 2009 to answer all the eternal questions regarding human existence, and to support the collaborative theatrical work of Nick Jones, Rachel Shukert, and Peter James Cook. Terrible Baby is committed to being better than other theater companies and attracting as much press attention as possible. In their own right, each of the primary artists have become known for elaborate sophisticated comedy with subversive and quasi-historical inclinations, rooted in the traditions of Charles Ludlam, Joe Orton, and Jim Henson. Terrible Baby's inaugural season includes dual productions of The Colonists and The Nosemaker's Apprentice, both at the Brick Theater, beginning in April.

Nick Jones is a playwright, director, puppet designer, and performer. His most recent show, Jollyship the Whiz-Bang at Ars Nova, a puppet rock musical about pirates, received rave reviews in virtually all major New York publications, including the New Yorker and the NY Times (Top 10 shows of 2008, Gothamist; Best Puppet Show, L Magazine). Other plays produced include: Little Building (Galapagos) Canada's Mid-Riff (chashama), Rockberry: The Last One Man Show (The Brick), Straight Up Vampire: A History of Vampires in Colonial Pennsylvania as Performed to the Music of Paula Abdul (Philly Fringe Festival), and Wooden Box (Flux Factory). He has also presented work at the Portland Institute of Contemporary Art's TBA Festival, the Dublin Fringe Festival, The Bangkok Fringe Festival, The Kitchen, P.S. 122, The Public, and the Edinburgh Fringe. He has been an artist-in-residence at Galapagos Art Space, the Bowery Poetry Club, Flux Factory, the O'Neil Puppetry Conference, at the Hoontown Puppet Festival in Bangkok, and as part of the Ars Nova Play Group. Other accolades include: Nomination for Best Show at the Dublin Fringe Festival, Best Music Video (with Jollyship the Whiz-Bang) from the Coney Island Film Festival, and a 2007 grant from the Jim Henson Foundation. As a puppeteer and puppet designer, he has produced work for the Castillo theater (Day of Reckoning), The All Stars Project (Robin Hood), the 2004 Dream Parade in
Taiwan, and with the artist Laurie Simmons on her film Music of Regret (starring Meryl Streep). Jones also serves as a theater/cabaret curator for the upcoming Extremely Hungary Hungarian Cultural Festival, which is presenting works at Lincoln Center and around NYC. Nick Jones graduated in 2001 from Bard College. He was born and raised in Anchorage, Alaska.

Raja Azar is the musical director and co-founder of the award winning, nautically themed puppet rock group Jollyship the Whiz-Bang. A classically trained pianist, he was the bandleader for the Bindlestiff Family Cirkus for 4 years, and also for the Bailey Bros. Circus, a touring three ring tent show. Due to this, he has developed an affinity for crinoline skirts and the smell of elephant dung. He has performed his work across the globe, from Bangkok, Thailand (as an artist in residence at the Hoontown Puppet Fest) to Anchorage, Alaska; and composed music for many vaudeville/burlesque acts including the Wau Wau Sisters, Happy Hour, and Murray Hill. When he isn't out debauching with mahouts and dolly wagglers he can be found playing piano in the punk rock big band, The World/Inferno Friendship Society. Upcoming projects include Addicted to Bad Ideas: Peter Lorre's 20th Century, a punk rock musical based upon The Life of actor Peter Lorre which will tour the world during the summer of 2009, and Do You Copy?, an electronic music-based multimedia puppet spectacle created with puppeteer/director Kate Brehm.

Robin Frohardt is a puppet designer, fabricator and scenic artist working in both New York City and San Francisco. She is the founder and artistic director of the Apocalypse Puppet Theater in San Francisco, which has been providing wonderfully ridiculous, occasionally historical, and often bizarre or satirical works for adults and children for over three years. Her visually rich productions utilize a host of inventive and traditional methods and contraptions, such as shadow puppets, Bunraku puppets, giant puppets wave machines and most famously, the Apocalypse Stagecoach, the bicycle-powered stagecoach puppet theater.

Her puppetry work took her to Asia in 2005 and 2006, where she built puppets and taught workshops for the Dream Parade in Taiwan and performed at the Hoontown Puppet Festival and the Patravadi Theater in Bangkok, Thailand. Her recent work in New York includes set design and fabrication for IRT, a Tragedy in Three Stations, a full-scale play performed entirely on the New York City Subway. She is currently developing new puppets for the Apocalypse Puppet Theater's summer southwest tour to the National Puppetry Convention in Atlanta. Additionally she is developing a shadow puppet show for The Swimming Cities of Serenissima, an art boat journey across the Adriatic Sea to Venice, where the show will be performed live in June.

The Brick Theater is located at 575 Metropolitan Avenue (between Union Avenue and Lorimer Street) in Williamsburg, Brooklyn on the L & G subway lines (L: Lorimer stop; G: Metropolitan stop). For more detailed directions & further information, see http://www.bricktheater.com. The Brick and its non-profit company, The Brick Theater, Inc. were founded in September of 2002 by Robert Honeywell and Michael Gardner. Formerly an auto-body shop, a storage space and a yoga center, this brick- walled garage was completely refurbished into a state-of-the-art theater complex, with a large sprung floor and professional lighting and sound package.

The Brick has been home to numerous critically acclaimed original productions, including three years of the New York Clown Theatre Festival, The Protestants, The Granduncle Quadrilogy, Lord Oxford Brings You the Second American Revolution, Live!, Richard Foreman's Harry in Love, The Film Festival: A Theater Festival (featuring Death at Film Forum and The Stubborn Illusion of Time), Babylon Babylon, Notes From Underground, Bitch Macbeth, The Debate Society's A Thought About Raya, Secrets History Remembers, The Pretentious Festival (including Every Play Ever Written and Macbeth Without Words), The Present Perfect, Bouffon Glass Menajoree, Strom Thurmond Is Not a Racist/Cleansed, The Death of Griffin Hunter, the Havel Festival, Sexadelic Cemetery, Greed: A Musical Love $tory, The Kung Fu Importance of Being Earnest, The $ellout Festival, Adventures of Caveman Robot, Total Faith in Cosmic Love, The Baby Jesus One-Act Jubilee, Memoirs of My Nervous Illness, The Moral Values Festival (featuring Dear Dubya, World Gone Wrong, My Year of Porn), Tupperware Orgy, Bizarre Science Fantasy, Who is Wilford Brimley? The Musical, Jenna is nuts, Habitat, In a Strange Room (based on William Faulkner's As I Lay Dying), Fallout Follies, Assurbanipal Babilla's Assyrian Monkey Fantasy and stagings of Chekhov's Three Sisters, O'Neill's Beyond the Horizon, Maria Irene Fornes' Abingdon Square and the Brooklyn premiere of legendary Polish playwright Stanislaw Witkiewicz's The Pragmatists.

 

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