You are not a Premium Member and you are blocking ads. You are using Vampire Rave for free. Vampire Rave relies on ads in order to operate. Please disable your Ad Blocker. This can easily be done for Vampire Rave only.
If you are using Chrome, click the red hand button at the top right of the screen:
Then select: Don't run on pages on this site
If you do it correctly, the red hand will turn to green and you will no longer see this message.
She may be playing the monster mom in Stray Cat's Kate Crackernuts, but her friends and fans know that Johanna Carlisle is a real beauty — even when she's barfing in the alley behind a convenience market.
I knew I wanted to be in show business when I memorized the aria "Un Bel Di" from Madame Butterfly at the age of 3 and then performed it at the family Christmas party that year.
The worst thing about being an actor is people always questioning your emotions. I always got the "turn off the tears" thing from people. Still do.
The happiest day in my life was the day I scored over a million points on Astrosmash with my Intellivision! No, actually it was the day my son Maxx was born.
If I could be anyone other than myself, it would be my Grandma Julieta Zepeda Hubbard. She led such an amazing life, starting in Mexico, then coming to Tucson by wagon with her family to escape Pancho Villa. She sang, did theater, had a wonderful family, teased boys . . . What a life!
It's not entirely true, but I sometimes tell people that I appeared on Broadway in Cabaret at Studio 54. (Actually, I was picked from the audience to dance with the Emcee at the start of Act Two. It was very cool but not quite a Broadway debut!)
My worst audition ever was for Peter Pan with a company I don't even remember anymore. It was so horrible I wrote two poems about it, trying to work through it.
The fictional character I am most like is a cross between Veronica Sawyer from Heathers and Mary Poppins on acid.
I am utterly terrified of helium-filled latex balloons.
I laugh uncontrollably at Monty Python, especially And Now for Something Completely Different.
The one thing I absolutely refuse to do on stage is something that would cause harm to me or another actor. I knew a method actor in college who did a cutting scene on stage with actual razors. Um, no.
Something I have never admitted to anyone before is I used to be a man. Okay, seriously: I've never taken an acting class in my life. I learned from watching movies, variety shows in the '70s, and working with amazing people like Kathy Fitzgerald, Joyce Lopez-Powell, and Lisa Fineberg.
Currently, I am reading Jane Espenson's Finding Serenity: Anti-Heroes, Lost Shepherds and Space Hookers in Joss Whedon's Firefly.
The first time I got drunk, I drank Southern Comfort and 7-Up and sang Journey's "Open Arms" loudly on the Biltmore Golf Course because the guy I had a crush on was with me. Later that night, I puked behind the Circle K on Seventh Street and Missouri. Good times!
Like my mother used to say, "Stand on your own two feet. Be independent, and you can do anything. And clean your room!"
I appreciated the first quote and then got to the Mother. O-boy, did I relate.
New Times Review of
18:16 Feb 15 2008 Times Read: 701
The kids are just alright
By Robrt L. Pela
Published: February 14, 2008
About halfway through Act One of Stray Cat Theatre's super-fashionable Kate Crackernuts, my middle-aged companion leaned over and whispered in my ear, "It's always nice to see what the youngsters are up to these days."
Waiting for Warhol: Some of the several young'uns gone Crackernuts.
Where:
Metro Arts, 1700 North Seventh Avenue
Details:
Kate Crackernuts continues through February 16. Call 480-820-8022.
Subject(s): Stray Cat Theatre, Johanna Carlisle, Kate Crackernuts I'm not sure I agree with him. Because while I found Kate energetically acted and competently directed, I also found myself feeling every minute of my 46 years. I knew that, somewhere in this miasma of techno pop and flashing lights, was a story based on an old Scottish fairy tale about a vengeful mother and a girl with a sheep's head. But I found myself unable to follow — or even find — much of its narrative, shrouded as it was in throbbing disco clips and cranked-up strobe effects. I felt not so much like a member of a theater audience as I did a septuagenarian trapped on the dance floor at an especially debauched rave.
Which is not to say that Kate Crackernuts is bereft of entertainment value. It's just that it manages, in director Gary Minyard's hippie-dippy staging, to obliterate Sheila Callaghan's clever translation with endless attempts to re-create Andy Warhol's Factory. There's no subtlety in Minyard's stylistic choices — lighting, setting, costuming, music — all of them meant to relocate an ancient fairytale to a more contemporary setting. Instead, he's piled on the dissonance and grunge until it buries what might have been an amusing, accessible allegory. For the recently teenaged, all this noise and torn fabric is probably quite fascinating. For the rest of us, it's merely off-putting.
Probably, I'm just tired of hipness getting in the way of good storytelling. There was, after all, some very pleasant acting in this production. I enjoyed John Caswell Jr.'s performance as a demented sheep, and found Amber Gildersleeve, in the title role, quite beguiling. And, as usual, Johanna Carlisle waltzed off with every scene she appeared in — not an easy trick here, given all the noise and confusion. Carlisle, her bosom covered in glitter, her torso swathed in a pleather jumper and colossal platform Mary Janes, was never not magnificent. Shaking her dreadlocked head and bellowing invective, she was the best thing about a show that might have benefited from a few more "best things."
The rest of the cast wore hoodies and ripped jeans and chattered on and on about things that presumably forwarded this slender morals tale, although after awhile, I became lost in all the smart asides and the grown men dressed in baby clothes and gave up caring whether any of these imaginary people lived happily ever after. Kate Crackernuts is theater for hip young things who like plays that more closely resemble music videos or independent films; in the end, I found its endless silly-making mostly just confusing.
Magnificent imagery, poetic language, imaginative sets and lighting, crackerjack acting – these are the ingredients of an intriguing show now being presented at Stray Cat Theatre in Phoenix. KATE CRACKERNUTS is the work of author Sheila Callaghan, whose flair for writing modern poetic prose cannot be topped. It is the most striking language I have heard on a stage in a long while. For example, to describe her tortured state, one character says that she was “a used dryer sheet”. And the play closes with the line, “We continue to begin.” Unfortunately I could not write fast enough to copy down any more of the pithy dialogue with which the script is rife. It came fast and furious and in the mouths of the excellent cast was clear as a bell and very effective.
Director Gary Minyard reveled in the surreal quality of Callaghan’s modern fable and took advantage of every twist and turn to bring us creative staging, appropriate music, psychedelic lighting effects, and sensuous choreography. And those were just the extras. The simple premise of this fairy tale (taken from the theater’s press release) goes like this: Kate (excellently played by Amber Gildersleeve) has a stepsister Anne (beautifully brought to life by Courtney Weir), “who is a ravishing hottie, but wakes up one morning to discover a sheep’s head between her shoulders… Thus begins the journey of the two sisters in their quest to return Anne’s true head to its proper place.” Along the way, of course, they have several misadventures whereby Kate rescues a weakling poet (somnolently portrayed by Sam Wilkes) from the clutches of a sex queen of the netherworld, Miss Prima (voluptuous Johanna Carlisle) and Anne falls in love with Paul’s jealous brother Ralph ( nicely played by Mike Girolamo) who actually prefers her animal head to her real one. Then there is the Greek Chorus - like Sheep (marvelously created by John Caswell Jr.) and a tour de force by Alex Raines who enacts three totally different characters (Paul’s father, Kate’s mother and Prima’s baby) with lightning swift costume and persona changes. He is superb! Finally, Cynthia Rena plays the role of Paul’s Voice, which has been lost due to a spell, and whose echo chamber dialogue is quite convincing. The other members of the ensemble divide their time between sensuous movement, wailing and lugging rolling platforms on and off stage, but are nonetheless effective in their tinsel, black light enhanced psychedelic costumes.
Suffice to say that like all good fairy tales, this ends with a happy moment, but the ride along the way is a boisterous and edgy one replete with sexual innuendo as well as dramatically sharp image filled prose. It is a convoluted story, which is not always easy to follow in its many twists and turns but the end result is nothing less than magic and isn’t that what a fairy tale is supposed to be? I am not sure that this play is for everyone; there were many in the audience who were totally lost and who could not follow the story line, but they could still appreciate the fine acting and production elements. If you are looking for symbolism, you might find it in the caricatures created by the cast, but I believe that the real meaning of this show is its inner exuberance and rave like attitude which just allows you to have a darn good time. At least that is what the show did for me. It lifted me out of the mundane and carried me to a fairy tale world where totally bizarre was the norm It was just downright FUN!
Kate Crackernuts by Chris Curcio courtesy of KBAQ.
Attribution Information
Title: Kate Crackernuts
Author: Chris Curcio
Publisher: KBAQ 89.5 FM
Link to Content: URL
License Information
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.5 License.
************************
Stray Cat Theatre always selects most unusual plays and presents them with endless creativity. Their current offering, "Kate Crackernuts," is the most bizarre piece they've ever picked. The weird play is an adult fairy tale set in an imaginary kingdom about two sisters, Anne, a real hottie, and the plain Kate.
Everything here is bizarre. Anne wakes one morning to find her attractive head gone and a sheep's head in its place. That starts a creepy journey where Kate helps Anne locate her real head. We come in contact with a catty, headless sheep who thinks he's lost his head to Anne. We run into a leather-wearing mother, Miss Prima, who seems to constantly be on some weird high, a sick brother, Paul, a wacky boyfriend, Ralph, who adores Anne's sheep's head, and other oddballs who run in and out of these sisters' lives.
Sheila Callaghan's "Kate Crackernuts" is just too bizarre as it will be for most theatergoers except those who love wacko crazies. The adventures and encounters are far-fetched and obviously parallel the bizarre characters we all come in contact with everyday. But the story is hard to follow and the occurrences are so far out there that you'll wonder what's going on and just who these weirdoes represent.
There's nothing wrong with the excellent Stray Cat production. Director Gary Minyard lets imagination flow in his staging although you can't always see scenes played on the stage floor. His performers play their parts with over the top acting to bring these bizarre people to vibrant life, and he lets his set, costume, and light designers go for broke. The show moves with swift irreverence as you travel through this unreal world.
The actors play these outlandish roles for all the bizarre excesses they need to be funny and clever. Best are the smaller supporting roles. Johanna Carlisle is a leather wrapped, warped Miss Prima. Alex Raines is fantastic in a trio of diverse roles including a drag sequence as Kate's Mother, a stern but loving father, and a balling and crawling baby who pulls the weirdest things out of his biggish diaper. John Caswell, Jr. has a field day as the hyperactive Headless Sheep, and Mike DiGirolamo is a hoot as the sheep-loving Ralph.
Amber Gildersleeve is an in-control Kate, Courtney Weir is an affected Anne, and Sam Wilkes is a sickly Paul. These characters hold the play together.
"Kate Crackernuts" is for limited audiences who relish bizarre theater. It won't appeal to most theatergoers even though the Stray Cat production is exemplary and wacky. - Chris Curcio, KBAQ
COMMENTS
-
Angelus
15:17 Mar 04 2008
"Johanna Carlisle is a real beauty"..
..and clean your room.
..
I appreciated the first quote and then got to the Mother. O-boy, did I relate.