Get the Willies!

At 12:01am on Friday, July 24 (i.e., right after midnight tonight), tickets go on sale for the New York International Fringe Festival at fringenyc.org. That means that tickets go on sale for Willy Nilly, which, if you're reading this, we're pretty sure you know is part of said Festival.

We won't jerk you around: the show is probably going to sell out. Maybe not tonight, maybe not tomorrow, maybe not Monday at 3, but AT SOME POINT. Do you want to risk being closed out? We hope not. That's why we encourage you to buy tickets.

More to the point, Trav S.D. encourages you to buy tickets in this special audio promo, with music by our psychedelic house band, The Four Hoarses.

Now, look at this picture of Willy and the Girls:

So there.

Congratulations to Our NYIT Award Nominees

Piper McKenzie is freaking thrilled to announce that, thanks to a couple of our talented comrades, our December 2008 production of The Granduncle Quadrilogy has been nominated for two New York Innovative Theater Awards!

Outstanding Actress in a Featured Role: Ivanna Cullinan

Outstanding Lighting Design: Ian W. Hill

Congratulations, Ian and Ivanna! The awards will be later in the year, so keep your many, many fingers crossed for these fine folks.

Photo Credit: Ken Stein/Runs With Scissors

 

Pictures of Filthy Hippies (as Opposed to Filthy Pictures of Hippies)

Lo and behold! Kodaksopeia, Muse of Photography, has bestowed upon Piper McKenzie not merely a handful of snapshots, but an entire photostream on Flickr!  Visit it right now in order to view, well, a handful of snapshots.

But they're not just ANY snapshots, nay!  They're the first batch of photos illustrating the dose of lycergic madness that is Willy Nilly!  You'll see some cracked-up character shots, a shockingly wide spectrum of costumes, and images of behind-the-scenes tomfoolery. (Featured above are Mateo Moreno and Michael Criscuolo as a pair of good-for-nothing beatniks.) Keep you eyes on this space for even more, even better pics as the process develops!

Meanwhile, our good friends at Nytheatre.com have published a Willy Nilly preview in which Trav and Jeff say some pretty awesome things about what we all hope will be a very awesome show. Give it a read, then check out the preview articles about our many other brethren in this year's Fringe! 

Willy Nilly Has Dates

It's true that times and dates are nothing more than arbitrary constraints used by The Man to crush our spirits and prevent us from being Free, but that doesn't change the fact that, if you want to see Willy Nilly, you're gonna have to show up at the right place at the right hour. Luckily for us, FringeNYC has given us a handful of places and hours that we can now pass on to you, our faithful water brothers. Drink deep, friends:

Fri 8/14 at 5pm

Sun 8/16 at 8:30pm

Fri 8/21 at 11pm

Sat 8/22 at 4:45pm

Sat 8/29 at 8pm

Etch these words and numbers into your foreheads and proclaim to all the world your fierce devotion to Willy Nilly!

Help Piper McKenzie Make Theater Magic!

Happy Summer from Piper McKenzie! As the Solstice kicks in, making the days simultaneously shorter and hotter, we are preparing to dive into an exciting series of projects for 2009. Would you like to take the plunge with us?

In 2008, your donations to PMcK helped bring three major projects to life: the environmentally-staged 30-actor historical comedy Babylon Babylon; PMcK's first-ever film, the short silent horror pastiche The Poison Kiss; and The Granduncle Quadrilogy: Tales from the Land of Ice, a twisted alternate-reality holiday story. (For more information on all of these projects please amble over to pipermckenzie.com.)

Now, we're ready for more! We have several thrilling projects in the works for the upcoming year, and we'd love for you to be a part of them:

WILLY NILLY: A Musical Exploitation of the Most Far-Out Cult Murders of the Psychedelic Era

A selection of the New York International Fringe Festival, this rock musical spoof by indie playwright and vaudeville historian Trav S.D. (No Applause, Just Throw Money) will combine Charles Manson with Mad Magazine to create a kind of anti-Hair that turns the mythology of the late 1960s on its shaggy, unwashed head.

CRAVEN MONKEY AND THE MOUNTAIN OF FURY
PMcK's proposed entry for December 2009's Fight Fest - the Brick Theater's inaugural festival devoted to the art of stage combat - is a Darwinian martial-arts fairy tale told in the same movement-theater style as PMcK's 2007 hit Macbeth Without Words.

TWO-FISTED TWILIGHT

We're ready for our next close-up with the development of PMcK's first full-length feature film, a WWII ghost story that brings G.I.s, Nazis, dancing girls and avant-garde artists together in a haunted chalet in the French countryside soon after D-Day.

LADY CRYPTOZOOLOGIST, SEASON TWO

Finally, this fall PMcK will return to the Vampire Cowboys' Saturday Night Saloon with a sequel to our wildly popular sci-fi-romance serial Lady Cryptozoologist, a comedic adventure equal parts globe-trotting pseudoscience and interspecies romance.

We clearly can't maintain such a gleefully prolific output on our own. This is why we would like to humbly, gratefully, and very politely ask if you might be interested in giving us a hand. By making a tax-deductible donation to Piper McKenzie via our fiscal sponsor, Fractured Atlas, you'll be providing us with rehearsal space, costume materials, and every imaginable expense in between. A donation as small as $10 will ensure that our shows get the time and attention they need to entertain and enchant audiences to the fullest. Read on for our giving levels, and help us shine in 2009!

PIPER McKENZIE's CRYPTOZOOLOGY-INSPIRED GIVING LEVELS

JERSEY DEVIL: $10 AND UP

CHUPACABRA: $50 AND UP

SASQUATCH: $100 AND UP

YETI: $500 AND UP

THE LOCH NESS MONSTER (We will call you Nessie for short): $1000 AND UP

So how can you contribute? There are three easy methods:

TO DONATE ONLINE

Visit https://www.fracturedatlas.org/donate/1160 to reach our donation page on Fractured Atlas.

TO DONATE VIA MAIL

Make your check out to "Fractured Atlas" with "Piper McKenzie Productions" in the memo and just send it to

PIPER MCKENZIE PRODUCTIONS

c/o Hope Cartelli and Jeff Lewonczyk

282 20th Street

Brooklyn, NY 11215

TO DONATE VIA TELEPHONE

Simply call (212) 277-8020

Please note: Fractured Atlas is a 501(c)(3) public charity; all donations are tax-deductible to the extent permitted by law.

Thank you in advance for your generous support. In the precarious world of independent theatre, companies like ours don't have a prayer without the assistance of patrons like you. Dedicated audiences and donors have long been the backbone of our success, and will continue to be so well into the future. We look forward to having you as a partner while we forge new artistic ground over the next ten years, and beyond!

Yours until such time as we have nothing left to give,

Hope Cartelli & Jeff Lewonczyk,

Proprietors

Oh Say Can You See

It’s July Fourth, and what’s more American than self-promotion? Certainly not apple pie – apples are red, like commies. But another red thing is blood, the flowing of which is an important component of the show we’re trying to promote – Willy Nilly: a Musical Exploitation of the Most Far-Out Cult Murders of the Psychedelic Era.

The show will be performing at Dixon Place as part of the New York International Fringe Festival in August. Ever read a Fringe blurb? Well, they go something like this:

Charles Manson meets Mad Magazine in this tasteless rock’n’roll spoof about a filthy faux-Messiah, his cult of wanton women, and high Hollywood murder. With a raucous score, gratuitous nudity, acid freakouts, excessive gore, cruel stereotypes and slapstick misogyny, consider this fictionalized musical satire the anti-Hair.

The script and songs are written by none other than the inimitable Trav S.D., the show is directed by Piper’s Jeff Lewonczyk, and dig this crazy cast:

Becky Byers
Hope Cartelli
Maggie Cino
Michael Criscuolo
Betsy Head
Daryl Lathon*
Rich Lovejoy
Mateo Moreno
Avery Pearson
Trav S.D.
Esther Silberstein
Adam Swiderski
Elizabeth Hope Williams

So how the hell about that – American enough for you? If not, consider this: during the real-life Tate murders, there was a giant American flag draped over the back of Sharon Tate’s sofa in the room she and her friends were killed in. Macabre? Sure. Effed up? Uh-huh. American? Oh yeah.

*member AEA

We Care Enough to Blog for You

Piper McKenzie is proud to present this obligatory post welcoming you to our blog and our blog to the world. We will be using this space to converse with our audience and curious passersby about what we’re doing, who we’re doing it with, and when, where, why and how we’re doing it.

We don’t anticipate this to be a process blog, per se. The intensity of our fascination with our process is likely to be inversely proportional to your own lack of interest in the particulars. Instead, we hope to store and share words and thoughts and images that relate to the various projects we’re working on, hinting and prodding and pulling and poking at your impressions and our own while presenting a kind of background to and running commentary on the art and entertainment endeavors we always seem to be embarking upon. Along the way, we hope to provide you with some fleeting amusement and, when the opportunity presents itself, actual information.

We expect that future posts will be marginally more interesting than this one.