Well, I'm still grinning from ear to ear. I was one of the lucky few hundred who were at last night's invited dress for ONEOFUS's latest holiday panto at the Abrons Arts Center, Sleeping Beauty. The sideshow-burlesque-movie-theatre-TV-nightclub power couple of Matt Fraser and Julie Atlas Muz are the core of ONEOFUS. Matt writes the scripts and plays drums in the band and Julie (a great lover of schtick) stages the shows. And since bringing the old English tradition of the panto back to New York (where it had last thriven around the mid 19th century) they have built this big multi-colored, multi-gendered, multi-sized, multi-abled all-ages community of players in a seamless melding of tradition and the best parts of contemporary American culture. We reviewed their inaugural one Jack and the Beanstalk for The Villager back in 2017. They have since added Dick Rivington and the Cat to their repertoire and now Sleeping Beauty.
I was not there in my official capacity as a reviewer, but I can't restrain myself from recommending this show highly not just as a cure for the blues and the blahs but also your own internal Blue Meanies. There's singing, dancing, many kinds of music, topical humor, double entendres, slapstick, audience participation, every kind of cultural representation you can think of, moral instruction, and -- the cherry on the sundae -- a wrestling match. And it's full of good friends like Jenny Lee Mitchell (as Muffy Styler as evil Queen "Karen"), Victoria Linchong (as Viva Lamore as the Good Fairy), Matt Roper (as the handsome but ultimately not very nice Prince), Miss Ekaterina, and many faces that were new to me. As for my face: I nearly broke it from smiling.
Get your tickets here, while you can: www.thepantoproject.com
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