Just Reviewed on NYTheatre.com: Under the Radar Festival

I saw two shows at the Public Theater's Under the Radar Festival this week:

Regurgitophagy

The gimmick is set up as the show is beginning: the machine they've devised "captures responses from the audience and turns them into electric discharges into the actor's body. Please turn off your cell phones."

Michel Melamed enters, dressed in black clothes that walk an odd line between high couture and the discarded gear of some strange brethren of monks. He is instantly likeable even with the severe intensity coursing across his face. He is adorned with strange jewelry. On his wrists and ankles he wears metal clamps, onto which he attaches cables akin to those with which you would jump-start a car. These cables are attached to boxes that are attached to pulleys that run up to the grid. I looked, but couldn't quite tell if they were plugged in or not.

That was my first question: is he for real? He started speaking and the first time anyone in the audience made a peep, be it a laugh or a cough, a bare bulb upstage left lit up and Melamed twitched from the charge that supposedly surged forth into his wrists and ankles.

Read the rest of the review here.

and Disinformation:

Reggie Watts is one cool cat. The man, the voice, the Afro—a total package. Charming, funny, and compulsively watchable, he is one of the most distinctive performers to come down the pike in a while. And blending his vocals and grounded-then-out-there-then-grounded-again style of storytelling with live-mixed sound makes for a a highly entertaining evening.

In fact, my companions, avid theatergoers, said it was the best show they've seen in a while. I agreed, in that it is not like anything I've seen recently on the current New York theater scene, because it is so many things all at once.

Read the rest of the review here.

Both shows run through Sunday the 20th.