So NR and I finish the first show and we have the most pleasant walk around the corner to get the car. We visit a beautiful community garden and have a pleasant conversation with some neighbors and just exalt in the beautiful day. Back to the FDR Drive and there is practically no one on it. We make it downtown to Houston Street in maybe nine minutes! We abandon the hoopty in the most expensive parking lot in Manhattan and head north to Houston. Your Shrewish Princess the Elder thought we’d nosh at Russ and Daughters but there was no good place to have a picnic and we wanted to sit down; so we went into Katz’s Deli. NR had never been to such a place before and had no idea what to get. We were accosted by the usual rude Jewish waiter who demanded our order because he was busy. When he realized that SP the E is not a tourist, he got really surly. We fearfully gave him our order and he got genuinely disappointed. “Nun sendvich?” he asked plaintively, truly disheartened. So we ordered a pastrami on rye to go to bring home for the Very Smart Prince. The fress at Katz’s was sublime. SP the E had the gigantic matzo ball and the large chocolate egg cream. Shrewish Princess the Younger and Miss Prada Priss texted in that all is good and obscene amounts of money have been spent. What a great day. Even better, when we were getting up from our table at Katz’s some old guy asked us if, “you girls are leaving?”!!

NR and I started to make our way to the next venue. We window shopped and shop shopped and spent some time in the best toy store in town. We settled in for the next show. We smelled divine carrying around the huge sendvich. People wanted to eat us and we were in the right place.

Did you know that Chlamydia is not a flower? I just found that out and I am so mortified because I give chlamydias to everyone I know. Oh dear……all of the things I learned from Chalmydia Dell’arte: A Sex-ed Burlesque. Chlamydia toured here at the 2010 Fringe Festival and the Washington Post liked it and said,”… none of the material seems dirty.” Don’t listen to The Washington Post. The show is dirty.

Chlamydia is a multi-media, film and live performance, lesson in sexy stuff for the ladies. GiGi and Meghann deleted deleted deleted and deleted. Romeo and Juliet deleted deleted onanism deleted deleted climax deleted deleted deleted exhausted satisfaction deleted. Then they deleted deleted deleted and we all laughed while GiGi deleted deleted and deleted and Meghann watched. Since this was about women would the female name for Onan be Onana…Onanine? Onanette? A very informative cooking show sketch deleted deleted chocolate frosting deleted deleted and deleted shmeared deleted big rubber deleted deleted phallus deleted muscular hydrostat deleted long deleted. Deep deleted deleted shaft deleted and deleted tickling deleted tea bag.…I think you get where this is going and it went there. Glossas.

We particularly enjoyed the talking deleted and the tete a tete between the girl and her puppetized deleted had me thinking that someone could use a visit to Brazil because the puppet had a strange mustache. But a girl and her deleted should always share a laugh. The Sugar Plum Fairy danced the deleted and had to lift her deleted and found it all deleted. Deleted Deleted Deleted and then Meghann deleted. GiGi lay down on the floor and deleted deleted and deleted while we watched. How come I didn’t know about that? Expletive expletive.

Husbands should see this show. There is no longer any reason for a girl to feel frustrated when Meghann and GiGi will actually show the boys what they need to do. There should be more educational theatre like this. Think of the field trips.

This show is very funny. NR and I thought we would plotz and the girl next to me actually did plotz during the sketch about the husband asking for deleted and deleted. Now we know how that‘s done. There are other sorts of folks who would plotz in a different way, but thankfully no one in our audience was offended by anything in this show and everyone had a riotous time. We are all sexual beings and there is nothing about life that should not be open to polite discussion except deleted and deleted. It turned out to be one of the presenter’s birthday so she did a hoochie c**chie dance and removed her deleted and deleted deleted pasties deleted spinning around deleted little boobies.

Meghann and GiGi are very talented and funny women. They are committed to their art because only true believers would do what they do in front of other people. But, let’s get real here, there are some who wouldn’t call this art…merely raunch. It seems to this reviewer that the younger generations of women performers are willing to debase themselves unnecessarily to prove a point. The claimed underlying message of the show is information and power to prevent sexually transmitted disease and to preclude unexpected and unnecessary pregnancy. That is a serious conversation and the material here is just too raw and coarse for the gravity of the other discussion. The statistics are just too sobering and the show is so embarrassingly funny that an audience should refuse to let the seriousness interfere with what is very private and intimate humor. The show stands on its own as a hysterical, if off-color, and entertaining evening out. Not everything has to be educational to justify itself; although if I was a better and more responsible mother I might start having these conversations with SP the Y….or just send her and the Boyfriend to this show, I guess.

As far as production quality goes, we were in a dive and the production quality matched the venue; although I think that was the point of the show. The puppetized deleted was very cleverly conceived and created. I laughed a lot and I had a great time; but in all honesty, as the mother of a young actress, this is not the type of performance or show I want to see my own daughter do. But I also acknowledge that I am more than willing to see other mothers’ daughters appear in these shows without wondering what those mothers think.

None of us are ever too old to learn something new. NR and I left the theatre and wandered around the Lower East Side feeling very sexy and getting the winks from the boys as we passed by. We retrieved the car and travelled uptown via 6th Avenue to collect The Giddy Girls at the Westin on 8th Avenue and head home. We all certainly had a lot to talk about and Miss Prada Priss had 50 Shades Of Gray on her iPad. Talk about frosting the cake…lol.

The Very Smart Prince thinks he’s such a smarty, but there are things that aren’t taught at the Smarty Pants Institute of Technology and he is going to see Chlamydia Dell’arte: A Sex-ed Burlesque as soon as I can get him there.

Cast

• GiGi Naglak
• Meghann Williams

Production Crew

• Producer: Ying Lee
• Associate Producer: John Nehlich
• Written by: Meghann Williams, GiGi Naglak
• Stage Manager: Catherine M. Pidgeon
• Lighting Design: Evan Roby
• Sound Design: John Glaubitz
• Original Music: Meghann Williams, Aaron Cromie, John Glaubitz
• Graphic Designer: Amy Scheidegger

Disclaimer: Chlamydia Dell’arte provided two complimentary media tickets to ShowBizRadio for this review.

Mae West said, “Men are all alike–except the one you’ve met who’s different.”

Road Trip!!!! So your adventurous Reviewer, her date, NR, and two tagalongs, Shrewish Princess the Younger and Miss Prada Priss, hereinafter referred to as The Giddy Girls, pile into my hoopty for a trip into The Big Apple. It’s smooth riding all the way up until the George Washington Bridge which is backed up past Fort Lee. So I spot an opening in the dividing wall to the Martha and pretend to be a police cruiser on a call….cutting into another major road artery or else still be stranded in traffic waiting to get onto the Georgy. Entrance to the Martha is moving…slowly…but moving. We make it over the Hudson River and it turns out that the backup is all about the exits off the bridge to I 95 North on the left and the Major Deegan on the right. No one’s going into the city except us. Soon we are speeding down the FDR Drive until 139th St. or so; so I get off the highway and we take Park Avenue down for 20 blocks. There are actual legal parking spaces on 109th St.!!! And we don’t have to parallel park. We stop for lunch at a cute little Italian joint on 109th and 1st Avenue. We stroll to 2nd Avenue and NR and I put The Giddy Girls into a cab and instruct the driver to take the girls as far away from us as possible. They called us later from the Hamptons.

We saunter to the Poet’s Den Theatre on 108th and find ourselves in the most charming small venue we had ever seen. We are here to see George A. Peters II in his one-man show, Any1Man. Young Peters is the man who is different. He is refined and elegant in his mien and speaks naturally like one imagines an angel would speak; and he is as fine an actor as anyone seen on any stage today. Your Shrewish Princess the Elder is in love.

My Crush has created a series of male characters, seven of whom spoke to us this time. Peters, in a nut shell, sees a man as being in whatever room…or space… he is in at the moment. As he moves from metaphorical room to room and morphs into each man Peters’ inherent elegance remains. He moves languorously from monologue to monologue and his commentary on humanity and how each man relates is original and thought-provoking. Peters is a man of intellectual power mixed with compassion and forbearance and his thesis is about choices and the implications of the choices we make.

We took our seats and then a homeless man popped up in the audience creating a disturbance. This is The Bishop, homeless for 4 years and 4 months. Today is his anniversary. The Bishop was not always in this wretched state and he doesn’t see himself, necessarily, as wretched. He acknowledges a certain amount of uncleanliness but hopes we understand his situation. He finds it somewhat comical…. the efforts we go to every day to avoid him on his street corner. He finds it amusing that we don’t want to know him but he knows us better than our most intimate companions. He knows how much money we make, what we eat and what our moods are because he is observing us every day while we make every effort to avoid him. He can predict every choice we will make on any given day; he has known us for so long. The Bishop is a thoughtful and intelligent man; he feels bad that we have avoided him for so long because he knows us so well and he does still like us anyway. Life is precarious enough that any one of us could become The Bishop and all he asks from us really is empathy…although some spare change wouldn’t hurt either.

The other men we meet this afternoon are Willy, Victor (short for Victory), Man Tan, Wesley, Adam and Slain. Slain is central to the understanding of men in this show because he is still a teenager. Slain is perp walking and scowling from under his hooded sweatshirt and covering threatening song lyrics from gangsta bands. He wants us to fear him; he makes every effort to induce us to fear him…because…in the end…he is just a boy and he is really no threat to anybody. He is engaging in every young man on the edge of manhood braggadocio…except in his case such normal boyhood antics may be a predicate for misunderstanding resulting in incarceration and/or death. The choice to behave in this persona implies deadly ramifications for one such as Slain.

Pythagoras…or Edwin Markham, if you went to Ethical Culture or Fieldston…. said, “Choices are the hinges of destiny.”

Adam, the very first man, is bewildered by his condition. He is the MAN but his companion, who he sees as simply an extension of himself, is not seeing him as the MAN. She has her own will and he’s just going along to get along and….oops….fig leaf time. (He did this scene in his panties…squeee…)

The technical direction and direction of this show is tight and the production crew are not amateurs by any stretch of the imagination. Director Carra Patterson has her own stunning curriculum vitae and has presented for us an intimate episode in a perfect venue.

Any1Man is a universal portrait of all men and the lives any single man could be leading depending on his own choices combined with what the fates may have in store for him; even Slain makes the choice to try on a gangbanger persona instead of that of Neil DeGrasse Tyson because, “it is better to be feared than loved, if you cannot be both.” The show is always on tour and one need only search for dates and cities on the web site. Peters’ outlook on manhood and his illustration of some types persuaded your besotted reviewer to further appreciate her Very Smart Prince.

Cast

• The Bishop, Willy, Victor, Man Tan, Slain, Wesley, Adam: George A. Peters II

Production Crew

• Executive Producers: Benny I. Walk, II; George A. Peters, II; George and Ruby Peters
• Director: Carra Patterson
• Written by: George A. Peters, II
• Stage Manager: Vincent Ferguson
• Lighting Design: Justin King
• Original Music: George 2.0

Disclaimer: Any1Man provided two complimentary media tickets to ShowBizRadio for this review.