FRICKS PRESENT POMP

 FRICKS

PRESENT

POMP!

Written and Directed

by

Courtney Campbell

Set and costume design: Devon Horn

Sound: Emma Magnus

Lights: Taro Baugham

Sound Engineer: Max Robinson

Couldn't find the Slipper room on my way to this show, Pomp.

We walked back and forth on Orchid street looking for the magical, "SLIPPER ROOM"

And with all the slush and snow almost came back. Then we saw two other ladies looking for the same

 place and we reached the slipper room. On opening the door and seeing the long flight of stairs almost

turned back but something was telling me, "Sweetheart, don't lose heart and go up."

I decided to listen to that inner voice and went up huffing and puffing.

Once I saw the intimate room, red curtain and the excitement at the bar I was happy for not giving up

and once the curtain went up, oh! what a show they put up. I was so excited and thrilled to see  

Wolfie (Amazingly talented, Emma Magnus) wearing a grand costume and Stanzi (Madison Iosia)

equally marvelous in a beautiful costume, I was so excited from the beginning to the  very end and trust

 me,

They didn't disappoint me.

It made me think of the old Lower East Side and the shows they used to do. Those fun things have been

replaced by commerce but while I was watching Pomp, I knew there is still hope for new talent,

 Imagination and brilliant sense of humor which sustain great shows.

Emma Magnus and Madison Iosia are hugely talented. They had enregy, great sense of humor, style

and novelty. It was such a pleasure to see actors like that. So free and commanding the stage every

 second and wonderful Dash Perry (Debt Giovanni) coming in and scaring the hell out of Wolfie.

(I was whispering to my partner, "Here comes the debt collector to give Wolfie a heart attack."

Poor Wolfie, Loaded with talent and debt...a bad combination but Emma Magnus dealt with it

in such a fun way.

Everything about Pomp was brilliant, the lights, the sound, the set, the costumes and the writing and

 direction by Courtney Campbell.

I haven't had such fun at any show for such a long time.

These actors should be any playwright's dream come true.

Thank god the staircase didn't influence me enough. One must never give up.

There is bliss after the long flight of stairs.

REVIEWED 

BY

BINA SHARIF

ATCA MEMBER

Editor/Publisher: artsinternational.blogspot.com

Email: binashariff@gmail.com

Mobile:212-260-6207

EVERYTHING IS ....

 EVERYTHING IS ...

A scolar, philospher said,

Trust no body

Believe nothing

Share nothing

Silence is golden

Be silent

And live, and live fully

Forget about anything you hear, anything, you are told, it's gossip ...

Gossip and fake nonsense

Mostly fake

Fake news

Fake success, 

Fake stories

Fake friends

Fake strangers

Fake families

Even fake enemies

Nothing you see,

Nothing you hear,

Nothing you are told...

Nothing is real...

Just forget about everything, very nonsense

And stop wasting your energy and time...

You hear?

And this is the last time I am telling you...

Really, you have wasted your life on this bull shit

And it is bull ahit

STOP IT

STOP IT

STOP IT

FROM THIS MINUTE ON...STOP THIS NONSENSE ABOUT ETHICS, DIGNITY

INTEGRITY. JUST STOP IT...

Remember what AURELIUS said and take care of only that.

AURELIUS SAID,

" LIFE IS MADE OF THREE THINGS

BODY

BREATH

INTELLIGENCE

From this day on you are going to concentrate only on those three things.

Body, Breath, Intelligence.

Promise?

Promise...

You broke all your promises before

Please commit to your new promise.

Otherwise your gods will be upset with you

and you don't want that.

Do you?

Oh!no. No, you don't want that.

What are you without your daimon, your god

Your daimon lives inside of you

You breath because of him

Your body is healthy because of him

nd you are not a moron

You have intelligence

And who gave you intelligence? and all other things?

Your god inside of you

And that is the only deity you don't pay attention to?

May god forgive you.

You talk about corruption, fake people, fake success, important hustlers,

all day long, day after day...

You have such energy? such stamina? so much time on your hands to waste

And all you have forgotten is your god who lives inside of you...

Who gave you breath, a healthy body and intelligence, the power to distinguish

between good and bad, between right and wrong, between peace and turmoil

between reality and fake unreal gossip...

ALL DAY YOU LISTEN TO FAKE NONSENSE...

ACTUALLY, YOU LIVE IT...

STOP, STOP, PLEASE STOP.

JUST DO YOUR WORK

THE THINGS YOU LIKE TO DO

THE THINGS YOU LOVE TO DO.

PEOPLE, YOU WANT TO TALK TO

PEOPLE YOU WANT TO SEE

PEOPLE YOU WANT TO HELP

PEOPLE YOU WANT TO LOVE...

LIVE A CLEAN LIFE

BE PROUD

BE THANKFUL...

MAMI BY MARIO BANUSHI AT NYU Skirball :UNDER THE RADAR

 MAMI, CONCEIVED AND DIRECTED BY MARIO BANUSHI AT NYU Skirball

REVIEWED BY

BINA SHARIF

Mami is a visually stunning and incredibly poetic surrealistic poem about the mother-child

relationship. It hardly has any dialogue and it's a slow moving and majestic tableau of memory,

and grief.

According to the program,"Mami" (mother) and "mam" (Food) reflects the neglect and the attention

towards survival and tender care. This visual poem of a play explore-life's cycle and history

through slow movement, dance and a stream of consciousness.

The surreal images being created out of very little, a little house upstage, dimly lit, darkness surrounding

wast grounds, a lonely pregnant woman coming out of that little house, carrying a bag, walking slowly

eventually disappearing in the darkness, then an old woman starving and in the need of assistance and

many more beautifully haunting images of young men and women intertwined naked in search of

intimacy and love wander away into the wilderness. It's a very rare image of a poem in any theater.

There are dim lights and haunting silences and rhythmic slow and melodious movements which are

to be remembered for very long time.

The fascinating silence in this intimate and tender play is much more important then any words

to tell such a deeply human story.

Mami is the highlight of under the radar festival.

BINA SHARIF

ATCA MEMBER

Editor/Publisher: artsinternational.blogspot.com

Email: binashariff@gmail.com

Mobile: 212-260-6207

DARK MATTER BY CHERISH MENZO AT PS 122, UNDER THE RADAR

 DARK MATTER BY CHERISH MENZO AT PS 122; UNDER THE RADR

REVIEWED BY

BINA SHARIF

The incredibly talented team, creating this unique performance/dance play is based in

Amsterdam/Brussels.

Cherish Menzo alongside her stage dance partner, Camilo Mejia Cortes explores

through the amazing dance movements which are, intense, challenging, aggressive,

frightening and tender at the same time.

These mesmerizing movements explore the reality of the body and it's public perception

as well as it's (afro) futuristic body.

The set has strips of white fabric smudged with black paint which hangs upstage behind

the dancers and is lit in blue color creating the effect of water dancing in the pool.

Their dance and the movements are at times intense and frightening turning abruptly

into intimacy, tenderness and love.

The dancer's silver teeth gleam and creates an out of body experience.

At one point the dancers pour buckets of black paint on the floor and then roll around

almost naked all over the paint creating haunting images of terror and bodily strength.

They twist and turn, run around sometime very close to the audience wearing black boots 

with high heels and incredible strength and confidence.

I have never seen such ferocious dance of intimacy, tension and fear.

It could have been called, "Dance of near death." It certainly keep the audience in awe

and amazement at the same moment.

Brilliant play.

A Tribute To Big Mama Thornton at Joe's Pub: Under The Radar

 A Tribute To Big Mama Thornton at Joe's Pub

REVIEWED BY

BINA SHARI

A Tribute To Big. Mama is Conceived and Performed by the Poet/Performer/Singer/Visual Artist

Pamela Sneed.

Set list

They call me big Mama

Hound dog

Little red rooster

Summer time

Go down Mosses

BAND

David Barnes: harmonica

Viva De Concini: Guitarist and musical director

Mara Rosenbloom: Piano

It is an enormously moving Cabaret (Queer-Focused) about the Black blues-legend Big Mama Thornton.

The story is being told through music, spoken word and monologue which explain the history of the

 birth of blues. That music was often stolen by the white singers/performers such as Janis Joplin and

 Elvis Presley and many more.

 Pamela Sneed's dynamic performance and rhythmic singing and the revelation

of the historical facts about racism towards black artists set the record straight. Most of them never

 made money and died broke.

We learn the personal history of Big Mama Thornton  and of her early life,  how she started to sing.

Big Mama learned to sing from her mother who was a gospel singer and her father who was a preacher

in the church. She sang in small venues as the opening act for Big stars and eventually won a prize and

 became the feature performer. 

After singing a few melodious songs, Pamela breaks the fourth wall, take her hat off and tell us  about

 her own history.

  She came to New York from Boston to study and reclaim her roots and Identity as well as Big

 Mama's struggle through the times and reclaimed Big Mama and herself as proud lesbian who were

 bold and thrilled to reclaim the origin of being queer black singers who gave birth to the blues long

 before it was considered the part of a politically correct list.

The most brilliant performance by Pamela Sneed with great humor, honesty and energy excited the

whole house. Audience were with her all the way rocking and roaring.

Wonderful band and songs to die. I loved the songs, all of them but can't seem to get, Hound Dog

out of my mind.

REVIEWED BY

BINA SHARIF

ATCA MEMBER

Editor/Publisher: artsinternational.blogspot.com

Email: binashariff@gmail.com

Mobile: 212-260-6207

UNDER THE RADAR FESTIVAL 2026: ALL THAT FALL

 ALL THAT FALL

BY

SAMUEL BECKETT

REVIEWED BY

BINA SHARIF

ALL THAT FALL is a one act Radio play written in 1957.

It's produced by the experimental company, MABOU MINES at PS122. 

Directed by: JoAnne Akalaitis and lit by Jennifer Tipton

Though Radio Plays are always an auditory experiences, here the director decided to stage it

with an enormous set design.

The photo graphs of the actors are shown in the beginning and then quickly removed.

The enormous and complicated set represents a rugged Irish town is by scenic designer

Thomas Dunn.

The houses in this town are tiny, like doll houses, beautifully lit. There is also a junk yard full

of broken bicycle, dirt filled tires which has been collapsed somewhere near a railway track.

One can see a beautiful blue river running through the town from the huge windows where the light

 shows the time of dawn and the dusk and the changing mood of the play.

One of the town dweller, Maddy Rooney (Voiced by Randy Danson) goes to meet her elderly blind

husband (Tony Torn) at the railway station and on her way she encounter other people from the town 

in an old automobile making crazy sounds. They offer her a ride.

The train has been delayed for some unknown reason but her husband Dan had not informed her of the

 delay and on the way back, the dark road and the expected thunder adds to their miserable conversation

during their trip back. They discuss loudly in a ferocious manner the idea of God-who-is the creator

of all that fall and end up in hysterics.

I throughly enjoyed the design, couldn't keep my eyes off the cute little houses lit like diamonds and the

beautiful river flowing outside the windows and the haunting shadows created by light which kept

 distracting me from the words. I tried very hard to concentrate but my mind kept wandering around.

Some words got lost though visually All That Fall is a marvel.

REVIEWED BY

BINA SHARIF

ATCA MEMBER

Editor/Publisher:artsinternational.blogspot.com

Email: binashariff@gmail.com

Mobile: 212-260-6207

RILKE: 1 MILLION WORDS, A SOLO SHOW AT TORN PAGE

                                                       RILKE: 1MILLION WORDS

A SOLO PLAY,  WRITTEN, PERFORMED AND PRODUCED BY

IVO MULLER AT TORN PAGE PERFORMANCE SPACE.

Directed by: Arieta Correa

Lighting by: Lucca Del Carlo

Costume by: Sophia- April Gross

Ivo Muller, a Brazilian actor has taken the challenge to do his solo play in English for the very first time

and he is pretty brilliant throughout his 60 minute long show in which he connects himself as an actor in

 2025 with one of the greatest poet, Rainer Maria Rilke who was born a Century ago in Prague and

 settled in Germany and created amazing and soul searching poetry in German language.

In an extremely intimate and fascinating space belonging to Late Rip Torn and Great actress, Geraldine

Page. The room is littered with tons of aged looking envelops with a school desk and a child's small

 chair. There is a pair of ruby colored slippers on the side. This minimalist approach enhances the poetry

and the idea of age and youth's freshness.

In 1903, a young poet took the courage to write Rilke a letter seeking his advice about how to create

 poetry. That correspondence continued till 1908 and Rilke wrote numerous letters to the young poet.

Actually, that's how I discovered the greatest poet Rilke myself. A book, "Letter to a young

 poet." as a gift and read the whole book in one sitting amazed by it's shear brilliance and the soul

 searching effort and desire to create something worthwhile. Rilke tells the young poet to reflect what's

the most important yearning within the deep depths of his soul, without expressing that desire he would

 perhaps perish and always feel like a child so he can have a sense of freshness and originality and child

 like truth and honesty in his reflection.

Ivo Muller uses his own inner desire to create as an actor in the present time remembering Rilke and

 also playing him in the very beginning of the show, anxiety stricken dealing with the numerous letters

 lying on the floor and suddenly changes into the actor paying homage to Rilke.

The show is mesmerizing and Ivo Muller is very capable and rooted in his creation sticking his courage

 to the moment and he succeed. He relates to us about his scattered identity as an immigrant where his 

foreign sounding name making it difficult to connect with the inner and  the outer worlds especially as 

an artist. 

Ivo Muller's struggle and dedication and love for Rilke is there all along and it absorbs us throughly.

I loved the show but at the same time wanted more of Rilke and his amazing poetry which I simply

 adore.

REVIEWED 

bY

BINA SHARIF

ATCA

Editor/Publisher :artsinternational.blogspot.com

Email:binashariff@gmail.com

Cell: 212-260-6207