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Tag: one-man show

  • With ‘nothing up his sleeve,’ illusionist takes Bethesda audience on a magic carpet ride – WTOP News

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    The world premiere of “Nothing Up My Sleeve: Simple Deceptions for Curious Humans,” now playing at the Bethesda theater through March 15, features illusionist Dendy, who takes the audience on a very personal journey through his life growing up in a small Midwestern town.

    Dendy on the set of “Nothing Up My Sleeve, Simple Deceptions for Curious Humans.”(Credit Margot Schulman)

    At its core, Round House Theatre’s latest entry is a magic show; but it’s so much more.

    The world premiere of “Nothing Up My Sleeve: Simple Deceptions for Curious Humans,” now playing at the Bethesda Theater through March 15, features illusionist Dendy, who takes the audience on a very personal journey through his life growing up in a small Midwest town.

    Dendy recounts being a lonely child. But once he got his first magic set, everything changed. He was hooked for life. And once he transforms himself into that little kid — complete with a lisp — in the first act, the audience is hooked, too.

    Dendy almost glides through the sure-to-win-awards set like a dancer. The strategic lighting plays a strong part, and the music subtly sets the mood without being dominant or a distraction. And the Mister Rogers-like wardrobe changes are lovely.

    Everything feels warm, cozy and just right.

    Though it’s described as a one-man show, “Nothing Up My Sleeve” is anything but. Dendy relies heavily on audience members to be part of the act. The man knows how to work a crowd.

    He mixes in the history of magic while paying homage to some of his heroes. Dendy is clearly a master magician, but he’s really a storyteller at heart.

    The show was conceived and co-written by Dendy and Aaron Posner, who also directed. The two previously collaborated (along with Teller of Penn and Teller) on a very different take of Shakespeare’s “The Tempest,” which was a hit at Round House in 2022.

    If all goes well, producers are hoping “Nothing Up My Sleeve” will get a U.S. tour down the road and perhaps a U.K. tour after that.

    I was reminded of the last live magic show I saw — way back in the mid-90s — “Ricky Jay and His 52 Assistants,” which was scintillating. Jay was a master showman and manipulator.

    The biggest difference for me: this show is warmer, kinder and gentler. You want to be Dendy’s friend. Most magicians can’t pull off that trick.

    “Nothing Up My Sleeve” is intimate, it’s funny, it’s heartwarming, it’s delightful. There’s nothing objectionable or offensive. It’s for adults but very appropriate for kids ages 10 and older.

    If you’re looking for amazing sleight of hand, disappearing objects and oh-my-gosh-how-did-he-do-that moments, you won’t be disappointed.

    But if you want more details about the show, you’ve come to the wrong place. To say more would be akin to explaining a magic trick, and that’s obviously a no-no.

    One other thing: In an era when shows and movies can sometimes push three hours, it’s nice to have one that’s barely two hours. It actually feels like less and leaves you wanting more.

    And that might be the show’s greatest trick of all.

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    Abigail Constantino

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  • Kevin Spacey Is Living in the Past

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    He’s been frank long enough.
    Photo: Mondadori Portfolio via Getty Im

    The days get shorter, a cold chill moves through the air, string lights sparkle in your neighborhood, a faint waft of pine floats your way, and inexplicably Kevin Spacey appears to do an odd bit of press. For whatever reason, the actor has a tendency to pop up around the holidays, typically in an ominous social-media video (like his “Let Me Be Frank” series), but this year, he is promoting a one-man music and storytelling show called Kevin Spacey: Songs & Stories that he has been trying to tour but has only been able to mount in Cyprus for an audience of “mostly real-estate developers.” The nature of the show — where Spacey regales the audience with old standards and stories from his childhood — is steeped in nostalgia, which is just about the only way to approach Spacey’s celebrity eight years after he was first accused of sexual assault by more than 50 men. The more he continues to receive accolades (even if they’re almost exclusively European ones), the more convinced Spacey becomes of his continued relevance.

    Though Spacey was acquitted on nine sexual-assault charges in the United Kingdom two years ago, Hollywood has more or less rebuffed the actor, forcing him into vaguely Mediterranean markets where he’s a staple in crime films. Despite that, however, Spacey told The Telegraph that he’s convinced “extremely powerful people” want to put him back to work. “So, my feeling is if Martin Scorsese or Quentin Tarantino call tomorrow, it will be over. I will be incredibly honored and delighted when that level of talent picks up the phone. And I believe it’s going to happen,” Spacey explained. He’s probably right that a call from either of those directors could change his fate, but it’s telling that the phone has yet to ring.

    Unwavering self-confidence notwithstanding, things don’t seem to be going so great for him. He told The Telegraph that he doesn’t “live anywhere,” and though he hoped to put up his show in Athens and Tel Aviv, the former show fell through because of his interest in performing in the latter city. “I would love to play Athens when they are more accepting of the fact that they should not be in the position of telling someone where they can and cannot perform,” he said. Maybe Spacey will connect with Tarantino if and when he makes it down to Tel Aviv, rather than wait for the director to call him. Just as Spacey has built a show around indulging in music and stories from the past, his points of reference for his fame include both blacklisted screenwriter Dalton Trumbo and beloved actor Jack Lemmon — two legendary men who have been dead a long time. Hindsight, however, is everything: Spacey sees himself as a figure of the past with the misfortune to live in the present.

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    Fran Hoepfner

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  • Kate Berlant Stays in Tune With Begged-For Facials and Fleetwood Mac

    Kate Berlant Stays in Tune With Begged-For Facials and Fleetwood Mac

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    A microsuede voice pipes in with a familiar prompt: Take this time to settle into your seat. Chatter in the room has quieted, lights dimmed, sitz bones rooted into cushioned chairs. A meditation of a sort has begun, only the collective attention is not directed inward (oceanic breathing, relaxed jaws) but rather onstage. There, the object of the evening’s 90-minute study is the irrepressible Kate Berlant, whose one-woman show Kate gleefully unravels the form, overlaying self-confessional tropes, performance anxiety, and a clown academy’s worth of facial gymnastics. A lip quivers, then slides into an elastic frown; her gaze toggles between hazy seduction and an antic cross-eyed flicker, which summons the usual silent-film-star associations. It’s especially fitting, given that there’s a camera positioned stage right, throwing a real-time, black-and-white projection onto the back wall of New York’s Connelly Theater. This face, looming and pliant and poreless, has not been yoked into submission.

    “There are nights where there are certain expressions I hold for such a long time that my cheeks burn,” Berlant, a Santa Monica native, says from a friend’s loaner apartment on the Lower East Side. (Kate, in an extended run under director Bo Burnham, is up through February 10.) “I just really never want to inject my face as long as I live. The white-knuckle grip on youth—I think I just can’t commit to a life of that.” The 35-year-old makes a good point, with a face that has been put to colorful use in Don’t Worry Darling, the recent A League of Their Own reboot, and, why not, Madonna’s tour announcement video; Berlant’s comedy special, Cinnamon in the Wind, also landed last fall. “I swear to God, I gua sha’d a line off my face,” she says reverently, pledging allegiance to the low-tech Chinese beauty ritual. But for her, lasting interventions would be a kind of “spiritual robbery.” The marks of the past make good material—even if filtered through her brand of self-aware artifice. 

    “I think it’s going to be very exotic to have wrinkles, to age.” It’s a forecast you might expect from someone whose stand-up sets include dubious displays of psychic powers, and who co-hosts the podcast Poog—a wink at Goop—with Jacqueline Novak (she also has a don’t-miss one-woman show). The wellness beat has its perks, as the two make clear at the top of each episode: This is our naked desire for free products. Berlant, notably without an understudy, has leaned in. She talks about the IV vitamin drips that have perked her up (“Maybe it’s placebo, who the hell knows”) and a particularly transcendent massage, gifted by one of her producers. “The massage therapist was just like, ‘You’re holding onto something for dear life in your hips.’ I think she’s right!” Berlant pauses, as if doing a mid-meditation body scan. “Guess what? I didn’t realize this until saying it out loud, but the pain stopped. She actually made it go away.” But the truest gift has been the permission to be herself. “I mean, I’m a hedonist. Last night I had a really fun dinner with a friend at Corner Bar—champagne and truffle pasta—and then today I’m going to try to just not speak and have broth,” she says. “The great thing about this show is that it allows me to feel like I’ve earned the decadence of doing almost nothing all day.”

    Monday, January 16

    9:15 a.m.: Wake up after nine hours’ sleep. When doing the show, sleep is my priority. Nine hours is what I try to hit; eight is like five for me. This week I’m staying at the Ludlow, which is a short walk to the theater. It’s perfect: The rooms are super tiny, but they’re very well appointed, I like to say. When checking into a hotel, I’m always like, “Can I have a high floor, away from the elevator, with a bathtub, please?” But let’s just say, at my tier there are no bathtubs.

    Today I have the day off. I’ve decided to commit to no social media for three days, after a couple months of not looking at all, basically. It’s hard to resist. Probably the best thing I can do for myself, more than anything, is just not be on my phone.

    9:30 a.m.: The first thing I do upon waking is spray my face with any essence. Jacqueline Novak turned me onto this and now I can’t live without an essence. My current one is this Josh Rosebrook Hydrating Accelerator. I also want to shout out Fend because I do that every day. It’s a mist inhalation thing that’s, in theory, supposed to minimize the chance of breathing in viruses.

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    Laura Regensdorf

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