‘Connections’ kicks off summer theater fest season BY MARTIN DENTON (of nytheatre.com and indietheaternow.com) | New York City’s busy summer theater festival season kicks off on May 29 with Planet Connections, a four-week celebration of independent theater and social consciousness that is now in its fifth year. Its official moniker is “Planet Connections Theatre Festivity” [...]

Avant-garde, acoustic, other sounds make the coming months rock and swing  BY SAM SPOKONY | Whenever the seasons change, it’s like I’m seeing everything for the first time…again. Yes, maybe I could chalk that up to some rapid diminishment of long-term memory — a possible result of all those things I may or may not [...]

!BADASS! BURLESQUE PRESENTS: !BADASS! LOVES JANIS 3 FringeNYC veteran, Huffington Post blogger and classically trained soprano Juliet Jeske brings her killer voice and improv chops to the role of Janis, as she hosts a righteous tribe of highly sexualized performers gathered together in the service of “making tantric mojo to Joplin’s jaw dropping battle cries.” The [...]

BY RANIA RICHARDSON    |  The title, “The Broken Circle Breakdown,” says it all. The Christian hymn and popular country song “Will the Circle Be Unbroken?” refers to reuniting with a loved one in heaven — and in a film that foreshadows death, it’s easy to imagine a consequential nervous breakdown. Early on, we meet [...]

BY RANIA RICHARDSON The decline of a parent can be devastating — so why would a filmmaker turn a camera on his mother as she falls prey to Alzheimer’s disease? “It’s a project to tell your mom that you love her,” director Banker White says to his mother during the course of “The Genius of [...]

BY SAM SPOKONY  | Now this is romance. The knowing glances, the swells and falls, the awkward moments, the utter silence. It’s always nice to experience a piece of fiction in which the depth of emotion is really shown rather than told, and “Just a Sigh” follows that old mantra of narrative in all the right [...]

BY TRAV S.D.  |  “Bending Steel” is an unexpectedly moving documentary by director Dave Carroll about a guy with the quixotic dream of becoming an old-time circus strong man. Chris Schoeck, the film’s subject, is a 43-year-old physical therapist and self-professed loner who literally spends all of his spare time in a storage room straining [...]

BY SCOTT STIFFLER  |  Australian filmmaker Kim Mordaunt’s 2007 documentary “Bomb Harvest” charted the decades-long impact of unexploded wartime ordinance strewn throughout Laos. Of an estimated 260 million bombs dropped by the United States from 1964-1973 (in an attempt to render the Ho Chi Minh Trail unusable), some 80 million failed to explode on impact. [...]

BY STEPHANIE BUHMANN | Directed by the Academy Award-nominee Steph Green, “Run and Jump” follows the moving story of an Irish family in the wake of a tragedy. First, we encounter the mother, Vanetia Casey (excellently played by Maxine Peake). On a rainy day, she is picking up her husband Conor (Edward Macliam) from a hospital to [...]