Tag Archives: Jessica Farr

Mad Cat’s Well-Named Mixtape Is Quirky, Passionate, Puzzling And Did We Forget Funny?

Mixtapes are by definition quirky, passionate, uninhibitedly self-expressive to the edge of self-indulgence, sometimes puzzling, sometimes touching, sometimes hilarious. Mad Cat Theatre Company’s theatrical/cinematic Mixtape 2 is all that — a compilation of playlets, snatches of poetry, music videos and short films by the region’s leading progressive, avant-garde theater.

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Mad Cat’s Blow Me Delves Into Surreal World of Doomed Fashionista Isabella Blow

Playwright Jessica Farr and director Paul Tei create a fever dream in Mad Cat Theatre Company’s Blow Me, depicting a tragic death spiral, relieved by copious droll dancing-at-your-funeral epigrams tossed off by Blow and her coterie like a latter day Algonquin Round Table, featuring a bravura performance by Erin Joy Schmidt.

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Busy Days At Mad Cat: Two Scholarships And World Premiere of Blow Me

Mad Cat Theatre Company has a reputation for providing a stage to young artists seeking more adventurous fare. But now, for the second year, it’s also putting its money behind its commitment to developing future theater professionals. The Miami-based troupe has awarded its Nine Lives Scholarship Awards to Christian Frost as outstanding high school senior and Vanessa Elise as outstanding college senior.

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Mad Cat’s Comedy Looks At Fashionista Isabella Blow

Editor, consultant and fashion icon Isabella Blow lived a tumultuous life that encompassed trend-setting style, two marriages plagued by infertility, championing designers like Alexander McQueen who then left her behind, coping with her brother’s drowning, battling ovarian cancer, trying electro-shock therapy to counteract depression and attempting suicide several times. So, of course, Mad Cat Theatre Company is turning her life into an entry in the annual South Beach Comedy Festival for two shows on Wednesday, April 17.

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This Cat Lady Purrs At Mad Cat

Kristina Wong’s Cat Lady at Mad Cat Theatre Company is downright hilarious while shot through with pathos and insights into the search for human connection. It seems to be exactly the offbeat but accessible exploration of loneliness that Wong and director Paul Tei hoped to create.

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Spraying Felines And Pickup Artists Populate Kristina Wong’s Cat Lady At Mad Cat

Who besides Mad Cat Theatre Company would take a talking cat, who persistently pees on the rug, and a professional pickup artist instructing wannabees how to pretend to be genuine – and meld them into a unified statement about fighting loneliness? But synthesizing disparate elements in Kristina Wong’s Cat Lady fits the aesthetic of the company opening its 13th season this week.

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Mad Cat’s Hamlet Dog and Pony Show Makes You Laugh, Think and Scratch Your Head

Playwrights Paul Tei and Jessica Farr’s Hamlet Dog and Pony Show at ad Cat Theatreis a stylized mashup of Shakespeare, Brecht and 21st Century performance art that examines existentialism versus nihilism by setting the vacillating Dane in a fantasia of modern American politics and power. Like an atom careening around a chain reaction, it is by turns inventive, self-indulgent, exciting, boring, and, above all, sometimes insightful, sometimes incomprehensible. And entertaining.

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Mad Cat’s Dog and Pony Show Won’t Be Your Parents’ Hamlet

South Florida playwrights Jessica Farr and Paul Tei hope that for all the philosophical profundity and political comment, their world premiere of The Hamlet Dog and Pony Show on July 26 delivers the wry, irreverent and idiosyncratic serio-comedy that Mad Cat Theatre has specialized in for 12 years.

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