click on tickets above for tickets and details on 'RPM' by Paul Tei at Miami Made Festival 2012 at the Arsht Center
mad cat shows on 3.2 and 3.3
This season made possible by the Miami Light Project, the Arsht Center, WLRN, Delaplaine Champagne and with the support of the Miami-Dade County Department of Cultural Affairs and the Cultural Affairs Council, the Miami-Dade County Mayor and the Board of County Commissioners
COMPANY MEMBERS
Artistic Director - Paul Tei ● Senior Production Stage Manager - Veronica Soderman ● Production Stage Manager and Set Desig ner - Elaine Bryan ● Lighting Designer - Sevim Abaza ● Sound Designer - Natan Samuels ● Sound Designer, Music Arranger & Composer - Matt Corey ● Musician - Brian Sayre ● Acting Company - Sofia Citarella, Ken Clement, Erik Fabregat, Troy Davidson, Betsy Graver, Joe Kimble and Erin Joy Schmidt ● Assistant Stage Manager - Margaret Prusner ● Ann Kelly - Business Manager ● Board of Directors - Paul Tei - President, Joe Kimble - Vice President, Ann Kelly - Chairman, Andrew Goldberg, Jason Lobel, Errol Portman, Mike Sastre and Brooke Whitley.
OUR MISSION
To create exciting new theatre. Provoke. Enlighten. Challenge.Tease. Taunt. Anger. Please. You. Us.Them.It's all about original works (sometimes not so much, due to the fact we allow ourselves the right to contradict).In search of a new audience.To move. Shake. Rattle. Rock & Roll.You.Us.Them.The constant search for the truth in life.No matter how ugly.Beautiful.Bizarre. Absurd.Cruel.Our lives are a constant flip-flop of pain and pleasure and also pretty damn funny.We hope we can always find a way to balance these emotions and come up with something that is ultimately good for.You.Us.Them.
Mad Cat Theatre Company, Inc. is a 501(c)(3) Not For Profit Organization. All donations are tax deductible to the full extent allowed by law. Donations may be sent to: Mad Cat Theatre Company, Inc., c/o Paul Tei, Artistic Director, P.O. Box 347621, Miami, Florida 33234-7621. Thanks for your support and see you at the theatre!
Michael & Mary Ellen Peyton, Andrew Delaplaine, Pio & Anne Tei, Jerome & Rita Cohen, Jack & Mary Jane Gandour, Ann Kelly & Steve Anthony, Chris & Stephanie Demos-Brown, Dana Casper, Tony Findstrom, Nancy Doyle, Mike & Hildy Sastre, Jason Lobel, Brooke Whitley, Elaine Bryan, Melissa Santiago, Jack B. Lipkind, Joseph Adler, Doug & Marzi Kaplan, Al Alschuler, Monica Soderman, John & Mary Ann Schmidt, Richard J. Simon, Melissa Almaguer of White Rose Miami, Wendy Cinnamon, Scott & Kerry Shiller, Luis Ramirez, Cheryl Dunn Bychek, Caroline Canaday and hopefully you!
2011 Miami New Times • Best New Script for So My Grandmother Died, Blah Blah Blah by Paul Tei and 100 Creatives • Mad Cat's Founder, Paul Tei 2010 Carbonell Award • Best Sound Design • Matt Corey for BroadSword and Miami New Times • Best Ensemble and Best New Play for BroadSword 2009 Miami New Times • Best Theatrical Production for Some Girl(s) 2008 Miami New Times • Best Theatre ● Silver Palm Award • Best Ensemble for Some Girl(s) 2007 Sun Post • Best of for Animals and Plants: Production of a Play, Director – Paul Tei, Set Design – Sean McClelland, Sound Design – Natan Samuels, Lighting Design – Sevim Abama, Curtain Speech and Opening Night Party ● Miami New Times • Best of for Animals and Plants: Production of a Play, Actor – Erik Fabregat and Supporting Actor – Kei Berlin ● Miami New Times • Best of for Mr. Beast: Director – Paul Tei ● Miami New Times • Best Theatre for Drama 2006 Miami New Times • Best of for Painted Alice: Supporting Actor – Erik Fabregat 2005 Miami New Times • Best Fringe Theatre Company ● Miami New Times • Best of for Betty’s Summer Vacation: Supporting Actress – Lorena Diaz 2004 Carbonell Award & Curtain Up Award • Best Supporting Actress – Lorena Diaz in Betty’s Summer Vacation 2003 Miami New Times • Best Fringe Theatre Company ● Sun Post • Best of for Cope: New Play & Playwright – Paul Tei ● Carbonell Award • Best New Play & Playwright – Ivonne Azurdia for Tin Box Boomerang 2002 Sun Post • Best of for Seventy Scenes of Halloween: Production of a Play, Sound Design – Nate Rauch, Ensemble and Lighting Design – Travis Neff ● Carbonell Award • Best Lighting Design – Travis Neff for Portrait ● Curtain Up Award • Best of for Portrait: New Play, Playwright – Ivonne Arurdia, Director – Paul Tei and Supporting Actor – Kevin Reilley 2001 Miami New Times • Best Comedy for Here In My Car
VENUE INFO
Arsht Center
1300 Biscayne Blvd.
Miami, Florida
NOTE: March Show Only
back at the Light Box this summer!
Miami Made Festival 2012
CARNIVAL STUDIO THEATER
Mad Cat Performs on March 2nd and 3rd
ADMISSION IS FREE!
Free FIRST ACCESS PASSES will be available beginning at 12 noon on Monday, February 27 at arshtcenter.org or in person at the Box Office (limit four per person).
Passes provide guests with guaranteed admission.
$35 VIP FESTIVAL PASSES are available NOW!
VIP FESTIVAL PASSES have limited availability and are the only way to guarantee priority access to the theater and guaranteed seating to every MIAMI MADE FESTIVAL 2012 event.
CLICK HERE TO PURCHASE A VIP FESTIVAL PASS!
The Adrienne Arsht Center and Mad Cat Theatre Company partner once again to bring Miami audiences two 45 minute spins of an inventive new play written by acclaimed director/writer/actor PAUL TEI. RPM takes a tour with DJ Spin as he falls out of love with fame and searches around the globe for what hes lost. Featuring Jim Camacho as Spin, Joe Kimble as Shakey, Paul Homza as Willie, Jennifer Lauren as Elizabeth, Rannemaria Rajala as Elizabeth 2nd, Rachel Chin as Big Eyes and Giordan Diaz & Sofia Citarella in ensemble roles. Molly Gandour, producer of the Academy Award-nominated film "Gasland" co-directs with Tei this music-driven exploration of the club culture.
PHOTO GALLERY
POSITION ARROW OVER PHOTO FOR
DETAILS AND TO ZOOM PHOTO
THE BEGINNING ● Mad Cat was founded in the fall of 2000 by its artistic director, Paul Tei. After leaving Juggerknot Theatre Co. in 2000, he set out to start his own theatre company and his own rules. It was always a dream for Paul to create a theatre company and form it much like a band, with a core playwright writing original scripts, core acting members, and a team of talented designers rounding out the group. Highly influenced by Steppenwolf’s idea of a core company, that allows the audience to grow with them, and the late night theatre in Chicago, which introduces irreverent pieces that are generally geared to younger audiences. He decided to implement this into his own company and take it from there.
THE NAME ● Mad Cat….The members felt they wanted a name that represented them and the company. Mad – meaning crazy, insane, and at times angry seemed appropriate in more ways than one. Cat – for several reasons: 1) due to the obsession most of the members have with their own pet cats, 2) the different mood swings of a cat, and 3) they wanted something that sounded like a rock-n-roll band.
INFLUENCES ● Mat Cat is highly influenced by several areas of art: movies, pop art, magazines, comic books, thrift stores, bowling alleys, pari-mutuels, dive bars and television. We are a theatre company for people looking for an alternative to your mom and pop’s theatre company.
PRODUCTION HISTORY ● Helluva Halloween, Shepherd’s Pie, Here In My Car, Portrait, Shoot, Seventy Scenes of Halloween, Tin Box Boomerang, Cope, Fell In Love With A Girl, Trembling Hands, Betty's Summer Vacation, Arful Dodgers, Action, Matt & Ben, Waiting for Godot, Painted Alice, Terminal Baggage, Mr. Marmalade, Animals and Plants, Everything Will be Different – A Brief History of Helen of Troy, Mister Beast, Some Girl(s), Mixtape, Broadsword, Viva Bourgeois, Shepherd's Pie at the Colony Theater, BroadSword (again, but this time at the Arsht Center), Going Green the Wong Way (Miami and San Francisco and other places in between), The Preservation Society, So My Grandmother Died, Blah Blah Blah and Macbeth & the Monster.
POSITION ARROW KEY OVER IMAGE FOR SHOW INFORMATION AND TO ZOOM IMAGE
MAILING ADDRESS:
Mad Cat Theatre Company, Inc.
c/o Paul Tei
Artistic Director
P.O. Box 347621
Miami, Florida 33234-7621
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Arsht to house Mad Cat show
By Christine Dolen
When Paul Tei first noticed Kristina Wong, he was sitting in the audience watching her perform her show Free? at the 2008 edition of the South Beach Comedy Festival. Tei, founder of Miamis Mad Cat Theatre Company and an actor now juggling recurring roles on two television series, was impressed.
I had a great time watching her, says Tei, who introduced himself after the show and stayed in touch via e-mail. She was a little Spalding Gray, a little Saturday Night Live, a little Mad Cat. What she was doing was where I wanted to go with the company a sociopolitical agenda put across with humor.
Tei and Wong, both of whom now live in Los Angeles, have become friends and artistic collaborators. They have teamed for yet another Wong solo show, Going Green the Wong Way (shes great with tongue-in-cheek titles). Under the Mad Cat banner, the piece begins a three-night world premiere run on Thursday in the Carnival Studio Theater at Miamis Adrienne Arsht Center for the Performing Arts.
Wongs best-known piece to date is a full-length solo show, Wong Flew Over the Cuckoos Nest , about the high rate of depression, mental illness and suicide among Asian-American women. The play is improbably funny, but Wong acknowledges that it is draining to perform, and her life as a touring solo performer can be isolating.
Tei, who plays Barry the money launderer on the made-in-Miami series Burn Notice, moved to Los Angeles last year to take a shot at expanding his career in television and movies already he has landed another recurring role as manager of a pair of skateboard stars in the Disney series Zeke and Luther.
His first week in town, Tei noticed that Wong was performing her show Whoring for Hollywood . He went; they reconnected and became great pals. About a year ago, he went to a Santa Monica art exhibit devoted to Los Angelenos who live without cars, Wong being one of them. In Wongs performance there, Tei discovered the nugget of Going Green.
At the gallery, Wong used a slide show to help her tell the story of the vegetable oil-powered 1981 pink Mercedes she thought would fit her profile as a passionate environmentalist.
Saving the planet became my Joan of Arc mission at a young age, says Wong, a third generation Chinese American who grew up in San Francisco. The one thing I could be perfect at was being a fanatic about the environment.
I documented my experience because I naively wanted to show people how easy and fun it is to have an environmentally friendly car. Instead, it became a total money pit and a nightmare. It caught on fire. It was traumatizing. So I decided not to buy another car.
Tei loved the way Wong talked about her carless life: using public transportation or a bicycle; walking and, when she has to go someplace hard to reach or fetch something heavy, posting her need for a ride on Facebook.
I told her I wanted Mad Cat to bring her to Miami, Tei says. We started working on a script. I asked her a bunch of questions. It was like building an album: We had our Stairway to Heaven, so we had to build the rest around it. We wrote things on stick ems and put them all over her walls. Then we workshopped the show at a piano bar, at a Comedy Central space and in Las Vegas.
Now Tei has come home, bringing his friend and collaborator to perform a piece he describes as not a traditional one-person show.
For one thing, Wong interacts with three assistant stage managers who play characters called Reduce, Reuse and Recycle. Tei hired a choreographer to provide grace notes of movement. The show has a design team and the Arsht Centers marketing muscle.
Im not used to all this help, Wong says. Paul is amazing as a director. Im not used to being presented and supported by an entire company. And everyone gets paid!
Tei, who has been taping TV pilot season auditions with the help of his parents while home working on Going Green, will head back to L.A. after the shows brief run. But he swears that, despite his relocation, Mad Cat isnt going anywhere. In fact, hes planning another original piece for the companys future home at Miami Light Projects new space next summer.
I feel Mad Cat needs to be a Miami company. Theater is so different in L.A. Nobody wants to pay for it, he says. Even if a lot of the faces change, Mad Cat will continue to be a creative outlet for me, like a live journal. Theater is what I love. Its in my DNA. Whether people like it or not, I know the work will be talked about.
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Review: Kristina Wong will do anything for the environment -- and for a laugh
CHRISTINE DOLEN
Kristina Wong is a funny -- no, make that an extremely funny -- performer with a wildly imaginative, sometimes raunchy sensibility.
As unafraid of mocking herself as she is of spoofing anything and everything, Wong brings a take-no-prisoners approach to her style of comic theater. Nothing in Wong's world is too edgy, crazy or gross to be used in the service of making theatergoers laugh. And oh do they laugh.
Now at Miami's Adrienne Arsht Center for the Performing Arts for what seems like a nanosecond, the Mad Cat Theatre Company's world premiere of Going Green the Wong Way flows from Wong's environmental passion. The Los Angeles-based performer really has been an eco activist since childhood, but what she does in Going Green flips the script on the stereotype of the humorless green warrior.
Wong, director Paul Tei and his Mad Cat collaborators have grown what could have been performance art or a stand-up routine into a fully developed theater piece.
Wong's ``set'' (a miniature view of the Hollywood Hills, their famous ``Hollywood'' sign changed to ``Hollywong'') is lined with children's playthings, including letters that spell out naughty words.
On one side of the space is an enormous pile of plastic bags, which Wong will put to a most unexpected and lascivious use. Over the other dangles a sparkly, twirling version of the Earth, and it is there that Mother Earth (the voice of Kristina Raines) occasionally speaks to the eco enthusiast, calling her ``Young Wong'' and trying to steer her toward environmental crusades with greater impact.
But Wong remains foundering and feisty, much to the delight of Mad Cat's roaring crowd.
She takes the audience on a fictionalized, funnier version of her journey from annoying middle-school scold to a grown-up who tried, really tried, to lessen her environmental impact by driving a 1981 pink Mercedes (she named it ``Harold'') that ran on vegetable oil. Driver and car had a fiery parting -- as Wong demonstrates via a painfully funny slide show -- so now she navigates the Los Angeles area's 500 square miles on buses she has shared with people, poop and a praying mantis.
Going Green ventures into ugh-inducing territory more than once. Wong, for instance, gives an audience member a ``gift'' of a brown-and-yellow roll of used toilet paper. She talks about washing out and reusing sanitary pads and tampons, and one of her funniest bits (really, it is) involves inserting and removing a ``diva cup'' in lieu of such sanitary supplies. But before you've finished cringing, the fast-talking Wong is on to something else.
Comic eco cohorts -- Troy Davidson as Reuse, Eli Peck as Recycle and Margaret Prusner as Reduce -- give Wong the chance to play off different characters, enhancing the production's theatricality. The show will be going, going, gone before you know it, its three-day, four-performance Arsht run ending late Saturday night. Which is too bad: Wong's sometimes-blue Going Green is a hoot.
Christine Dolen is The Miami Herald's theater critic.
Kristina Wongs comedy goes green the right way
By Bill Hirschman
Kristina Wong's show "Going Green the Wong Way" plays at the Arsht Center through Saturday.
Comic Kristina Wong loves dancing near the precipice of what society considers acceptable topics in mixed company, then diving over it. She revels in the profane and the gross, not for shocks sake, but simply as tools in her kit that she sees no reason not to employ. For instance, the funniest section of her satire Going Green the Wong Way on Thursday involved nearly obscene physical contortions during a disastrous demonstration of a reusable feminine hygiene product.
Her convention-obliterating comedy is perfectly in tune with the anarchic ethos of the shows producer, Mad Cat Theatre, and its director, Paul Tei. Not every portion of the 90-minute world premiere at the Arsht Center is hysterical; some sections land a little flat. But large stretches are uproarious. Essentially a one-woman show, Going Green is an allegedly autobiographical account of Wongs frustrated attempt to be environmentally responsible. Theres not much of a message here other than lampooning self-serious activists who push their altruistic causes past the point of practicality.
The first three sections are theatrical skits complete with choreographed movement, interaction with the audience, morphing lights, sound effects, silly props and a set featuring a four-foot high heap of used plastic bags. The last two sections are more static standup routines that she has honed over the past year, augmented with a slide show. The first scene introduces 11-year-old Kristina who sings a hip hop anthem to her classmates at Herbert Hoover Middle School on the importance of being careful custodians of the environment. In response, the voice of Mother Earth recruits Wong to become an environmental martyr.
Then we watch the 17-year-old going door to door selling memberships to the Sierra Club and discovering lust along the way. The third skit finds her as a young adult in Los Angeles hawking the aforementioned feminine product. The fourth section the initial core of the evolving script has the present-day Kristina describing her ill-fated attempt to survive life in Los Angeles by driving a 1981 pink Mercedes Benz (dubbed Harold) that ran on vegetable oil and eventually caught fire.
The final section details her post-Harold life relying solely on Los Angeles Byzantine network of mass transit. Her slide show offers tips for using the system, certainly funny but not on a par with the earlier material. Although much of her comedy lies in her attitude, she does have a talent for penning lines such as In Los Angeles, two people count as a carpool. Its like Bruce Jenner saying hes a Kardashian when hes only their stepfather. It helps that Wong is winsome, winning company with a wry sense of humor accompanied by an indefatigably cheery enthusiasm. She and Tei wisely draw in the audience from the first moment, encouraging them to use party favors left on every seat: recycled water bottles filled with beans that can be rattled at Wongs prompting. Troy Davidson, Margaret Prusner and Eli Peck are sort of like magicians assistants who give her someone to play off when she needs a character to talk to. While the trio doesnt have much to do, Kristina Raines does invest a little comic verve as the voice of Mother Earth, represented by a shiny ball hanging from the rafters. Tei, one of Mad Cats founders, met Wong at a South Beach Comedy Festival and then hooked up with her when he moved to Los Angeles last year to seek a film career. The script they developed is California-centric, but they have tossed in a handful of Miami references. Check your priggishness at the door and youll find yourself grinning much of the evening.
Mad Cat Theatre Unearths Elvis and Moliere Via Viva Bourgeois by Brandon K. Thorp
Molière's Le Bourgeois gentilhomme was first presented to the Sun King, Louis XIV, in October 1670. It was a play and a ballet (a comédie-ballet) that constituted, at the time, extremely sharp social commentary. The story is set in the home of Mr. Jourdain, born poor but now a member of the bourgeois thanks to his father's success as a cloth merchant. Jourdain's one wish in life is to rise above the ranks of the bourgeois those petty strivers and nouveau riche and become a proper member of the aristocracy. Into his home streams a parade of teachers and flattery-peddlers he has hired to groom him and provide him with proper gentlemanly airs. Their attempts fail. Time and again, Mr. Jourdain's uncultured behavior reveals the stamp of his lowly origins, and he spends the play looking ridiculous. Taste, we learn, is something you cannot buy. Three hundred forty years later, Le Bourgeois gentilhomme still feels like sharp social commentary, but when pulled from the context of 1670s France, its exact targets become difficult to parse. Is petty striving the object of contempt? Or the unsatisfied middle class? These questions are extra-interesting when considering Viva Bourgeois, a new adaptation of Le Bourgeois gentilhomme by Paul Tei of Mad Cat Theatre. In Tei's re-imagining, the targets could also be crackers, Southerners, or ugly Americans. Or and this is the most dangerous possibility Elvis Presley. For this is now a play about Elvis, the soul-cracker of Beale Street who would one day himself be compared to the Sun King. The idea is so obvious, so perfect, that Tei must have giggled like mad when it first occurred to him. Of course! Mr. Jourdain is Elvis! What other rich man spent so many years so deeply resentful of the gentry's refusal to accept him as one of its own? Who spent more money trying to become worldly? Nobody. So Viva is set in Graceland instead of the French countryside. The year is 1971, and the parade of teachers and flattery-peddlers wandering through the King's abode now includes a martial arts master rather than a fencing master. (Remember how Big Elvis loved his karate? And how he used to interpolate karate moves into his stage show to demonstrate what, exactly? Toughness? As though his truck-driver cred and alley-cat yowl weren't enough?)That the Mr. Jourdain/Elvis transubstantiation is an inspired twist is demonstrated by the ease with which all of Molière's other ideas slide into Elvis's living room. There is a moment, in both the original and in Tei's adaptation, when a hired philosophy teacher is reduced to instructing Jourdain/Elvis on the basics of spoken language. In both plays, Jourdain/Elvis is stunned to learn that language is broken down into "prose" and "verse" and that he has been speaking in "prose" all of his life without knowing it. It's a funny thing to see in both plays, but only when it's Elvis making the discovery may we place the moment that follows in meaningful context. Elvis, sick of hearing his wife telling him how ridiculous he is, asks her: "What's that? What'm ah speaking, raht now?" "Garbage," she says, lovingly. Playing Mr. Jourdain/Elvis is Eric Fabregat a good-natured, game, and goofy actor who is also the only South Florida thesp who could have done this role any justice. Looking a little more like Roy Orbison than Elvis, he nevertheless nails it. Every Elvis you could want is present and accounted for in Fabregat's performance the aw shucks charmer, the bungler, the drug addict, the rock star, and the egomaniac, as well as the charismatic monster who could dominate a room with the thrust of a shoulder, the shivering of a hand, or a wink. Most marvelously, Fabregat sings like Elvis, at least at the beginning of the play. (His throat tires out later on, and he begins to sing like Erik Fabregat.) Fabregat is surrounded by the largest cast Mad Cat has ever assembled, most of whom do their jobs adequately and a few of whom somehow steal the stage from Big Elvis for a moment or two. First among equals is Erin Joy Schmidt, playing Mrs. Jourdain/Priscilla Presley, who brings both down-home country sass and even-headedness to the chaotic Graceland, where she's beginning to feel less and less at home. Notable too are Caitlin Geier's bubbly, lusty incarnation of Mr. Jourdain's daughter, Lucille, and Troy Davidson's performance as Leon, Lucille's dancing, singing suitor. It'd be wrong to say too much about that dashing young fellow, for his whole performance comes as a delightful surprise. It is enough to note that later in the show, when he is forced to speak in a made-up Turkish dialect, he intones the magic words, "Mama-se, mama-sa, ma-ma-coo-sa" in a high, feathery tenor that made me a little weepy. Viva Bourgeois has only two significant problems, and they are related. One is Tei's over-reliance on Molière's script. Le Bourgeois gentilhomme is ultimately the story of two love affairs: one between Mr. Jourdain and a wealthy widow he wishes to seduce; the other between Lucille and her suitor (named "Cleonte" in the original). One of these must go. Together, they drag the play out and bog it down in a comedy-of-errors quagmire that feels both creaky and irrelevant. The other problem is Viva's cruelty. Even after thinking about it for two days, I am uncertain whether Viva Bourgeois is making fun of Elvis Presley or if its targets are the forces that drove him mad those same jealous, classist forces that would cause biographer Albert Goldman, through a haze of smug schadenfreude, to write of Elvis's loathing for his "ugly hillbilly pecker" and to refer to the King's clan as "deracinated," as though deracination were a moral failing. If Viva Bourgeois is having a go at those forces, then bravo. If, however, it is their latest manifestation, then boo. It is too easy to have a whack at Elvis, and it would be too easy for future productions of this play to turn him into a crude and unfeeling parody. When he refuses to allow his daughter to marry the self-made Leon, insisting that she marry a born gentleman instead, it is only Erik Fabregat's warm, silly acting that keeps us from hating the guy. Thankfully, Fabregat is not going anywhere, and he'll redeem every under-workshopped second of this promising little play with his twitching hips and Kingly vibrato. There will be time enough, after this run, for Tei to excise hunks of Moliere's fine but needless intrigue, leaving us a Viva Bourgeois that's a little less conversation and a little more action.
Viva Vision With Mad Cat's Viva Bourgeois, Tei's creativity is King By Mary Damiano
Mad Cat artistic director Paul Tei is one of the more larger than life figures in the South Florida theatrical community as well as one of the most underrated. That's not to say that Tei's work has been overlooked--in 2008 he walked off with Carbonell Awards for best actor and best supporting actor, and he shared in the best ensemble award that year. But he's also a man of vision, a writer, director and artistic director brimming with creativity. Tei's work is consistently terrific, and often that vision is taken for granted, especially when his work is behind the scenes.
Tei's quirky, original sensibilities go full throttle with the latest Mad Cat production, Viva Bourgeois. As the company's artistic director, he's once again created a show that's entertaining yet substantial. As a writer, he's adapted a French classic by Moliere, finding commonality between a fictional, 17th century character and Elvis Presley. As a director, he's assembled a cast of Mad Cat regulars and new faces who form a tight ensemble, and a team of designers who turn Mad Cat's scrappy, office building space into a complete, sensory experience. He also throws a great opening night party, in this case, complete with Elvis Presley's favorite foods, whipped up by his mom, Anne Tei.
In Tei's adaptation of Moliere's The Bourgeois Gentleman, the setting has been updated to 1971 Memphis and the titular Mr. Jourdain has been reimagined as a cross-between Elvis Presley and Jethro Bodine, a hillbilly member of the nouveau riche. Mr. Jourdain is a social-climbing country bumpkin with a good heart who surrounds himself with glad-handing sycophants eager to carve out a piece of his largesse for themselves. Mr. Jourdain (Erik Fabregat) confuses crass with class, favors with friendship and tackiness with taste. He lives in his tricked out mansion with his down-to-earth wife (Erin Joy Schmidt), his lovesick daughter Lucille (Caitlin Geier), and his sassy housekeeper Nicole (Betsy Graver). There is also a parade of Mr. Jourdain's teachers, who school him in music, dance, martial arts and philosophy.
Mr. Jourdain's social climbing leads him to seek a noble marriage for Lucille, even though she's in love with honorable working man Leon (Troy Davidson). Mr. Jourdain's desire to transcend his folksy roots for a more sophisticated life leads him to being duped into a ludicrous scheme.
Erik Fabregat channels the King of Rock and Roll right into Mr. Jourdain. He's got the sneer and the quiver down, and he wears Elvis's iconic white polyester suit perfectly. Although Mr. Jourdain is often a buffoon, Fabregat's funny and touching performance turns him into a tragic, poignant figure. Fabregat has had a string of hit music-themed performances lately, beginning last fall when he roared through Mad Cat's Mixtape as Meatloaf, then as part of the precise ensemble of GableStage's production of Adding Machine, then last April as a heavy metal singer in Mad Cat's production of Marco Ramirez's Broadsword. Fabregat is becoming the face of a new kind of musical theatre.
Davidson's performance is as infectious as his laugh, and he does a mean Michael Jackson homage. Schmidt is wonderful as Mrs. Jourdain, a down-home voice of reason, and Graver is all sass and attitude--let's call it sassitude--as the Jourdain's maid.Daniel Campbell's costume design is 1970s' mod, a mix of new and vintage--one of Davidson's costumes is actually his own father's clothes from that era. And Schmidt should hang on to that fringed denim bra top--it's super hot. Sound designer Matt Corey sets the tone of Viva Bourgeois with a whimsical mix of Elvis classics, 1970s pop tunes and original compositions. Sevim Abaza's lighting is fit for the King, with larger than life flourishes. The set, by cast member Joe Kimble and Tei, walks a fine line between 1970s sunny and terribly tacky, but it's appropriate for the show.
Perhaps one of Tei's greatest accomplishments is that everyone involved with the show looks like they're having as great a time as the audience. Viva Bourgeois is a free-wheeling ride, a 20th century Moliere for a 21st century audience. Don't miss it.
Moliere meets Elvis. Mad Cat Theatre imaginatively adapts Moliere's 1670 satire about a nouveau riche boor who longs for respectability. BY BILL HIRSCHMAN - SUN SENTINEL
Admittedly, it's a bizarre premise: picking up Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme, Moliere's 1670 satire of middle-class greed for social standing, and plopping it down in 1971 Graceland with Elvis as the buffoon who chases genteel respectability with a bulldozer. But Paul Tei and his anarchic Mad Cat Theatre Company transform this classic into a hilarious evening called
Viva Bourgeois! featuring Erik Fabregat in one of the funniest performances this year as The King after he discovered carbohydrates.
Tei has imaginatively adapted Moliere and directed his repertory family in this goofy spoof about a nouveau riche boor who lusts for acceptance from a cultured class that he cannot see is morally bankrupt. He endangers his own marriage by pursuing a parasitic aristocrat and then blocks the happiness of his daughter who wants to marry a ``commoner.''
This would have been more pointedly uncomfortable if it had been set in 2009 SoBe among the Real Housewives of sybarites. But Tei has long been fascinated by the resonances between Moliere's Monsieur Jourdain and Elvis, the consummate 20th century man with immense talent and stupendous wealth and whose ``taste is in his wallet.''
Tei finds much of his comedy in the collision of Moliere and Memphis. Many passages are lovingly lifted almost word for word from Moliere's grandiloquent 17th century speech, followed by such grandiloquent asides as ``Stick a sock in it.''
But often Tei just trusts the master. As in the original, Elvis is delighted with his innate nobility when a teacher explains that Elvis' normal speech is ``prose'' -- which Elvis thinks is in the same rarefied sphere as poetry. ``I've been speaking prose for 30 years and didn't know it!'' he boasts proudly in a Tennessee twang.
But the consistent jewel under Tei's guidance is Fabregat, who wanders about in a sublime mixture of genuine befuddlement and misguided certainty, echoing his turn as George W. Bush in Mosaic Theatre's Dirty Story. The fact that Fabregat is too short and doughy to ever be mistaken for Elvis makes his dead-on impersonation in a black wig, white jumpsuit and yellow-tinted glasses just that much funnier. And when he sings into an overmodulated microphone some pseudo-Elvis songs set to Moliere's lyrics, the effect is a gold-plated hoot.
The cast's wackiness and the enthusiasm over their performances is infectious, especially the chameleonic Joe Kimble as a hippy-dippy songwriter and doubling as a venal politician hitting up Elvis for a loan. But other than the always wonderful Erin Joy Schmidt as Elvis' wife. So many elements are infused with wit and imagination: the set including a zebra-skin couch, the so-accurate-it's-embarrassing period costumes by Danielle Campbell, the pre-disco choreography of Caitlin Geier and, above all, Matt Corey's original score with so many Elvis-like riffs that you'll swear you've heard the tunes before. It's a raucous, rollicking evening from Florida's most irreverent company.
Review | Playwright proves sharp with `BroadSword'
BY CHRISTINE DOLEN
CDOLEN_MIAMIHERALD.COM
Making terrific theater doesn't take huge sums of money, the work of a famous playwright, performers with an endless string of big-deal credits.
When vision, creativity and talent align, the smallest theater company can become the purveyor of major artistic pleasures. So it goes with Mad Cat Theatre's production of BroadSword, Marco Ramirez's rich new play about the heavy reunion of a metal band.
BroadSword is still a work in progress, a script that Ramirez will continue to refine until the play gets its official world premiere somewhere -- which it clearly will, since the award-winning Hialeah native is a rising star in the theater world.
Even so, for this workshop production, BroadSword gets the full-on Mad Cat treatment: a stellar cast featuring some of South Florida's most inventive performers, first-rate production values including Joe Kimble's fabulously detailed set, even an original metal song played by actors who also happen to be great musicians.
Directed by Paul Tei, who also crafts a tart and funny performance as drummer Nicky Green, BroadSword flows from Ramirez's interest in music, myths and fantasy, but it also underscores his ability to work those elements into a solid and involving story. BroadSword involves deals with the Devil -- mesmerizingly played by a dapper, peanut-gobbling Gregg Weiner -- but it is also observantly grounded in issues that resonate with the mere mortals watching it.
Ramirez weaves loyalty, betrayal, self-interest, love, loss, secrets and more into the story of BroadSword, a never-quite-made-it heavy metal band from New Jersey. Both Nicky and bass player Vic Viporino (Scott Genn) still live in Rahway, having traded their rock star dreams for jobs that keep food on the table.
We meet them in the cluttered basement ''bat cave'' that was home to Richie Gomez, the crazy musical genius who wrote the band's songs -- and who, some months earlier, up and vanished. Everyone has come to mourn and remember, though Richie's body was never found. And after Becca Worth (Sofia Citarella), the no-longer-young girl from across the street shows up, so does Richie's brother Tony.
Tony ''Trash'' Gomez (Erik Fabregat), it turns out, is the guy who broke up the band when he got a better offer. He and Nicky have issues, and within minutes the two are verbally slicing and dicing each other: If Tei and Fabregat, two intricately adroit actors, were fighting with real broadswords, there would be blood all over the basement.
Mad Cat Theatre Dabbles in Diabolism with Broadsword
By Brandon K. Thorp
Published on April 14, 2009 at 7:15pm
Broadsword, a new play showing at the Mad Cat Theatre Company, is the story of a fictional New Jersey metal band that never went anywhere. The guys broke up 19 years ago. Their former lead guitarist, a reclusive genius named Richie, has disappeared. He had spent his life in his mother's basement, working out arcane musical formulas on his guitar and cataloguing them on a series of cassettes. Broadsword, written by Hialeah's Marco Ramirez (who is finishing his studies at Juilliard), is set in that basement, the same basement where the band also called Broadsword once practiced, and where its remaining members meet now for the first time in two decades, on the occasion of Richie's funeral.
