Sunday Scoop 4/23/15 - What's Happening This Week or Coming Up Soon

Introducing New Jersey's Newest Professional Baseball Team

Who: The Sussex County Miners

Where: Skylands Stadium

             94 Championship Place

             Augusta, NJ

When: Starting in May, 2015

For the first time in several years, there will be professional baseball at Skylands Stadium in Sussex County, NJ. The Sussex County Miners are a new team in the CanAm League, an independent professional baseball league which also includes the New Jersey Jackals as well as four (4) other teams in the U.S and Canada.. The Miners will have their  first game at Ottawa, Canada on Friday May 22, 2015 at 7:05 against the Ottawa, Champions.  Their first home game will be Monday May 25 at 7:05 against the New Jersey Jackals. Prior to the first game there will be several exhibition games including the following home games:

                                      Saturday May 16 at 1:05 PM against the New Jersey Jackals

                                      Sunday May 17 at 2:05 PM against the Rockland Boulders

For more information about the Sussex County Miners go to http://sussexcountyminers.com and continue to follow this blog as we will be featuring more about the Sussex County Miners throughout the season.

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The New York Children's Theater Festival

What: The New York Children's  Theater Festival

Where: The Player's Theatre

            115 MacDougal Street

            New York, New York

When: Now through May 17, 2015

Featuring the following shows:

The Sock Who Lost His Mate - (April 24th-26th)
A musical adventure about a sock as he looks to rescue his mate and liberate
all the socks who have gone missing on laundry day!

Sue Ology & the Case of the Possibly Haunted House -(May 1st-3rd)
Join Sue Ology & friends in a musical mystery at her new
- and possibly haunted - house!

Help Save the Monkey! - (May 8th-10th)
A play with puppetry fun about 8 year old Howard and 80 year old Lillian
who must rush to save a monkey about to land from space!

The Meanest Birthday Girl - (May 15th-th)
It's Dana's birthday, and she's gonna do whatever she likes!
But when a present causes problems, she needs to rethink her birthday behavior...

The festival will include:
                                        Free Crafts
                                        A Magic Wand Parade
                                        Cast Meet and Greets
                                        Workshops
                                        Face Painting
                                        Free Festival coloring book and crayons for each child
                                        and more

For more information or to order tickets go to www.nyctfest.org.

For a discount on tickets use the code: LAPT

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New Exhibit Opening at the Children's Museum of the Arts

What:     Far, Far Away

Where: The Children's Museum of the Arts

             103 Charlton Street

             New York, New York

When: May 14 -September 6,  2014

Artworks featured in this exhibition will captivate and inspire us by evoking dreams of 

places that may only exist in our imaginations. In practice, many of these works highlight 

the artist’s process of manipulation. At the heart, these works celebrate storytelling and 

the power of visual art to weave a tale without using any text at all. Some works consist 

of dream-like fantasies filled with details and discoveries, while others address issues of 

youthful turmoil, awkward transitions between childhood and adulthood, or of ever-

changing identity or illusion. Audiences are urged to fill in the blanks for themselves, 

identify with the familiar and non-familiar, and venture into the unknown, all before 

returning home safely.

The exhibit features the works of :

Meghan Boody is a New York-based artist whose work often includes a young 

heroine facing dark forces that induce internal change. Her lighthouse project 

follows a fictional young woman living in the 19th century English countryside as 

she embarks on a journey of self-fulfillment.

Julie Heffernan’s work encourages the viewer to meander through spaces, across 

rivers, get lost in thickets, and get singed by forest fires. Blending art historical 

canon and interior narrative, she creates fairy tale-like landscapes, often 

referencing natural disasters, such as Hurricane Katrina and the BP oil spill.

Much of Gail LeBoff’s work features large-scale mysterious landscapes, such as 

her Glacier Girl series. Inspired in part by her own unfinished childhood dreams, 

the works combine photographs of Icelandic glaciers and aerial cloud photographs,

with images of precarious young ice skaters taken at rinks around New York City. 

The resulting images capture the uncertainty and fragility of childhood at moments 

of transition, yet ultimately the sense conveyed is that of resilience, curiosity, 

wonder and hope.

Ethan Murrow uses film and photography to create theatrical narratives that are 

then translated into large-scale graphite drawings that feature outrageous 

innovators and absurd explorers. Murrow draws upon a “childhood determination to 

succeed and an adult obsession with glory and heroism” in his work.

Joe Fig recreates the workspaces of contemporary painters and sculptors. Fig 

interviews each of his subjects before taking study photographs, watching the artist 

in action, and measuring everything in the studio, in order to create miniature 

models that take four to eight weeks to construct. Almost all the details in his 

dioramas—ladders, benches, rolling carts, artworks, and so on—are made by him; 

the rest are manipulated items originally intended for dollhouses. He then uses his 

dioramas as models and studies for his paintings and photographs.

Also on view in the Pepperman Family Fine Arts Studio is a solo exhibition of Jenny 

Fine’s photographs from her series In Character. The photographs on view were made 

in collaboration with students grades Pre-K to 12th at The Wellington School in 

Columbus, OH. Continuing her interest in storytelling, she shared her process of image 

making with the students at Wellington. The students were asked to think about a family 

narrative and develop those narratives into images, then create characters, design 

costumes, and construct backdrops and props for the photographs. Through a series of 

local field trips the students enacted these collective narratives for the camera.      

************************************************************************                        News From O & A Co.

What: Permission

  

What: Lucille Lortel Theater

            121 Christoper Street

            New York, New York

When: May 20 - June 7, 2014

Permission the latest show by Robert Askins the author of Hand to God has been given an extended run even before it opens. Previews of the show which will be presented by MCC Theater at the Lucille Theater are currently scheduled to start on April 29, 2014. Opening night is scheduled for May 20, 2015,

The show will star:

                                   Justin Bartha

                                   Elizabeth Reaser

                                   Nicole Lowrance

                                   Talon Monahon

                                   Lucas Near-Verbrugghe

It will be directed by Alex Timber.

In Permission, Eric and Cyndy are looking for some direction. They’ve decided to follow the lead of their friends Zach and Shelley and make the real life practice of Christian Domestic Discipline the foundation of their marriage. But restructuring their lives and their union according to role play and a new moral code upends everything they knew--and took for granted--about one another, their friends, and more importantly, who really holds the power.

MCC Theater - founded in 1986 as Manhattan Class Company - is driven by a mission to provoke conversations that have never happened and otherwise never would.  Led by Artistic Directors Robert LuPone, Bernard Telsey, William Cantler, and Executive Director Blake West, MCC fulfills its mission by producing new work that challenges artists and rewards audiences, and by nurturing the development of playwrights and students through a variety of literary and education programs that enable nearly 1,200 New York City high school students to find – and use – their own unique voice each year through the creation and performance of original theater pieces.  MCC currently produces its annual season at the Lucille Lortel Theatre (121 Christopher Street) and will open its own two-theater complex on West 52nd Street and 10th Avenue in 2017.  Notable productions include the recent hits Punk Rock; Hand to God; Small Engine Repair; The Village Bike; The Other Place; Really Really; The Submission, winner of the inaugural Laurents/Hatcher Foundation Award for new American plays; The Pride; Fifty Words; Nixon's Nixon; The Grey Zone; the Tony Award-winning Frozen; the Pulitzer Prize-winning Wit; the re-imagined production of the musical Carrie; and eight plays by Playwright-in-Residence Neil LaBute, including Fat Pig, Reasons to Be Pretty and Reasons to Be Happy.

For more information about Permission or about MCC Theater go to www.mcctheater.org.

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What: The 6th Annual Lilly Awards

Where: Playwrights Horizon

               416 W. 42nd Street

                 New York, New York

When: Monday June 1, 2015 beginning at 5:00 PM

The Lilly Awards recognize and honor women of distinction in American Theater. The event will be hosted by Lisa Kron. 

The Lilly Awards will honor the extraordinary contributions made to the American Theater by women, as well as announce the $25,000 Stacey Mindich Prize, which funds a new work by a female playwright, and the Leah Ryan Prize, which awards an annual cash prize to an emerging woman playwright and produces a reading of the winning play in New York City.

Over 100 theater professionals were asked for their nominations for the 2016 honorees. The presenters and winners will be announced shortly.

Following the ceremony, guests and honorees will attend a cocktail reception at the West Bank Cafe (407 West 42nd Street). 

The Lilly Awards were started in the Spring of 2010 as a way to honor the work of women in the American Theater. The founders of The Lillys are Julia Jordan, Marsha Norman and Theresa Rebeck. The awards are named for Lillian Hellman, a pioneering American playwright who famously said “You need to write like the devil and act like one too when necessary.”

Previous winners who have won the Lilly Award include Mary Rogers, Dominique Morisseau, Kristen Anderson-Lopez, Jeanine Tesori, Liesl Tommy, Kelli O’Hara, Pam MacKinnon, Leigh Silverman, Anne Kauffman, Sarah Ruhl, Kristin Chenoweth, Annie Baker, Susan Stroman, Lynn Ahrens, Tina Fallon, Amy Herzog, Nina Arianda, Diane Paulus, Katori Hall, Tina Howe, Estella Parsons, Lynne Meadow, Ntozake Shange, Jessica Hecht and  Lois Smith.

For additional information about the Lilly Awards (including a list of all past recipients), visit www.thelillyawards.org.   

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And that's the scoop. Tune in tomorrow for another Talking Topic.