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Stage Preview: City Theatre to spotlight variety on its 'dark' nights
Tuesday, January 19, 1999 By John Hayes, Post-Gazette Staff Writer
Before there was such a thing as niche marketing and customer demographic studies, variety was truly the spice of life.
Where: City Theatre, Hamburg Studio, South Side.
Nightclubs, speakeasies and show halls booked entertainers from diverse disciplines and strung their acts together with emcees, the best of which could also sing, dance and tell jokes. The idea was to provide something for everybody.
In recent years, the entertainment market has become so glutted with options that profits from the busy weekends are often offset by three or even four nights when it's more cost-effective to remain closed. In theater, they call those "dark nights."
City Theatre is putting its dark nights to good use by providing non-mainstream entertainment on its satellite stage next door at the Hamburg Studio. The Dark Night Showcase Series happens one Tuesday night each month. It's so ambiguous, even its organizers aren't really sure what to call it. While they say it isn't quite smoky and risqué enough to be called a cabaret, it isn't exactly an Ed Sullivan-style variety show, either.
The only thing certain is that it's part of City Theatre's Hamburg Partner Program, which makes the 100-seat studio theater available to entertainers who are not otherwise linked to City Theatre.
"It's as varied as we can make it, but there are stipulations," says co-organizer Daniella Topol, City Theatre's associate producing director. "Every act has 10 to 15 minutes and it has to be new and original. It's so rare to have an environment where you can experiment with new work and try things out without having a big, blown-up performance. Some of the work is work in progress. We see it as a springboard to new work."
Since the series started in November, it has showcased musicians, actors, poets, dancers, monologists and performance artists. Tonight the showcase includes its first visual artist.
"Artists in Pittsburgh have a hard time finding somewhere to work with an audience before they're ready to perform for the public," says performance artist Adrienne Wehr, one of the Dark Night co-organizers. "Sometimes you need that in-between level because feedback can tell you a lot."
Wehr says the showcase is also exposing fans of individual styles to new works in genres they wouldn't ordinarily patronize.
Tonight's show spotlights a short theater piece by members of the New Horizons company directed by Jeffery Carpenter, storyteller Mike Ivan, singer/songwriter Molly K, the Runaway Puppet Theater, modern dancer Nick Daniels, satirist Preston Simpson, cabaret comic Sharon "Mama" Spell and emcee Mark Whitehead, a Dark Night co-organizer. Also on display is the visual art of Hannah Niswonger.
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