Wide Eyed Productions had the privilege of producing Lisa Ferber's short play The Return of Toodles von Flooz as part of our A Girl Wrote It series in 2011. Shortly afterwards, we partnered with River Wide Productions and co-produced Ferber's script as a short film. Directed by our Artistic Director, Kristin Skye Hoffmann, and starring the talents of Brianne Blessitt, Colin McFadden, and Lisa Mamazza, this 14.5-minute film noir satire is a gorgeous ton of fun.
We are celebrating this delightful film with a party and screening on Tuesday, March 22, and we want you there!All proceeds will help fund our collaboration with Mastodon Theatre Company to co-produce the world premiere of Keep, a new play by Francesca Pazniokas. Keep will run at The Barrow Group Theatre this spring, and Stephanie C. Cunningham, Wide Eyed Production's Associate Artistic Director, will direct.
Please join us in your 1940's best - or just come as you are from the office, we know it's a Tuesday - and help us celebrate with a gin cocktail worthy of Toodles' Betty O'Boozenberg. We'll have a photographer on hand and our step & repeat, so you can say you were there, plus raffle prizes, beer and wine available, and a great time with members of the Wide Eyed and Mastodon family. And our raffle items? Well, they're the bees' knees. You could take home:
2 tickets to Irish Rep
2 tickets to WIDOWERS HOUSES at TACT onMarch 30
2 tickets to Inside the Actors Studio
2 tickets to Second Stage
2 tickets to FLY YOU FOOLS at the Pit in April
1 Level 0: "The Joy of Improv" class at the PIT
1private Haunted Manhattan Greenwich Village tour for up to 6 people
4 tickets to the Greenwich Village Literary Pub Crawl
4 tickets to the Brooklyn Literary Pub Crawl (plus 4 t-shirts)
Haircut and blowdry at KennaLand in Greenpoint by Davey Partain
Cocktails for 2 at Reclamation Bar in Williamsburg
2 tickets to Broken Box Mime Company's 5th annual Black and White ball in late June
...And there's more where that came from!
Your $20 advance ticket purchase gains you admission to the party and screening, *plus* five raffle tickets and one signature cocktail. Now that's a deal!
Please join us for a Masquerade Ball on March 7, 2015 in celebration of eight years of producing brave, bold, and culturally relative new texts. All proceeds to benefit our 2015 theatrical season.
Wide Eyed Productions is proud to announce its first annual
Gala event, which will be taking place on Saturday, September 28th.
We caught up with Wide Eyed Board member and Events chair Melissa Johnson to
find out what delights await our guests attending this very special
celebration.
Let’s talk about
glitz and glamour first. Can you tell us a little bit about Dune Studios, where
the event will be held this year? What’s your inspiration in terms of décor for
the Gala?
Dune Studios is a beautiful professional photography studio and event
space in the heart of SoHo. Guests will travel
up to the top floor of the space at 121
Varick Street, and be greeted with stunning views of
the city through the almost floor to ceiling windows. The space itself is very
minimal and we don’t want to take away from that too much, so you will see a lot
of small details in the décor. Twinkling lights, hints of gold accents and our
signature red and black here and there.
I hear we have some fantastic sponsors
for this year’s event, yes?
Absolutely! We are very lucky to have such amazing
support for this event. Our official sponsor for this event is Stone Creek Bar and Lounge, which has been such a huge supporter of Wide Eyed for many years. Jon
Pirozzi, the owner, is a good friend to Wide Eyed and will be providing the beer
for the evening, as well as something small for our swag bags. We’ve also just
gotten the support of a local vineyard Lieb Cellars from North Fork, who will
be providing some of our wine for the event. We are very excited to
have them involved! Also good friend
and huge supporter to Wide Eyed, Tim Butterfield, provided us with some delicious wine, as well. He was the first one to come out and hand me a donation
several months ago; now the big night's just a couple of weeks away!
Word is we have some truly impressive items
up for bidding in our silent auction.
Can you share with us what items will be crossing the auction block?
Thanks
to Charity Fundraising Packages,
we have some truly amazing celebrity autographed memorabilia to auction off
this year. We've never held a silent auction like this before, but they are such an
amazing organization to work with, that we just had to give it a shot. Some of the items guests will have an opportunity to have bidding wars
over: An electric guitar signed by Sir Paul McCartney; a framed Star Wars Movie
Poster signed by 10 of the original cast members; a framed, autographed
photograph of Michael Jackson; a framed, autographed photograph of Taylor Swift; an
autographed record album signed by U2; and an autographed record album signed by
Billy Joel!
Those are just the celebrity items. We also have restaurant gift certificates,
exercise equipment, and headshot sessions. There truly is something for everyone
so bring those checkbooks and credit cards because all donations are tax deductible!
As a performing arts organization, it just
makes sense that Wide Eyed would include live performances during the course of
the evening. What can our glamorous Gala audience expect to see and hear on
September 28?
We will start the evening with a little background music in the
way of a live jazz piano set provided by Asen Doykin,
then we will get into the performance program for the evening. Guests will
see a short set by Wide Eyed’s new improv troupe, Real. Good. Spies. I am very
excited about that; they are hilarious and I know they have been working very
hard! After their set, we are going to get a sneak preview performance into a
play that we read during our "Winks" series: Dan Kitrosser's Dead Special Crabs.
I can’t say too much about what we will see, but I guarantee it will be highly
entertaining.
I hear we may have some paparazzi and creative photo opportunities at the
event. I don’t want to give away *all*
the secrets, but are there more special treats in store for our Gala guests?
All
I can say is dress to impress, because you will be having your photo taken! And
be ready to have some fun with us, because we want to enfold all of our guests
into the Wide Eyed world, and by the end of the night we should be able to show
everyone what it feels like to be on stage with us.
I know that some
people would love to come to our first Gala, but time or distance may make that
a challenge. How can our fans still participate as “patrons of the arts” from a
distance?
We completely understand that not everyone will be able to make it
out to this event this time, but if you would still like to support Wide Eyed
Productions and our next season, which is going to prove to be our most
impressive undertaking yet, we appreciate any and all donations no matter how
big or small. Donations can be made via our website,
and all donations are tax-deductible. Also, look out for announcements for
ways to get involved in our upcoming season! We are going to have lots of
opportunities for artists in our area. We
are so thankful to our supporters everywhere; there are so many that have been
with us from the beginning and we would be nowhere without our families,
friends and fans. We have been waiting to throw and event like this for years,
and we can’t believe it’s finally happening. We just know those who do attend
will not be disappointed.
Final question: Are tickets still available? Where
can those be purchased, and can our last minute guests still get tickets at the
door?
Tickets are absolutely still available, and can be purchased through our website.
You will also be able to get tickets at the door (credit card only), but I
suggest getting them ahead of time. Also, I can’t stress this enough: The event
starts at 7pm. I would highly suggest showing up on time! There will be a lot
going on that starts right at 7, and some events will not be happening all night. You won’t want to miss anything! We'll see you at the Gala!
White Liars– the web series written, directed, shot and starred in by Wide Eyed company and board members Andrew Harriss and Neil Fennell – launches its second season with a new episode on September 29. While not a direct project of Wide Eyed Productions, the web series has featured the talents of many of our company members. We caught up with Andrew and Neil to discuss their project. Be sure to check out the Season 2 trailer on youtube (you can also watch it below)!
Please tell us about how this project was conceived. What inspired you to create White Liars?
ANDREW: The seed of White Liars came from my cousin, Adam Harriss, who basically gave me a situation and a few lines of dialogue which I used as my starting point, and are the first lines of dialogue in the first episode. The idea of spending the amount of time and money that it would take to produce a web series was overwhelming to me at the time, so I put off writing the first episode for about eight months until I thought, why not? That’s when I approached Neil to direct and Justin Ness to play [the character of] Chet, and we finally sat down and talked about it about three months after that.
NEIL: Andrew brought the script to me and asked if I would direct it. We sat down for a production meeting and ended up mapping out all eight episodes of the first season. Then Andrew wrote script by script, and we shot as we went, episode by episode. We were pretty green in the beginning, and definitely picked up steam with more experience.
ANDREW: I had no idea what the show was going to be about other than con artists. I thought a lot about the concept of lies, and how easy they are to tell to ourselves and others, how comfortable we can be with lies, and how when we convince ourselves of a lie, sometimes we can just go ahead and proceed as if this fiction we’ve created for ourselves is true. There’s a lot of humor there and commentary, too.
Adam wanted it to be a little more like the office. He comes from the corporate world, and I don’t even have a stamp on my passport for the corporate world, so making Tim (my character) an actor and keeping the corporate world vague was a product of my personal experience. That was pretty much the point we were at when Neil and I sat down and talked through the season.
Can you give us a little summary of what happened in Season 1?
ANDREW: In a nutshell, White Liars follows the exploits of Tim, a down on his luck New York actor in need of a job and his friend Chet, who has lots of jobs. Their journey takes a satirical look at the world of business, non-paying theatre, and the little white lies that end up becoming much bigger down the road.
How would you say Season 2 differs from the first?
ANDREW: Season 2 is a continuation of the narrative of Season 1. At the end of Season 1, we see Tim turn from a pawn to a player in the game. The game changes very quickly in Season 2 as the consequences of Tim and Chet’s actions start to catch up with them. There’s still plenty of lying, though…Lots of lying. That’s very important in our show. The quality is much better, too. The lessons we learned on Season 1 bear their fruit this time around.
NEIL: Season 2 is so much tighter. It’s fast-paced; it’s funnier; the performances are fantastic. Plus, we’ve just gotten better at it. The planning was far more extensive, the camera covers more, and it’s on a much grander scale. People will be very interested to see where the story goes.
I’m sure you each have a couple of favorite shots from Season 2. Can you share with us some of the technicalities?
NEIL: Well, I can reveal that a good friend of ours is a Steadicam operator, and we got to utilize his talents for a shot in Season 2. That was an incredible experience, utilizing 15 people for one long moving shot. I had never got to direct something like that before - it was so much fun. Anything else, you’ll have to wait and see.
ANDREW: I do love the Steadicam shot, but I have to say, even though I’ve only seen some of the raw footage, I think the finale has some of my favorite moments and shots of the entire series. They’re beautiful.
White Liars has an original soundtrack. I believe that’s kind of unusual for an indie web series. Can you tell us how that came about?
NEIL: I always hoped that we could do original music for the series, since I’m a musician. I also hoped that we didn’t have to use outside sources due to rights, etc. We wanted to create something original that had our own kind of feel. Luckily, we have fellow company member Sky Seals, who works wizardry. We have a lot of fun, the three of us in a room, coming up with original themes for the show.
ANDREW: I’ll just say that when you have people who are willing and eager to help you out, you should make use of them. I didn’t even think about music until we’d started shooting, but when it came time to score the episodes it became very clear that the music had to tell as much of the story as the rest of the components. I think it’s wonderful and can’t sing Sky Seals’s praises enough for the work he did (and is continuing to do) to bring a musical life to our story.
I understand that White Liars is now not only the name of this web series, but is also the name of your production company. What do you like most about working together?
NEIL: I like that we’re friends first…We work together because we like each other. It’s hard enough to do this without an underlying friendship, and lord knows we can get stressed with/at each other at times. I’d hate to think what it was like working on a project of this scope with someone that I DIDN’T like.
ANDREW: I like what Neil said. Same goes for me.
Can you tell us about other projects you have in the hopper?
NEIL: I’m currently editing Wide Eyed Productions’s short film The Return of Toodles Von Flooz. It’s been on the back burner far longer than I care to admit, but we have a timetable in place and people should keep an eye out for it soon. Other than that, I enjoy the few hours a week I get to sleep.
ANDREW: Smaller, more sketch based videos in 2013! And maybe a nap.
Please join us this Saturday, Sept. 29, at 9:00 p.m.
3pm to 10pm
@ UNDER St. Marks Theater
94 St Marks Place NYC
$10 gets you in the door AND $5 more will get you a bottomless beer cup! (Yes, just 5 DOLLARS. I know; that's crazy talk! But it's true.)
10% of proceeds will be donated to Horse Trade Theater Group's campaign to SAVE UNDER St. Mark's Theater!
Join the Wide Eyed Productions crew on Sunday May 1st for a May Day celebration!! We are celebrating spring, flowers blooming, birds chirping, that winter funk finally leaving, AND our final show of our 4th season The Trojan Women coming to The Kraine Theater in July.
Grab some free food, soak up the sun in the backyard, carnival games, music, a raffle, awesome prizes and giveaways, CHEAP CHEAP BEER and much much more! Come one come all, tell your friends, bring a date, come alone you will have a good time guaranteed!
From Horse Trade Theater Group
Recently we have found out that our second home since 1999, 94 St. Marks Place home of UNDER St. Marks Theater, was put on the market. Our goal is to stay at 94 St. Marks Place, and we will be announcing a campaign over the coming weeks to purchase all or part of the building; we will need your help.
At the eleventh hour, we met our $5,000 target on Kickstarter! We are so grateful to each and every one of you who made a donation or even just got the word out about our campaign. Our rent on the East 13th Street Theatre is now as good as paid, and our ambitious rendering of Shakespeare's Henry VI (Part III) has a place to play. Tickets are now on sale!
Secondly, our Pour of the Roses party at Stone Creek (our beloved official sponsor) was a rousing success. So much fun and love last night. Drinks flowed freely, the raffle prizes were hot (!) and the set played by local band The Plastic Pets was awesome (they have a gig on Tuesday at Arlene's Grocery, so go check them out if you have a chance).
Thank you again so much for both your interest and support. As Queen Margaret might say, You fight in justice.
Saturday, June 19th $20 at the door Open bar 9-10pm Arrive after 10pm and get 2 drinks and a free raffle ticket @ Stone Creek 140 E. 27th Street (between 3rd and Lex) NYC
Party like it's 1421! Join us for our Pour of the Roses party to kick off our production of Shakespeare's War of the Roses fueled epic, Henry VI (Part III). Come partake in our open bar from 9-10pm; drink specials will follow. Revelry and amazing raffles will abound (including one for a week's stay at a resort in Mexico)!
