Review: "Frankenstein" – Manual Cinema at Under the Radar Festival at The Public

Worried about the fate of live performance or cinema in this digital age? Run to see Frankenstein at The Public’s Under the Radar Festival this month and you’ll be shouting, “It lives!!”

Adapted from the novel of the same name by Mary Shelley, Frankenstein turns the anatomy of a play inside out in a unique amalgamation of shadow puppetry, cinematic techniques, sound, and live music. Interwoven stories of Mary Shelley, Victor Frankenstein, and his Monster unfold before one’s eyes in a 97-minute spectacle of nonverbal, unadulterated marvel in which actors and technicians are one entity, seamlessly transitioning between a multitude of characters and multimedia platforms to tell the story. Three playing areas exist comprised of live feed cameras, lights, projecting screens, and puppets that allow Manual Cinema to manually create a sort of live movie projected on one giant screen above center stage.

New YorkChristopher PetersonJanuary 9, 2019Natalie Rine, The Public Theater

Off-Broadway Review: “Miss You Like Hell” Redefines Redemption at the Public’s Newman Theater

After seeing her estranged daughter’s “veiled suicide threat” on her “anonymous” blog, Beatriz (the irrepressible Daphne Rubin-Vega) drives her truck “like a bat out of hell” from California to Philadelphia to take her daughter Olivia (the deeply reflective Gizel Jiménez) on a seven-day road trip. After some mild mid-adolescent protestations, Olivia – sixteen – agrees to the trip hoping, perhaps, for reconciliation with her mother and an end to her deep and debilitating angst and depression.

Off Broadway, New YorkChristopher PetersonApril 19, 2018David Roberts, The Public Theater

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