If you’re looking for great theater in the Mile Square look no further than the Monroe Center for the Arts. Already home to Mile Square Theater, the center welcomes a new theatrical troupe to the Hoboken art hub this season, The Theater Company.
Formerly the DeBaun Players while still in residence at Stevens Institute last year, the company traded their previous name and space at the DeBaun Center for a new studio at 720 Monroe St. in Hoboken. The new 900-square-foot space is perfect for smaller performances like children’s theater and cabarets.
“We hope to do a lot of our smaller productions there,” said producing artistic director David Zimmerman. Called Studio C413, the Theater Company has already hosted a production of “Rent” at the center last February.
“We needed a space to really call our own,” Zimmerman said. “We’re really excited.”
“Everyone loves a good rock show.” – David Zimmerman
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The company has a brand-new production line-up for the 2010-11 season including a musical opening this November. But for the upcoming holiday season, the company will again perform their well-received renditions of two David Sedaris essays, from the author’s “Holidays on Ice,” a collection of six, often dark and humorous, Christmas-time compositions. The first “Santaland Diaries,” is a comedic one-act play told through the tiny eyes of Crumpet, a Macy’s Department store elf.
The second and final act of the evening will be another Sedaris favorite, “Season’s Greetings,” a story in the form of a tragic letter from a house wife, who has recently found out her husband Clint, had a stint with a Vietnamese woman 22 years ago, and “planted the seed” for the arrival of her step-daughter.
“The plays are hilarious, and great for the holidays,” Zimmerman said.
Do the ‘time warp’
In February, Zimmerman breathes new life into a past company production, “The Rocky Horror Picture Show.”
The company performed the deliciously bizarre rock-comedy six years ago to a packed house every night, Zimmerman said. “People have been asking us for years if we will ever do it again. It’s going to be hugely popular.”
The musical opens when a newly engaged couple’s car breaks down in front of the mansion and laboratory of a transvestite called Dr. Frank-N-Furter, who is quite literally not from this world.
“We’re really looking forward to that production,” Zimmerman said. “Everyone loves a good rock show.”
‘Pirates of Penzance’
The next production by the company will be “The Pirates of Penzance,” a Gilbert and Sullivan operetta written in the late 1800s, coming to the Monroe Center for the Arts this November.
“It’s a comedic tale,” Zimmerman said. “It’s a fun little show that, of course, we’re putting our own twist on.” According to the director, the show is usually presented as an opera, but for this production will be more of a musical.
In “Pirates of Penzance,” the main character Frederic is apprenticed to a band of affable pirates by his hard-of-hearing nurse, who had mistaken her master’s instruction to apprentice the boy to a pilot.
“It’s about pirates and maidens and someone falls in love with someone else,” he said, someone they’re probably not supposed to fall in love with. “It’s your typical love story.”
Although the play deals with pirates, Zimmerman and crew are deliberately not setting the play in any time period.
“We’re not going to hold it in the typical period,” he said. “We want to kind of modernize it.”
For more information about The Theater Company visit the company’s website: www.thetheatercompany.org.
Sean Allocca can be reached at editorial@hudsonreporter.com