 A
Funny Thing Happened on My Way to Shoot the Czar!!!
at the Helen Phelan Gardiner Playhouse
July 2nd-11th, 2004
Sponsored by the Buffalo Arts Council
Subversive Theatre was honored to be
one of the eight troupes chosen worldwide to make up the international
component of the sixteenth annual Toronto Fringe Festival -- an event
that comprised one hundred twenty different productions in twenty one
different venues all crammed into a twelve day period.
For this auspicious opportunity, we presented the
original work A FUNNY THING HAPPENED ON MY WAY TO SHOOT THE CZAR!!! by
Subversive Theatre's Founder & Artistic Director Kurt Schneiderman.
This bizarre, historical, stream-of-consciousness,
occasionally farcical drama follows the experience of one very confused
Red Army Soldier who's ordered to execute deposed Czar Nicholas II in
1918. Before he can ask "do the ends justify the
means?" he finds himself bouncing back and forth through
time. First he lurches forward to one of Stalin's gulags and
witnesses the horrors of what his regime will become. And then
it's backward in history to his own poverty-stricken youth in pre-war
Russia.
Just to keep things interesting he also briefly finds himself at an
endless tea party at the far end of the cosmos that hosts all of
history's executed dictators.
Declared a "political
think piece" with "respectable turns" by Toronto's Eye Magazine, our production most
certainly raised some eye brows and gave us our first opportunity to do
some good ol' fashion subverting north of the border.
Here's the rundown on who did what: Yuri
Gregorevich Gavrilov . . . John Kreuzer
Fetiukov/Mother/Abe . . . . Arlene Clement
Sergeant/Nicholas/Charles . . Dennis Keefe*
Shaman/Ermakov/Chin . Marshall Maxwell*
Rubashov/Tupa/Marie . . . . Kristi Potteiger*
Yurovsky/Goldstein/Julius . Andy Michalski Director/Author/SM
. . Kurt Schneiderman*
Commissar of Costumes . . . . Maura Price*
Generalissimo of Sound . . . . John Shotwell
Graphics Czar . . . . . . Matthew Clabeaux* This
production would not have been possible without volunteer assistance
from the following gracious souls:
Michael Fanelli*, Robert "Hodie" Hodas*, Franklin LaVoie*,
Daire Brian Irwin*, Timothy McPeek, James Holstun*, Tom Scahill*, Robert
Palmer, Richard Lambert,
The New Phoenix Theatre Company,
The Buffalo & Erie County Arts Council,
Odd Man Ou....t Design Studio,
Revolutionary Graphics Studio,
and The Allen Street Connection * = indicates
members of the Subversive Theatre Collective
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