It ain’t like putting on a show in a barn Judy Garland/Mickey Rooney-style, but Gregory Scott Campbell and his Luna Theater Company have found their own silo and should be moving in soon. After running roughshod through Philly’s curtained halls since 2002, holding shows wherever they set their tap shoes, LTC found a producing partner and an actual home in participation with Partners for Sacred Places at the Church of the Crucifixion at 620 S. Eighth St. They’ll show off the digs with an open house Dec. 3. “We’ve been searching for a few years,” says Luna producing artistic director Campbell. “Our demands were high: something large enough to incorporate a performance space, rehearsal spaces, office and storage, all in a locale on our radar.” Campbell is quick to add that every T isn’t yet crossed, but he’s happy with the location. “We’re a South Street kind of company, connected to our counterculture/punk roots.”
Michael and Jeniphur Pasquarello’s plan for world domination is on. The Prohibition Taproom/Café Lift couple’s long-building pizza joint should be open by mid-December. Bufad (1240 Spring Garden St.) will have a wood-fired oven and super-traditional Roman (sold by weight) and Neopolitan pies, and all of the toppings will be pickled and/or cured in-house. The Pasquarellos are also making moves toward spring with a butcher-block-booze-beer boite at 1310 Frankford Ave. next to the Xhale peeps’ Bottle Bar East.
You gotta wait until January to hear War on Drugs bassist Dave Hartley’s solo project Nightlands’ AM-radio-wavy debut disc Oak Island (on Secretly Canadian). Still, you can hear the Night man in action Dec. 4 when he and guitarist Jeff Zeigler will perform an original score to 2001: A Space Odyssey at PhilaMOCA. (See Agenda on p.24.)
First-time Philadelphia Theatre Initiative grantee Mary Tuomanen and her roomie Aaron Cromie (Dave and Aaron Go to Work opens this week at Plays & Players) got a two-year grant ($60,000) to create a piece about Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec called The Body Lautrec. “I’m directing and Aaron is starring, along with a skeletal puppet and an ensemble of four women: Liz Filios, Christie Parker, Kittson O’Neill and Kathryn Raines,” says Tuomanen, who goes on to say how their theatricale is about Lautrec’s body of work and his body itself, deformed from a genetic disorder caused by inbreeding. “It’ll be my first time taking the reins as director, and quite a big project, so I’m excited to have two years to work on the piece.” The finished 19th-century Paris music/art scene Lautrec thing will play as part of 2014’s Fringe, with the Mütter Museum acting as the venue for a work-in-progress show this coming March.
More skeletal puppetry at citypaper.net/criticalmass.
