travsd

More Marxfest Mop-Up!

That’s right! There’s more! In fact there’ll be even more than THIS post over the next few weeks, truth to tell.

The wonderful news for folks who couldn’t attend Marxfest is that it was extremely well documented and sharable. So you will be able to experience entire programs from the festival, or some of them at least. Anyway, my wrap-up post from last week was pretty thumbnail, so I’m glad to report that the present episode of The Marx Brothers Council Podcast starring Noah Diamond and Matthew Coniam features Marxfest Committee members Kathy Biehl and Jonny Porkpie, and it covers the festival in some detail, with memories from the gang as well as audio clips from the festival. At nearly three hours long, it amounts to an entire Marxfest experience itself! Listen to it here.

There are other ways to experience the festival, too. Illustrator/cartoonist Tom Motley brought along an accordion sketch book and filled it with images and spoken remarks, almost like a court reporter. He shared it on social media so I hope he doesn’t mind my taking the liberty of sharing a couple of sections that record his impressions of my talks. You’ll find references to Weber and Fields, Smith and Dale, Ned Wayburn, and Gummo in this one (the naked chick is from a Howard Chandler Christy work hanging in the Lambs Clubhouse:

This little snip is from my Coney Island talk the following week:

Thanks, Tom!

And we now have several of the Marxfest presentations available online:

Robert Klein in conversation with Jason Zinoman of The New York Times. I produced this one! Watch here.

Noah Diamond and the New Yorker‘s Adam Gopnik in conversation about Duck Soup. Scroll to 8:57 to hear the latter say something highly complimentary about ME! Watch it here

My own Marxfest talk is now online too! You can check it out here.

Gary Hardcastle’s 16 minute radio play about Chico’s cold dalliance with Clara Parnin, which he debuted at our Animal Crackers Salon, can be heard in its entirety here.

And here’s friend Bob Greenberg’s wonderful presentation.

For more on the Marx Brothers, please read The Marx Brothers Miscellany: A Subjective Appreciation of the World’s Greatest Comedy Team

Published by travsd

Writer and performer Trav S.D. (www.travsd.com) is best known for his books "No Applause, Just Throw Money: The Book That Made Vaudeville Famous" (2005) and "Chain of Fools: Silent Comedy and Its Legacies from Nickelodeons to Youtube" (2013). He has written for the NY Times, the Village Voice, American Theatre, Time Out NY, Reason, the Villager and numerous other publications. Trav has been in the vanguard of New York’s vaudeville and burlesque scenes since 1995 when he launched his company Mountebanks, presenting hundreds of acts ranging from Todd Robbins to Dirty Martini to Tammy Faye Starlite to the Flying Karamazov Brothers. He has directed his own plays, revues and solo pieces at such venues as Joe’s Pub, La Mama, HERE, Dixon Place, Theater for the New City, the Ohio Theatre, the Brick, and 6 separate shows in the NY International Fringe Festival. In 2014 he produced and directed the smash-hit "I’ll Say She Is", the first ever revival of the Marx Brothers hit 1924 Broadway show in the NY International Fringe Festival.