In Which Virtue is Rewarded: Jim R. Moore Gets His

Congratulations to our friend and sometime collaborator Jim R. Moore, who is being honored by the  Alliance of Resident Theatres/New York with an aptly named Local Hero Award in a special ceremony at the Signature Theatre tonight. Over the last several years, Jim has been a friend to scores of indie theatre venues and hundreds of performers, as he has taken thousands upon thousands of photographs of vaudeville, circus and clown shows, and other indie theatre productions for his web site Vaudevisuals.com. In addition, he does some valuable video reporting of today’s variety scene on his web site as well.  His archive is already a substantial resource for folks who care about this stuff, as I assume you do! If you know him, give Jim a shout-out, a congratulations, and a thanks today. Come to think of it, it really wouldn’t be too much to do that EVERY day!

Trav S.D. Rockin’ Da New Vaudevisuals.com Hoodie, Yo!

Thanks to the entrepreneurial acumen of Jim Moore (and the fact that I bought it) I am now the proud owner of one of five limited edition Vaudevisuals.com hoodies. I can’t think of a better time to send you in the direction of his web site in order to buy one, as Jim’s just revitalized the look of the whole site — a great time to catch up all his excellent photographic coverage of New York’s clown, vaudeville, and circus scenes. (To those in the know these three disciplines overlap but are NOT identical!) Check it out, check it out, check it out, yo, yo, yo, yo! (See Geraldo was right, you put one of these things on and you start to change….)

Step off, step off, a’ight?

“Another Satisfied Unibomber”

Festival of Fools Opens Today

Today is the opening day of the Festival of Fools in Burlington, Vermont. Their schedule includes a roster of incredible looking clowns from all over the country, but also (this is how it got on our radar) our pal Jim Moore is showing a bunch of his wonderful photographs of variety performers. The festival is up through this Sunday, the 5th, but Jim’s photos will be up through September. For more info, go here. 

Two Awesome Shows at Dixon Place Tonight

Lounge, Film Friday

7:30pm Jim Moore & Katy Einerson

A Quiet Night at the Movies: Lon Chaney’s

He Who Gets Slapped Tickets: Free Admission

A Quiet Night at the Movies, hosted by Jim Moore & Katy Einerson. Chaney stars as a brilliant scientist, betrayed and humiliated by his wife and closest friend, who joins the circus and becomes the main attraction as “HE Who Gets Slapped:” a clown who routinely endures the slaps and ridicule of all the other clowns.

Theater, Physical Theater, Women in Theater

9:30pm

Gold No Trade The Pinks Or, How the Pinkerton Detectives defeat the Wild Rose of the Confederacy, No. 2.

Tickets: $12 (advance) / $15 / $10 stu/sen (door)

Created by Megan Campisi, Max Dana, Jay Dunn, Kevin Lapin & Siobhan Towey. Written by Megan Campisi. Real life Confederate spy Rose Greenhow is seducing half of Washington for the Southern cause, but the Pinkerton detectives are on her trail in this historical comedy about tolerance across political divides. Get more info on their website.

dixonplace.org

The Unholy Three & The Ridiculous Romantic

Tonight at 8pm at Dixon Place Lounge, Jim Moore & Katy Einerson will present: A Quiet Night at the Movies: Lon Chaney and Todd Browning’s The Unholy Three.  Tickets are FREE!

In addition to the not-to-believed 1925 silent classic about a sideshow ventriloquist, a midget and a strongman who conspire to commit a series of robberies, Jim will be premiering his original silent comedy The Ridiculous Romantic, starring many of your favorite downtown New York clowns. Be there or be square!

The Clown Unmasked

OPENING PARTY – Tuesday June 7th – 5:30 – 7:00PM

THE CLOWN UNMASKED will be on view beginning June 7^th , 2011 at Cornelia Street Café, 29 Cornelia Street, New York, NY, from 5:30PM to 7PM EST.

The exhibit will feature twelve photographs by Jim Moore, depicting scenes shot at venues such as The Big Apple Circus, Bottom Line, Dixon Place and The New York Downtown Clown Revue, where Jim is currently photographer in residence.  The performers are revealed in honest, black and white portraits without makeup and costume, juxtaposed with their live stage shows, which are done in color.

Jim is a leading authority on documenting the performing arts, has been  photographing all kinds of artistic and eccentric performers (for the past 30+ years) ranging from magicians, clowns, puppeteers, mimes, ventriloquists, performance artists, and sword-swallowers to tightrope and high wire walkers. Check out his web site Vaudevisuals to see some of his work!

 

The New York Variety Arts Theatre

Thanks to Jim Moore I now know that I am only two degrees of separation from Sarah Bernhardt.

Everyone in New York’s variety artsscene and its many subsets knows who Jim Moore is. He showed up one day, like the shoe-maker’s elf, to make all of our lives a lot easier. A photographer and videographer, through his web site Vaudevisuals he has been meticulously chronicling all the vaudeville, burlesque, circus, sideshow etc activity in New York now for many months. This is already a hugely valuable record.

While this is wonderful, he is not actually an elf, unfortunately. And it turns out he has been making Herculean efforts to keep the performing arts traditions alive and before the public for a very long time. Recently, he told me about an attempt he and some partners made about thirty years ago to create an organization called “The New York Variety Arts Theatre”.

Here’s the poop, people. Jim studied film production at NYU. In an effort to be a better director, he studied mime with some fairly distinguished teachers. In the late 70s, he was performing a lot, based out of a space called the Hudson Street Studio. (He also had a public access variety tv variety show, which featured people like Paul Zaloom and my old buddy David Jenness. How I’d love to see that!) At any rate, at certain point Jim and his cohorts began to organize a not-for-profit, whose mission was to be training, preservation and the production of variety shows. A big benefit was held at Theatre of the Open Eye, featuring Joe Smith of Smith and Dale, who was 92 at the time. Jim had gotten to know Joe following his presentation at a big popular entertainment conference held at Lincoln Center. He actually did his Dr. Kronkite sketch!

And Joe Smith is what links me (uh, and a thousand other people as the Countess points out), through Jim Moore, to Bernhardt. Smith and Dale had performed together on the same bill with Bernhardt at the Palace). Believe it…or not.

The sad news is, Jim’s long-dreamed of variety arts preservation organization never came to pass. There was dissension in the ranks, and the parties went their separate ways.  Jim was ahead of his time in that enterprise. But guess what? He is in the RIGHT place at the RIGHT time, right now. Hats off, and three cheers to him.

To learn about variety entertainment, consult No Applause, Just Throw Money: The Book That Made Vaudeville Famous, available at Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and wherever nutty books are sold.