At last year’s It’s a Christmas Cabaret 2, the running joke through the 12 acts was that Holly Harrington, a script writer and veteran actress in the theater scene, would try and sing a Christmas carol in each scene and get the door slammed in her face every time. In the final act, DC Rapier, who played the half drunken, grouchy Santa Claus role, was supposed to let her in and do her thing. With live theater, though, some things don’t go as planned and again, the door was slammed in Harrington’s face and she never got her moment to shine.
“It’s forgivable because it’s for charity,” Harrington said with a smile.
It is, after all, the season for giving. For the past two years, the Taipei Players have put on a Christmas cabaret show where all the proceeds go to charity. Usually, the funds go to local animal rescue shelters or orphanages, but this year, the destruction of Typhoon Haiyan was too close to home to ignore.
Photo courtesy of Taipei Players
“The town we are donating to this year is called Estancia on Panay Island where 90 percent of the homes were destroyed,” said Mandy Roveda, one of the founders of Taipei Players.
“We are accepting donations at the door of soap, toothbrushes, toys and kitchen stuff, and we will give that to our contact, Jay Billones, who then sends it to her family there to distribute.”
COMING TOGETHER
Brandon Thompson is a man of many hats because he is the lead singer in a few bands around Taipei and one of the hardest working actors in the expat theater scene. Instead of just a play, where he’s around other actors, the cabaret brings together the best of both of his worlds.
“With music, it’s a job,” Thompson said. “With acting, it’s a passion and we want to share that Christmas feeling with everyone.”
Katie Partlow, an actress with a bachelor’s degree in acting from Washington State University and a masters in theater, agrees with Thompson wholeheartedly.
“Last year, my main scene was with Moshe Foster,” Partlow said. “He’s a musician and I’m in theater. Cabaret is really good because it brings in people that don’t normally work together and we develop a trust that goes on between stage performers.”
THE GIFT THAT KEEPS ON GIVING
At this year’s It’s a Green (Door) Christmas, the Taipei Players encourage attendees to wear their festive clothes and participate in Christmas karaoke sing-a-longs during intermission. The theme of the show is a peek into what happens behind closed doors on Christmas Eve in Taiwan. Because of the limited time to practice together, there is only one run through on the day of the show where everyone sees what everyone else has done.
Roveda revels in the feeling of spontaneity that the cabaret brings. “Everyone is responsible for their own show.”
Thompson chimes in: “We have no idea what the final product is going to be. It’s just like a Christmas gift.”
It is barely 10am and the queue outside Onigiri Bongo already stretches around the block. Some of the 30 or so early-bird diners sit on stools, sipping green tea and poring over laminated menus. Further back it is standing-room only. “It’s always like this,” says Yumiko Ukon, who has run this modest rice ball shop and restaurant in the Otsuka neighbourhood of Tokyo for almost half a century. “But we never run out of rice,” she adds, seated in her office near a wall clock in the shape of a rice ball with a bite taken out. Bongo, opened in 1960 by
Common sense is not that common: a recent study from the University of Pennsylvania concludes the concept is “somewhat illusory.” Researchers collected statements from various sources that had been described as “common sense” and put them to test subjects. The mixed bag of results suggested there was “little evidence that more than a small fraction of beliefs is common to more than a small fraction of people.” It’s no surprise that there are few universally shared notions of what stands to reason. People took a horse worming drug to cure COVID! They think low-traffic neighborhoods are a communist plot and call
Over the years, whole libraries of pro-People’s Republic of China (PRC) texts have been issued by commentators on “the Taiwan problem,” or the PRC’s desire to annex Taiwan. These documents have a number of features in common. They isolate Taiwan from other areas and issues of PRC expansion. They blame Taiwan’s rhetoric or behavior for PRC actions, particularly pro-Taiwan leadership and behavior. They present the brutal authoritarian state across the Taiwan Strait as conciliatory and rational. Even their historical frames are PRC propaganda. All of this, and more, colors the latest “analysis” and recommendations from the International Crisis Group, “The Widening
The sprawling port city of Kaohsiung seldom wins plaudits for its beauty or architectural history. That said, like any other metropolis of its size, it does have a number of strange or striking buildings. This article describes a few such curiosities, all but one of which I stumbled across by accident. BOMBPROOF HANGARS Just north of Kaohsiung International Airport, hidden among houses and small apartment buildings that look as though they were built between 15 and 30 years ago, are two mysterious bunker-like structures that date from the airport’s establishment as a Japanese base during World War II. Each is just about
RSS