A LIVE-ACTION PUNCH AND JUDY TO DEBUT AT HOLLYWOOD FRINGE

Punch and Judy

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
May 2, 2016

THE SCHOOL OF NIGHT
PROUDLY PRESENTS
PUNCH AND JUDY
at the 2016 Hollywood Fringe Festival

Los Angeles, CA – The School of Night is pleased as punch to announce its participation in the 2016 Hollywood Fringe Festival with Punch and Judy.

This live-action adaptation of the western world’s most enduring popular entertainment follows the beloved and irascible domestic abuser Punch on a hilarious and kill-crazed day of adventure. All your favorite characters are sure to put in appearances: Judy, Pretty Polly, Scaramouch, Jim Crow, Toby the Dog, Jack Ketch, Hector the Horse … even Old Nick himself, the Devil and Prince of Lies, will wind up on the receiving end of Punch’s tomfoolery.

Drawing on performance traditions as richly varied as Commedia dell’Arte, the Roman gladiatorial games, the English mystery plays, Kenpo Karate, Atellan farce, Grand-Guignol, Dorian Mime (?!) and Hollywood action-splatter cinema, The School of Night is proud to present a blast of theatrical bombast crafted to batter and berate its viewers into giddy, satisfied submission.

Mr. Punch will tickle your ribs as he bludgeons, stabs, slashes, burns, shoots and inappropriately gropes his way straight into your heart.

Not recommended for kids.

Christopher Johnson (Director) most recently helmed the critically lauded and award-winning Entropy for Hollywood’s Theatre of NOTE. He is the founding artistic director of Chicago’s historic Defiant Theatre for whom he served as producer on dozens of projects including the U.S. premieres of Sarah Kane’s Cleansed and Phaedra’s Love, the Chicago premiere of Caryl Churchill’s The Skryker and multiple iterations of the cult-classic Action Movie: The Play. Defiant directing credits include Titus Andronicus, A Clockwork Orange, Macbeth, Dope and Hamlet in addition to world world-premiere adaptations of Stephen King’s Apt Pupil and Thomas Harris’s Red Dragon (the latter garnering Christopher a Joseph Jefferson Citation for Best New Adaptation). Other Chicago and Los Angeles directing credits include Henry VI, Part 1 (The Production Company), Balacarita: The Adventures of Young Krishna (Silk Road Theatre Project), The Pity of Things – Desert Aria (Theatre of NOTE), Cave Dwellers (North Avenue Productions) and Dulcitius (The School of Night). Credits as playwright include Like Family (The Electric Shakespeare Company), Godbaby and Dope (both Defiant Theatre). Christopher has appeared as an actor at the Goodman Theatre, Chicago Shakespeare Theater, Lyric Opera, Chicago Opera Theatre, Redmoon Theater, The Building Stage, A Crew of Patches, Ark Theatre and Defiant Theatre.

Jen Albert (Producer/Fight Choreographer) returns to the Hollywood Fringe festival after a successful run last year as Kate in Fifty Shades of Shrew for Broads’ Word Ensemble. Jen earned a BA in theatre from Columbia College Chicago where she became SAFD certified in all manner of stage combat before going on to get her Blue Belt in Kenpo. She is an emeritus company member of Babes with Blades, Chicago’s first all-female stage combat theatre company, with whom she traveled to Scotland to perform at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. She is currently a faculty member of Art of Acting – the Conservatory of Stella Adler in Hollywood where she teaches stage combat. Recent Los Angeles fight choreography credits include: Entropy (Theatre of NOTE), Fifty Shades of Shrew (Broads’ Word Ensemble), The Noir Series (Heretick Theatre Lab), Conduct of Life and Down in the Face of God (The Vagrancy), Henry VI, Part I, Very Still and Hard to See, and Beauty Queen of Leenane (The Production Company). Favorite roles as an actor include: Inez in Women w/o Walls (Broads’ Word Ensemble), Poison Inniman in Action Movie the Play (Defiant Theatre), Gwen in Fifth of July (The Production Company) and Yvonne in War (Theatre Banshee).

Jimmy Slonina (Mr. Punch) currently stars as Benny the Clown in Cirque du Soleil’s Mystère at Treasure Island in Las Vegas. Previous Cirque credits include Zarkana, “O” and the North American tour of Koozå. In 2013 he starred as the concert host/emcee of PINK’s The Truth About Love Tour, entertaining tens of thousands nightly in North America, Europe and Australia. He created characters for and performed in Franco Dragone’s Vegas aquatic spectacle Le Rêve. Jimmy has also performed as a physical comic in more than a dozen Las Vegas showrooms, has appeared in several acclaimed films and web series and produces various popular video and film projects. Originally from Chicago, Jimmy enjoyed many years as a critically acclaimed actor in a broad variety of contemporary, classical and physical theatres. He has worked with many world-renowned, award-winning Chicago theatre companies, including Steppenwolf Theatre, Chicago Shakespeare Theater, Redmoon Theater and Defiant Theatre. He is also the recipient of two Joseph Jefferson Awards for acting.

Rounding out the cast are Kjai Block, Tiffany Cole, Synden Healy, Sondra Mayer and Eric Rollins.

Production staff includes Ryan Beveridge (Foley/Sound Design) Linda Muggeridge (Costume Designer) and Fred Manchento (Scenic Designer).

Previews:
Saturday 6/4 at 9:15pm and Sunday 6/5 at 7:15pm.

Regular performances:
Thursday June 09 2016, 8:45 PM
Friday June 10 2016, 10:15 PM
Saturday June 11 2016, 8:15 PM
Sunday June 12 2016, 5:15 PM
Thursday June 16 2016, 8:45 PM
Friday June 17 2016, 10:15 PM
Saturday June 18 2016, 10:15 PM
Sunday June 19 2016, 6:45 PM
Tuesday June 21 2016, 7:30 PM

Tickets are $15 and may be purchased online at: http://hff16.org/3722

All performances are at The Complex Theatres (OMR Theatre), 6468 Santa Monica Blvd., Los Angeles, CA 90038.

The School of Night is a not-for-profit theatre company dedicated to the study, preservation and live presentation of the dramatic works of the European renaissance and their antecedents: the folk and religious dramas of the middle ages, the tragedies, comedies and spectacle entertainments of pagan Rome and the ancestral Atellan farces from which these derived.

The School of Night strives to employ a combination of the finest theatrical artistry and dramaturgical scholarship to create performances that evoke for a contemporary audience the same emotional immediacy, linguistic power, charged spirituality and theatrical vitality that these entertaining, artistically influential and culturally significant gems of world theatre provided audiences in their own times.