“Mike Check 1, 2, 1, 2. Welcome to the official, informal and unlicensed” Hamilton “! “Walking Tour,” actress Michelle J. Rodriguez spoke to a portable voice amplifier, a headset with a microphone and speakers, worn like her funny pack. “Joke, but it’s allowed. I just want to say that.”
So it starts “Discovering Downtown: A Magical Expedition of Unrecorded Dreams” One of two walking tours of “Downtown Story,” a series of interactive theaters that will be performed in downtown Manhattan until June 25th. Three works (two guided tours and one “docu theater” play) presented by the Downtown Alliance, a non-profit organization that manages the Business Improvement District of Lower Manhattan, and the experimental theater company En Garde Arts. Weaves New York City landmarks into storytelling. ..
“Which was better, Lin-Manuel or Alexander?” Rodriguez continued with the enthusiasm of a college tour guide drawn from her days as a real campus tour guide at Williams College.Fun facts are delivered like history lessons until you remember what you are doing Fictitious Walking trip. Did Hamilton’s gold epaulettes really sell for $ 1.15 million at auction? ((((they were.).
The play takes the audience through a crowd of rushing New Yorkers and non-hurrying tourists. “Hamilton and Washington” History Tour, Winding from Bowling Green Park to the backstreets of Marketfield Street. Stop for a moment outside the New York Stock Exchange and observe tourists looking at the bronze “Charging Bull” sculpture. (“Boys, do people really like taking pictures with their hips,” says Rodriguez.)
Anhamburger, artistic director of Engard Arts, said the inspiration for this work came from “the theater pervades the entire city.”
“That’s what makes me excited. Together with a group of artists, I said,’How would you like to use this city as a stage?'”
All three are stories of what the company calls “a dream from New York’s oldest street.” In “Uncovering Downtown,” written by Jessica Holt and Mona Mansour (“The Vagrant Trilogy,” the audience is a non-working Puerto Rican performance artist who leads “Hamilton!” I’m following you. Walking trip. Written by Eric Rockley and directed by Morgan Green, “We the People (Not the Bots)” introduces men from the future. He is here to teach lessons about the past, hoping to prevent the world from becoming a robotic controlled society. Rock Lee’s Time Traveler takes the audience to the Trinity Church soldiers’ monument, which embodied the prisoners of war in 1777, and the Automobile Bureau on 11 Greenwich Street, where they talk about young people. Jean-Michel Basquiat has tagged Lower Manhattan with graffiti art.
In writing a science fiction work focused on expressing historic moments, Rockley said he wanted to think about ways blacks could “use their ancestors to arm themselves in the future.”
“We want to remind people that it’s more than we see,” he said. “It has a spiritual element.”
Playwright Rogelio Martinez and director Johanna McKeon tell the story of working immigrants in the documentary theater work “Sidewalk Echoes,” performed at the John Street United Methodist Church. Irish immigrants got a job at an Italian restaurant but can’t pronounce orecchiette. An Indian Catholic man started working as a gas station clerk, but when the owner asked if he was wearing a diaper on his head, he quit after three days. Uzbek immigrants via Israel obtain a barber’s license by having a haircut on a homeless man.
“When I see someone sleeping on the subway, it’s not because they don’t want to work,” says the barber. “Maybe they are working too hard.”
These are stories of people working in business in downtown Manhattan. To write the script, Martinez listened to hours of interviews with hamburgers with local business owners. He then created a story about the immigrants who are building their lives in New York City. Some of the lines in the play are taken verbatim from the conversation, while others are a composite of multiple characters that blend history, facts, and fiction.
“As an immigrant, I’m always interested in reforming myself and changing the patterns of my story,” said Martinez from Cuba. “This is my chance to listen to the reflections of the community, and from there I was able to create my own story.”
At the show, a banker turned to a food and health advocate and told a friend who returned to his native Australia, “people are really restless.”
“We will reinvent ourselves,” she tells the audience, sitting in a church pew. “The cells of the body exchange themselves about every seven years, and it’s in our DNA, and it’s in New York’s DNA,” she said.
The 45-minute walking tour ends at a nearby restaurant. Here, the audience can use the $ 20 ticket as a meal voucher to support local eateries. “Sidewalk Echoes” is free.