Molly Hale

New Eleanor video!

mollyhale — Tue, 24 Aug 2010 18:35:08 +0000

The newest video in Eleanor’s series of interviews I produced, directed and edited. Enjoy!

Eleanor’s Happy Place

mollyhale — Thu, 12 Aug 2010 23:04:55 +0000

Enjoy this series of interviews I shot, edited and produced for Rich Fulcher’s alter ego Eleanor the Tour Whore.

Eleanor’s Happy Place – Fitz and the Tantrums

Eleanor’s Happy Place – Jon LaJoie

Eleanor’s Happy Place – Har Mar Superstar

There’s many more to come, so keep an eye out!

My voice in an Etsy Commercial

mollyhale — Thu, 12 Aug 2010 07:52:18 +0000

Check out this amazing commercial for Etsy by David Gregg!

Olive and Mocha

mollyhale — Fri, 30 Jul 2010 04:53:26 +0000

I’m making a movie!

I’m very happy to say that I will be producing one of my own scripts this year. I call this film my female Superbad…

…and I can say this with confidence because my screenplay is both funny and raunchy. Just how I like it!

To find out more about the movie, the screenplay, and the wonderful characters that are Olive and Mocha, please check out the new website for the movie www.oliveandmocha.com.

New Pics from Kimberly Akimbo

mollyhale — Wed, 21 Apr 2010 04:00:36 +0000

This winter I played Patty in the production of Kimberly Akimbo by the Schoolhouse Theater. Enjoy these photos taken on preview night. There were lots others I’m not posting here, but I wasn’t in any of them… so why bother. Am I right people?! Is this thing on?

Patty talks into her tape recorder as an “oral history for the baby.”

Kim tries to feed her mom but mom’s wrapped up in her own jokes.

I’m always sitting in this play and someone’s always mad. ha!

“You wanna name the baby?”

The family is playing Trouble without Patty at 3 in the morning.

Buddy turns on his present for the baby. I want this light effect for my dinner parties.

Debra has no idea how to play this game.

The family plays D and D with Jeff as Dungeon Master.

“Hell no! That manticore has wings and claws and the body of a lion!”

Jeff gets riled when the game goes out of control.

Momma fell off a loading dock.

Those god damned cabbages.

Buddy in his chef hat and I in my robe.

Patty has a baby on stage.

Let me build you a webpage for CHEAP!

mollyhale — Tue, 30 Mar 2010 23:35:08 +0000

Websites:

Need a website? Want to update that old static Flash site you had built 3 years ago that doesn’t serve you any longer? Let me help you!

Your website is your calling card. I will set you up with a beautiful, dynamic website that’s tailored to your needs and EASY for you to update after I’m done. No more paying your web designer for simple updates and waiting around for weeks for her to get back to you. Your site will live and breath, change and expand on your whim.

PREVIOUS SITES:

For actors – Brianhotaling.com / Mollyhale.net / RichFulcher.com / IsraelGutierrez.net

For books – Tinyactsofrebellion.com

For production companies – Throwslikeagirlproductions.com

All costs include installation of your theme, set up of all your content and meetings to show you how your site works so that you can walk away running your own show.

For project estimates contact Molly at chitownladym77@hotmail-dot-com
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Hire Me As Your Online/Social Media Specialist:

Your work should be your top priority, but as an artist/ freelancer you need to maximize your online outlets. Let me help you get the most out of your online presence. Your website is your face to the world. The time of setting up a page with basic information is long gone. Your website is your business’ connection to a broader audience. It’s the way you sustain loyalty, keep connected in real time and provide better customer service. The problem is that keeping up with your online base can take hours, mental energy and prioritizing that there isn’t always time for. I can help you empower yourself and boost sales by creating an online community, connecting you better to customers through social media, track who’s coming to your site and create buzz with creative marketing.

Past campaigns have included Rich Fulcher’s new book T iny Acts of Rebellion and LA’s #1 Long-Form Improv team USS Rock N Roll.

For project estimates contact Molly at chitownladym77@hotmail-dot-com

Rattlesnake High School Reunion

mollyhale — Thu, 25 Mar 2010 01:28:32 +0000

My long running iO Harold team, Rattlesnake High School, will reunite for one day only at the Playground Theater in Chicago on Saturday, April 24th @ 7:30 pm. The upcoming show was called “especially intriguing” by the Chicago Sun-Times.

I was on this team for four glorious years before I moved to Los Angeles. Our style was uniquely physical and many Rattlesnake shows ended in sex, fights or a mash-up of the two. I’m excited to see what this wonderful night of play will bring. Half the original players on RHS now live in Los Angeles and play on USS Rock N Roll but several of them are flying back to play. Whether you’ve never seen this group before or if you’ve just been jonesing for some physical snake pits… you won’t want to miss this show!

Tickets for the festival will go on sale April 1 at www.chicagoimprovfestival.org.
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Chicago Improv Festival announces lineup

March 9, 2010 4:15 PM |

Cook County Social Club will be one of many local acts at this year’s fest.

The beauty of improv is its unpredictability — but sometimes, you want to have at least a little information before jumping in. This week’s announcement about the lineup for the 13th Annual Chicago Improv Festival (April 19-25) offers just that. Some key numbers:

65. The number of acts performing at this year’s fest. Our favorite at first glance is Dusk: Improvised Tween Erotica (from Austin, TX). See the full schedule here.
38. That’s how many Chicago ensembles are included in that number. Especially intriguing: the Rattlesnake High School reunion show.
24 and 8. The number of different cities and countries, respectively, that the rest of the acts hail from. Boom Chicago All-Stars!
12. The number of locations for this year’s events, including Apollo Theatre, Annoyance Theater, the Athenaeum, Chemically Imbalanced Theater, ComedySportz, Gorilla Tango, IO Comedy Theater, Laugh Out Loud, Martyrs, The Playground and The Second City.
3. The number of recipients of the 2010 Lifetime Achievement Award. Harold Ramis, Dick Schaal and Severn Darden will be honored at 7 p.m. on April 21 at the Second City ETC theater. Susan Messing (Improviser of the Year) and Improvised Shakespeare Co. (Ensemble of the Year) will also be getting awards.

The critics LOVE Kimberly Akimbo!!

mollyhale — Tue, 23 Mar 2010 02:54:47 +0000

From the New York Times! From the CT Post! From the North County News! Even this lady liked us! Read the full articles below.

Playing a Game of ‘Who’s the Adult Here?’

By ANITA GATES Published: March 11, 2010

One question has to be going through audience’s minds during “Kimberly Akimbo” at the Schoolhouse Theater: How old is Ruth Reid?

Ron Marotta

(IM)MATURITY The cast of “Kimberly Akimbo” includes Ruth Reid, Israel Gutierrez and Brian Hotaling.

For once, this is a question an actress would want you to ask — or at least wonder about. Ms. Reid plays Kimberly, a typical teenager in many ways. She pouts when her father is late to pick her up. She kind of likes Jeff (Israel Gutierrez), the shy classmate who works at Zippy Burger. Playing Dungeons and Dragons, she adores the gore. (“They tore out my throat. Cool!”) Kimberly’s problem is that she has the body of a 60- or 70-year-old woman.

The cause is not a wacky brain transfer like the one in “Freaky Friday” or in “Prelude to a Kiss.” It’s not a child’s wish granted too soon like the one in “Big.” It’s an honest-to-goodness disease similar to progeria, one that causes children to age at four and a half times the normal rate. Average life expectancy is 16, and Kimberly has just reached that birthday.

Would that the shadow of death were her only problem. David Lindsay-Abaire, who wrote “Kimberly Akimbo,” which was presented by the Manhattan Theater Club in New York in 2003, knows that no one’s life is simple and that human beings aren’t always that nice. (Consider his other work, like the Pulitzer Prize-winner “Rabbit Hole,” which focused on parental grief over a little boy’s death.) This simultaneously sweet and biting production, ably directed by Raymond Munro, keeps the comedy coming, but it never lets us forget that Kimberly’s parents are seriously deranged.

Or maybe they’re just painfully immature. Pattie (Molly Hale) and Buddy (Brian Hotaling), with their cutest-senior-class-couple names, are probably about half their daughter’s apparent age. Buddy drinks too much and spends a lot of time reflecting on how much excitement he has missed, like seeing the running of the bulls in Pamplona, Spain, by becoming a husband and father. But at least he tries to grasp the nobility of adult life: “Most guys are just guys who work, right?” he says, speaking into a tape recorder to his second, unborn child. “There’s no shame in that.”

Yes, Pattie is pregnant, and she callously predicts, “This one is going to be perfect.” Pattie also has bandaged hands because of carpal-tunnel surgery, Thorazine in the medicine cabinet and, by Act II, a broken leg in a huge cast. She carelessly announces that she’s sure she has cancer and is going to drop dead at any moment, when it’s really Kimberly who isn’t long for this world. By comparison, Pattie’s sister, Debra (Mollie O’Mara), a black-sheep type who has been secretly living in the local library, is a paragon of empathy.

With gentle but deliberately wacky humor, Mr. Lindsay-Abaire forces us to look hard at this blue-collar New Jersey couple. (Buddy works at a gas station and has recently moved the family from Secaucus to Bogota for creepy reasons revealed in Act II.) Selfish parents who don’t even try to understand their children aren’t comic fantasies, of course. They exist all too often in real life. Maybe like Pattie and Buddy, those real parents feel cheated in their own lives and can’t summon the mental energy for genuine caring.

But it’s the daughter you can’t take your eyes off. Watching the white-haired Ms. Reid play Kimberly, you might infer that she is just a particularly youthful woman whose adolescent demeanor has inexplicably hung on for decades. At times, you might even think that she’s a very young actress made up to look older. But if you saw “Appointment With a High-Wire Lady” (also directed by Mr. Munro) at this theater two years ago, you saw Ms. Reid play Kimberly’s mental opposite: an unkempt, institutionalized older woman whose posture and gait say everything about her awful situation in life. (Ms. Reid declined to give her real age. She did say, however, that she had planned on attending Woodstock but had to work that weekend.)

Whatever else this smart, sensitive production of “Kimberly Akimbo” may have to say, Ms. Reid’s performance reminds us that “young at heart” isn’t an empty turn of phrase. Her performance is bright and engaging and inspiring.

The opening image in the Schoolhouse Theater production is of a snowfall in April, a symbol of wintry old age that has come too soon. But then doesn’t it always?
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She’s growing old before her time: ‘Kimberly Akimbo’ at The Schoolhouse Theater

By David Begelman, THEATER CRITIC

Published: 06:43 p.m., Friday, March 12, 2010

Playwright David Lindsay-Abaire has a penchant for relying on quirky human failings to get the action rolling in his dramas. In “Fuddy Meers” it was psychogenic amnesia forcing its heroine to face each day with a fresh slate. In “Wonder of the World” it was a husband’s sexual fetishism for Barbie dolls.

In “Kimberly Akimbo,” which is being staged at the Schoolhouse Theater, the blight is dysfunctional family dynamics heightened by a daughter’s disease — she’s growing old at four-and-a-half times the usual rate. At 16, Kimberly looks like a woman well into her seniority, a Benjamin Button in reverse.

Lindsay-Abaire has a gift for infusing metaphor into any pitfall of existence that has his characters taking life detours to accommodate its brutish reality. In the play, Kimberly’s parents harbor a secret about the mother’s new pregnancy that haunts family life since the clan fled Secaucus, N.J., for Bogota, N.J. The secret is yet another family concession to Kimberly’s condition, although one among several that has her complaining volubly, “I’m not dead yet!”

The aging disease, “like progeria without the dwarfism,” is only one problem in a world of disarray around the heroine. Although resigned to an early death, she is nonetheless a model of normalcy in the strife bedeviling her daily life. Her father is a Bible-toting alcoholic who forgets her birthday, is in constant spats with his wife, and hectors kids who he feels are in the Satanic grip of Dungeons and Dragons games.

Kimberly’s mother is a shrew racked with labor pains, a fractured leg, and carpel-tunnel pain in both her bandaged hands. In a rare moment of solicitude for Kimberly, she promises “to be normal.”

Kimberly’s sister, Debra, is a homeless felon and lesbian who plans a scam based upon doctoring checks she steals out of a public mail box she lugs into the home.

Some solace is provided Kimberly by the nerdy Jeff, a suitor smitten with her and fond of anagrams.

Lindsay-Abaire’s play, while engaging, seems to hover somewhere between daytime soap opera fare and lyrical dramas like those authored by Arthur L. Kopit (“Oh Dad, Poor Dad, Mama’s Hung You in the Closet and I’m Feelin’ So Sad “) and Paul Zindel (“The Effect of Gamma Rays On Man-In-The-Moon Marigolds”). You get the feeling that just as the play is about to take you to new levels of understanding, you’re dragged back down again to more humdrum action and themes.

All performers put in accomplished portrayals, but the star of the show is clearly Ruth Reid as Kimberly. She creates a subtly shaded and consistently riveting interpretation of the role. Her transformation into an older woman in disguise for Debra’s scam was startling. Mollie O’Mara provided a gutsy and conniving Debra, while Molly Hale as mother Pattie was a live wire of grousing and elevated decibel levels. Brian Hoteling as father Buddy crafted a skilled combination of inebriation, forgetfulness and being under the thumb of the women around him. Israel Gutierrez as Jeff was a beguilingly lovable suitor and gamester. Kudos to Raymond Munro for his skilled direction.
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Stellar acting lifts loopy ?Kimberly Akimbo?

By Bruce Apar bapar@ncnlocal.com

CROTON FALLS — When was the last time, on screen or on stage, a simple, tentative kiss brought tears to your eyes? It happens in The Schoolhouse Theater’s staging of “Kimberly Akimbo” by David Lindsay-Abaire.

Lindsay-Abaire is the clever, Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright who has made a name for himself through a rare talent for tackling thorny topics with both pathos and provocative humor.

In this work, his plot conceit is a 16-year-old girl whose genetic disease causes her to age 4-1/2 times faster than normal, so her physiognomy is that of a 70-year-old.

Kimberly Levaco is surrounded on the compact and totally utilitarian Schoolhouse stage by a certifiably wacko mother, Patty, who’s both pregnant and a hypochondriac; a teddy bear of a father, Buddy, who can’t get out of his own way; a crass and criminal but doting Aunt Debra; and geeky classmate and fellow outcast Jeff, who has a thing for anagrams, Dungeons & Dragons and, after a fashion, for Kimberly.

As the title character, despite her senior citizen status, the elegant Ruth Reid physically captures the callowness and cunning maturity of teenage girls in such a way that captivates the audience from the first scene, and never relinquishes control. Her malady notwithstanding, she is both the matriarch and the soul of the household.

Each performer in this stellar ensemble holds his or her own equally well. As service station laborer Buddy, who also is a barfly, Brian Hotaling renders a disarmingly authentic portrayal. He is as good as his acting is effortless.

As the Martha Rayesque mother Patty (a show biz reference for us old-timers), Molly Hale provides comic relief just by her pantomime-influenced presence. It comes as no surprise that the program reveals she was with Chicago’s famed improv troupe Second City.

Mollie O’Mara’s Aunt Debra is a commanding character that’s tough as nails outside and soft as feathers inside.

Israel Guiterrez, as Kimberly’s friend Jeff, is making his debut as a Schoolhouse performer and he is quite the find. His character is pivotal in illuminating Kimberly’s true emotions about her condition — which Reid accomplishes with heartbreaking understatement — and the young actor’s portrayal is never less than thoroughly engaging and matter-of-factly empathetic.

In the hands of Lindsay-Abaire, “Kimberly Akimbo” is akin to a balancing act that manages to hover both precariously and stealthily just this side of politically correct. He has a light touch with conversational dialogue that flows naturally and swiftly, yet is given weight by eccentric characters whose foibles we recognize—in others, perhaps in ourselves—all too readily.

So skip the boob tube one night to see something whose caliber you won’t see on TV. Besides, there’s nothing like live, intimate theater, and you won’t regret discovering The Schoolhouse Theater’s many charms that has earned it acclaim well beyond its environs.
After the Sunday, March 7 performance, Director Raymond Munro, Scenic Designer Ken Larson, Artistic Director Pamela Kareman and General Manager Quinn Cassavale joined the cast onstage for an informal chat with the audience.

Munro, whose deft handling of the show is a major cause for its success, remarked on the hyper-aging condition depicted in the show, noting that he’s nearing 60 and “gradually, imperceptibly slowing down, but it’s happened over 20 years.”

Despite his remarks, let’s hope he continues to brighten the stage with numbers as good as this one for years to come.

Olive and Mocha is a Semi-finalist!

mollyhale — Tue, 23 Mar 2010 02:39:39 +0000

My new comedy screenplay “Olive and Mocha” (AKA “Typical Girls”) was chosen as a semi-finalist in the L.A. Comedy Shorts Screenplay contest!

See the full list of semi-finalists here.

Peapod Squad wins third Beanpod title!

mollyhale — Tue, 23 Feb 2010 14:05:57 +0000

The Peapod Squad, the improv troupe I started in college, is still going strong. So strong in fact that there’s now a second troupe on campus. This year the Peapod Squad won it’s third Beanpod title, a coveted college improv title. I’m so proud of these guys. I’ve been back to teach improv there many times over the years and I am always impressed with how smart, funny and ready to learn they are. It does not surprise me that they won again. See the official Clark bulletin below or read here.
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Peapod Squad wins 3rd Beanpot improv title

Thursday, March 4, 2010

he Clark University Peapod Squad took first place at the 2010 College Beanpot Improv Tournament, held Feb. 24-27 at ImprovBoston.

Peapod competed against eight other area college improv teams to win first place, the third Beanpot title for the squad.

Members of the Peapod Squad are Andrew Ninnemann ‘10, Kaylie Curran ‘10, Sarah Jette ‘10, Milo MacPhail ‘11, John Nolan ‘11, Danny Zeliger ‘11, Ian Michaels ‘11, Julian Kronick ‘12 (of Leominster), Laura Flynn ‘12, and Vicki Grogan ‘10. Individually, MacPhail won the Breakout Player award.

The tournament is conducted in a Theater Sports-style competition, with teams going head-to-head, being scored individually according to Story, Skill, and Entertainment. This year’s tournament featured a “Goon” judge, who was allotted 15 points per round to give out as they saw fit, according to things they liked about the scenes.

Peapod won the competition in the final round against Fairfield by playing a long-form version of a game (with the working title of “The Morality Game”) created by the Squad, in which the team went through the scenario of the way a character’s life would pan out if they made one moral decision over another. The team received a perfect score for this final game, bringing in the win.

Peapod was coached at this year’s tournament by Impro Boston cast member Jenna O’Brien of Flaming Awesome, an IB house team.

This year’s other contestants included Fairfield University; Northeastern University; MIT; WPI; Brandeis University; Boston University; Boston College; and Gordon College.