Stand-up comedy in San Miguel
July 14, 2006

Daniel Packard is "one of the most charismatic, passionate, funny stand-up comics I've ever seen," wrote a reviewer for the Vancouver Sun. Packard is bringing his Live Group Sex Therapy Show to San Miguel. A conventional stand-up comic for the first years of his career, Packard spent years redefining what a comedian can accomplish on stage.

His goal was to create a show in which the humor comes not from formulaic delivery but from the passion and excitement of real-life human interaction. The result is a "brilliant, fearless, ruthlessly funny sociologist/psychiatrist of a comic." He has performed all over the world.

Daniel Packard's Live Group Sex Therapy Show, which he says is a "clean show about a dirty topic," is being produced by Iguana Productions, the same group that brought us the very successful play Blown Sideways Through Life. The show will be held at the sexy new nightclub at Hidalgo 79 called, appropriately enough, The Foreplay Lounge. The nightclub is part of the new Hotel Doña Urraca. 

Admission is $150 pesos, which includes one cocktail. Reservations are available at Galería Izamal, Mesones 80 (right next door to the Angela Peralta theater). Or, you may reserve a seat by phone or email: 154-0352 or alanjordansma@yahoo.com. (Those with reservations must arrive by 8pm the evening of the performance.) Doors open at 8pm, and the show starts at 9pm. Seats are not reserved, but seating is limited.

Daniel Packard's Live Group Sex Therapy Show
Thursday-Saturday, July 27-29, 9pm, Foreplay Lounge, Hidalgo 79, 150 pesos



Dear George letters

Based on the 40-year correspondence between the playwright George Bernard Shaw and the actress Mrs. Patrick Campbell, Dear Liar is a love story in letters. Shaw fell in love with Campbell while sitting in a darkened theater where she was performing. A magnificent actress, Campbell starred in, among other plays, The Second Mrs. Tanqueray, Bella Donna and Hedda Gabler. Shaw wrote Caesar and Cleopatra hoping that she would be in it. She had other commitments. However, when Shaw created the teenage cockney flower girl, Eliza Doolittle, in Pygmalion, Campbell, who was 49 years old at the time, opened the show in a tour de force performance. 

Like most affaires de coeur, this one began in mutual admiration and proceeded to flirtation, passion, irritation, jealousy, misunderstanding and heartbreak. They adopted pet names for each other-Shaw became "Joey" (after the then-popular clown) and Campbell "Stella" (from her name, "Beatrice Stella"). Stella chided him with, "When you were a little boy, someone should have said 'hush' to you once." Their affair became widely known because, as Shaw says, "I wish I could fall in love without telling everybody." (In his biography of Shaw, Michael Holroyd wrote that Mrs. Patrick Campbell was the one woman who threatened Shaw's marriage to his wife, Charlotte, and Charlotte did everything in her power to keep Shaw away from "Stella.")

Opening on Broadway in 1960, Dear Liar was revived to acclaim by the Irish Repertory Theater with Marian Seldes and Donal Donnelly in July 1999. For the Playreaders of San Miguel, the respective roles of Mrs. Patrick Campbell and George Bernard Shaw are performed by Narissa Ferrer and Tom King. Dic Simandl executes the lights and sound, and Fran Rowe Robbins directs. The doors of St. Paul's Parish Hall, calle Cardo 6, open at 7pm and the show begins at 7:30 pm (or earlier if the house fills). A donation of 10 pesos is requested.

Playreaders present Dear Liar, Wednesday & Thursday, July 19 & 20, 7pm
St. Paul's Parish Hall, Cardo 6, 10 pesos