ANNOUNCMENT!

Curtain Up Cookies is taking a hiatus from cookie creating to focus on outside endeavors.

Please check out the NEW Curtain Up Crafts etsy store to see what we're up to over there!

Wednesday, May 26, 2010

RUN AND SEE: Sarah Ruhl's Passion Play


Last night I saw Sarah Ruhl's Passion Play at the Irondale Center in Brooklyn presented by the Epic Theater Ensemble. What an incredible piece of art!

I have been a HUGE fan of Sarah Ruhl ever since I saw Eurydice at Second Stage in 2007 which just took my heart (I don't even know if that's a saying, but that's what it did.) Passion Play was just as moving and the production is just beautiful. The show is 3 hours long with 2 intermissions, but I nearly cried, I didn't want it to end (like literally). It's a wonderful look at history and religion and humanity. It's funny and poignant and intense, and it takes you on a journey that you just get swept up in. Each act focuses on the passion play during a different era in history, and the production creates such an atmosphere of community between the actors and the audience and the space (a beautiful community room inside a church (how fitting)), that speaks so well to the passion play as the community event it was, that this is more an experience than a piece of theater, and an amazing one at that.

It's only running until June 5th, but if you have a chance, RUN AND SEE THIS!

* The link above includes a short, but great video about the making of the piece (they are much more eloquent about it than I am)
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Thursday, May 20, 2010

Kicknic Cookies!

JARADOA (Just A Room Full Of Artists Doing Outreach And) Theater is an amazing theater company that I worked with last summer on the musical Shafrika the White Girl by Anika Larsen. Beyond doing great productions, JARADOA does amazing community outreach and also has super fun parties and events.

Last Monday I joined JARADOA in Central Park for their very first Kicknic (Picnic + Kickball Game)! It was a potluck, so naturally I brought cookies!

I enlisted the help of my friend Lisa, who also worked on Shafrika, and we had quite the adventure.

We began with a recipe for Butter Cookies that we used during a class at the ICE, but unfortunately it went horribly wrong and the dough fell apart when we tried to roll it out. After many attempts to salvage it, we had to come up with something else.


Once we had actually made some edible cookies, we had a great time decorating them.

Lisa made an amazing maroon icing (2 drops red, small drop green, small drop violet) and we got to work.


The maroon looks brownish in the pictures but I promise it looked great in real life.

I got the script idea from a wonderful blog that I read called Bake at 350. I had to test it out a bit first.


Mercy, Beauty, Truth is JARADOA's motto, and I wanted to make some cookies with their motto and some with their logo (you can see both on their website).





And I’m pretty pleased with how they turned out.


And they were a HIT at the Kicknic!


AND my team won the kickball game!
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Thursday, May 13, 2010

OPENING NIGHT: Gabriel

Tonight Gabriel by Moira Buffini opens at the Atlantic Theater Company! This is the third show of my Stage Management Fellowship. No cookies today (I save them for closing, remember!) but it's sure to be a fun night!


"Gabriel is set around a largely forgotten moment in British history — the German occupation of the Channel Islands during World War II. A naked young man washes up on a Guernsey beach. Unnervingly handsome and fluent in both German and English, he has no recollection of who he is — patriot or Nazi…innocent or madman. Gabriel explores the heart of memory, identity and imagination, as well as the lies people tell themselves and each other to make the darkness light again."


Come check it out! 

UPDATE: The Reviews are In! 
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Monday, May 10, 2010

Welcome to Curtain Up Cookie Design!


Hello Everyone! My name is Catherine. I am a stage manager in New York City. I love theater. I also love decorating cookies. I have been decorating cookies every Christmas since I can remember, and recently I’ve been expanding that tradition into a full-time hobby.

I am currently doing a Stage Management Fellowship at the Atlantic Theater Company, and it has become a tradition of mine to decorate show-related cookies for closing night (way too busy to get them done by opening).

My first foray into this idea was for Two Unrelated Plays by David Mamet: School and Keep Your Pantheon last October. This was the show artwork (left) and these are the cookies I made (right). This was before I'd really gotten into the whole thing (I've learned A LOT of techniques and such since, and even took a class at the ICE), but creating these from scratch (I even made a cookie cutter out of wax paper to get the right shape!) really inspired me to see where I could take this.





The second show of the Atlantic season, Ages of the Moon by Sam Shepard, didn’t have a logo to work off of so I had to think something up. I didn't have enough time to make them exactly how I wanted to, so they turned out more like black-and-white cookies, but I got more practice with writing.



From this little custom I have dreamed up a Broadway bakery of sorts, and I wanted to create this blog as the first step!

I'll be posting pictures of all of the cookies I create, as well as more theater-related things such as reviews of shows I've seen and info about what I'm doing at the moment, so stay tuned for more from Curtain Up Cookie Design!
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