Sunday Afternoon in Mott Haven: Theater for the New City presents Checks and Balances, or Bottoms Up! at St. Mary's Park

(Video courtesy New York Raw Videos)

Sunday Afternoon in Jackson Heights: Theater for the New City presents "Election Selection, or You Bet" at Travers Park

(Video courtesy NewYorkRawVideos)

Sunday Afternoon in Noho: Reverend Billy and the Stop Shopping Choir's "Monsanto Is the Devil" at Joe's Pub

(Video courtesy Joe's Pub)

Saturday Night on the Lower East Side: Hip Hop and Poetry Showcase at the Nuyorican Poets Cafe

(Video courtesy Shadrack Boakye) (Video courtesy Abraham Benjamin)

Sunday Afternoon in the East Village: Theater for the New City presents “Sanitation; or Off the Grid” at St. Mark’s in-the-Bowery

(Video courtesy NewYorkRawVideos)

Thursday Evening in Dumbo: Great Small Works 10th International Toy Theater Festival presents Jenny Romaine and Roberto Rossi's "Sandy Sandy Sandy" at St. Ann's Warehouse

(Video courtesy Trudi Cohen)

Saturday Afternoon in the East Village: Theater for the New City's Street Theater presents "99% Reduced Fat, or, You Can Bank On Us" outside Theater for the New City, East 10th Street at First Avenue

Theater for the New City's award-winning, rabble-rousing, rip-roaring Street Theater's up-to-the-nanosecond over-the-top agitprop summer musical extravaganzas are always a pure delight, and we were thrilled to be standing on East 10th Street outside Theater for New City by First Avenue

on this very hot and humid afternoon to see the premiere of director/creator Crystal Fields' 2012 production, 99% Reduced Fat, or, You Can Bank On Us,

a fabulous only-in-New-York-kids theater experience put on by an amazingly energetic and dynamic cast and crew, including many of our favorite performers from street summers past, with a terrific musical score by Joseph Vernon Banks.

We don't have the amount of time we used to and could write long, detailed stuff about what we see , but here's a great summary of this brilliant show:

Spooked by the loss of his best friend, who sniffed everything from incense to bath salts, a surly young gang member known as B.C. (Justin Rodriguez) begins to feel the weakness and impotence of a tough's life.

He wanders aimlessly through the city, witnessing impotence and suffering everywhere.

Teachers teach to the test and students learn nothing. The Mayor campaigns on a bicycle against sugary drinks and smoking in the park.

Pink slips fly while schools and hospitals close.

Stop and frisk and racial profiling push him from one neighborhood to another. ("Why don’t you go back to where you came from!" "Where’s That!? The Bronx? Cause that’s where I was born.")

The illusory nature of the American Dream is distilled at a concert where a Hip Hop artist performs, jumping all over the stage. People yell, scream and finally bum rush the stage but all they can grab is thin air--it’s a hologram!

B.C. finds himself at an Occupy Wall Street encampment in Zuccotti Park, where, he is beguiled by Suzy Freedom (Bridget Dowret), a young protestor.

She is an enlightening dreamer, pursued by police sirens, nightsticks and mace.

Lured by her desire for a better world, she blindly follows her visions: flying off the top of the Freedom Tower into the Land of Angels, where everyone has a three-room apartment and where everyone can afford organic food, college is tuition free and the government pays for health care. "Naïve, naïve," everyone says as she wafts away, "She didn’t know where she was going."

With her disappearance, B.C. knows he has lost the only thing he has ever prized. He tries to return to his old life, but a police raid throws him into the arms of his Seventh Grade teacher, Mr. Smiley (Michael Vazquez and Michael David Gordon alternate in the part), who gives him the best-selling book he has written, "Recipes for the Future."

It's a manual of gourmet meals for under $3.00, plans for Urban Gardens and methods of organizing grass roots protests and civil actions.

It is linked with a smiley face onto Facebook and Twitter.

B.C. and Smiley found a Cultural Center for the neighborhood and organize for future elections.

B.C. is also nurtured by a Mentoring Angel (Mark Marcante) and the "Un-Leader" of a local Occupy Wall Street contingent (Alexander Bartenieff).

Our hero has found his role in life, gathering strength from his immigrant heritage, the idea of taking government out of the hands of corporations, and the notion that politics doesn’t die with an election.

One man in office cannot change the world, but pressure from the ground up can and will accomplish all.

These wonderful shows, which we saw last year at St. Mark's Church and in 2009 in a Jackson Heights' Travers Park, always contains an elaborate assemblage of trap doors, giant puppets, smoke machines, masks,

original choreography and a huge (9' x 12') running screen or "cranky" providing continuous movement behind the actors.

We always enjoy the company of more than thirty performers at Theater for the New City's summer Street Theater productions, and that's why we wanted to see the very first performance of this year's show. You can catch it all over the city on weekends until September 16. Check this schedule.

We're grateful to everyone who presented today's performance, well worth standing in the hot sun -- though we were happy to get some ices as soon as we stopped applauding.

Sunday Afternoon in the East Village: Theater for the New City presents “Bamboozled, or the Real Reality Show” at St. Mark’s Church

Nobody does street theater like Theater for the New City, which is why we're so grateful that we managed to catch the very last performance of Bamboozled, or the Real Reality Show, the typically hilarious, incisive and infectious summer theatrical confection cooked up for the 35th year by director Crystal Field and the venturesome company of performers, musicians, and highly-skilled behind-the-scenes crew.

Theater for the New City's topical, satirical summer productions have made them a 21st-century mashup of the agitprop companies of the Great Depression and the activist street performers of the late 60s/early 70s.

Taking on the economic, political, social and cultural climate of the Great Recession, Bamboozled has first-rate production values and a cast of 33 actors with broad and subtle comic timing and gorgeous singing voices.

Since early August we've been meaning to get to one of their weekend productions that have traveled to different locations in all five boroughs, and today, at the last possible time, we managed to eke out some time after teaching our 9-to-noon class downtown at the wonderful Borough of Manhattan Community College.

Although we arrived late enough in the yard in front of St. Mark's Church on Second Avenue and Tenth Street to have to stand for the first half of the show, someone managed to find us a choice seat -- a dairy crate in the bank -- for the remainder.

Given that we're scrambling busy this term, teaching seven classes at four colleges six days a week, we'll cheat and cut and paste from the show's website for a little Bamboozled plot summary. (Students, it's okay if you credit your source!):

The hero of the play is a lowly but reliable Postman, whose route runs through Jackson Heights. He has always been very happy with his job, delivering the happiness of birthday cards, news of newborns and the romance of marriage invitations.

But this year, there is a terrible change--he is carrying a tsunami of unhappiness with pink slips, layoffs, businesses closings, Medicare terminations, closings of hospitals, firehouses and libraries; teacher terminations and condolences sent to the Japanese.

The TV haunts his dreams and corrupts his reality, with its bizarre reality shows and its news of wars in which we're not really there, but somehow we're bombing them to pieces.

He experiences a visitation from Diablo Hysterico, the Rock 'n' Roll King of the Underworld, who reveals to him our Faustian contract with Nuclear Power. Diablo declares, "You are America! Lord and Master of the World!"

Our hero resists the responsibility until he is visited by a fugitive from the future, who screams out what he has seen and pleads not to be sent back.

But Diablo sings him away, and the Postman flies with him to see a people-less planet--a silent world, with nothing but grasses and overhanging trees, and little animals scurrying here and there, and the only vestige of Human Civilization: a few Pokemon characters left over from a digital remix.

The operetta shows how a strong young man, slipping quickly towards middle age, can see through the maelstrom of bad news towards a clear vision of a cleaner, more harmonious planet.

Our hero fools the Devil and reminds us that a really good postman will ring three times if he has to, and even knock the door down if smoke is billowing from inside the house, and a person is screaming for help, as our planet is now.

Two years ago in Jackson Heights we saw and utterly adored TNC's 2009 summer show, Tally-Ho!, or Navigating the Future and figured it would be hard to top, but Bamboozled seemed even more resonant and entertaining.

Director/writer Crystal Field, the doyenne of New York street theater, who played Mother Nature at the end of the show, called Bamboozled "our gift to the city in the summer," and it's one for which we are extraordinarily grateful.

As the great theater writer Jerry Tallmer wrote in Chelsea Now/The Villager/Gay City News, this production of Bamboozled was enlivened considerably by "a five-piece band, music by Joseph Vernon Banks, giant puppets, masks, smoke, moving scenery on a nine-foot-high scroll called a Cranky,' group singing by the audience, dance by everybody."

The eighty or so minutes of Bamboozled seemed to go by in a flash, perhaps because of its incredibly fast, almost manic pace. In addition to trenchant social satire, it gave the audience a lot to think about, and if a rollicking farce can be thoughtful, this play was just that. It was also very moving

as well as informative, especially on the nature of global warming, the perils of hydrofracking and nuclear power, and other environmental issues. The songs were indeed wonderful, but our favorite was a surprisingly touching ode to New York State's superb (and scarily endangered) drinking water.

There are also wonderful parodies of cable TV pap designed to narcotize American citizens. We don't have cable TV and only know about some of these "reality" shows from our reading, but they included hilarious send-ups of Sarah Palin's Alaska, Jersey Shore, The Deadliest Catch, and some apprentice-chef-competition reality program.

The Theater for the New City cast is, as always, both versatile -- their swift costume changes would have our heads spinning -- and infectiously energetic, with clear and resonant singing voices that you'd expect of a Broadway musical.

Led by Michael-David Gordon as the Postman and Mark Marcante as the Devil,

the actors worked together with precision and dead-on comic timing. There were times when the ensemble overflowed the stage, and the ending got the audience up on their feet -- with some joining the cast in a celebratory conclusion to the show.

We are so grateful we were able to catch the final performance of Bamboozled on such a gorgeous afternoon in the yard in front of St. Mark's Church in-the-Bowery.

Since the last time we sat at a bench here, on the Sunday of Rosh Hashona a couple of years back, we ended up in the emergency room of New York Eye and Ear Infirmary a few blocks away after a freak accident (okay, okay: a bird's shit ricocheted from the inside of our glasses into our eye, causing a severe burn that didn't go away after an hour and required medical attention), we were a little, uh, gun-shy about returning to the spot.

But today the birds behaved themselves, and Theater for the New City's production, thanks to Crystal Field, the cast, crew and other creators, gave us an end-of-summer lift. As we said at the beginning, nobody does street theater better than this.