Awkward Moment Productions

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NEW NEW NEW! Clips from the Victoria Fringe Festival opening of "Circumference", August 20, 2008!
Amy explains "Awkward Moment Productions":
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Amy talks about a memorable "Fringe Moment":
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Awkward Moment Productions is the teeny theatre company of me, Amy Salloway, an actor/writer/solo performer living in Minneapolis, MN. I tour three (3!) (Tres!) (Troix!) one-woman comedies around the US and Canada -- sometimes as part of Fringe Theatre Festivals, sometimes as independently-booked gigs for colleges, conferences, fundraisers, performance series, JCCs, synagogues, women's events, etcetera. This website is a great place to visit if you'd like to find out if any of my shows are coming towards YOU...cuz if they are, you should, like, see them. :-)
NEW NEW NEW OH SO NEW!
Awkward Moment Productions (that's me, Amy Salloway) presents a new collection of stories EXCLUSIVELY for the Spirit In The House Festival of faith-oriented performance, February 27-March 8, 2009!
HEEBS and DWEEBS
Minneapolis Fringe fave Amy Salloway (“So Kiss Me Already, Herschel Gertz!”, “Circumference”) breaks her solo-show-with-a-plotline tradition for a moment to offer up "Heebs and Dweebs", a casual and eclectic batch of Jewish, true-ish stories that changes nightly – no two “Spirit in the House” performances exactly alike! You definitely don’t have to be a Yid to relate to these reflections on life at the “Math Boys” lunch table… a bipolar Israeli tour guide…and Linda, the psychic cleaning lady.
SHOWTIMES:
Sat February 28, 8:30 pm
Mon March 2, 7:00 pm
Tues March 3, 8:30 pm
Wed March 4, 7:00 pm
Sun March 8, 5:30 pm
WHERE:
Hennepin Avenue United Methodist Church
(intersection of Lyndale and Groveland, Minneapolis, MN)
Church of Youth room
TICKETS:
$12.00 adults
$10.00 students, seniors, MPR members, Fringe buttons.
Reservations through Uptown Tix:
651-209-6799 or
1-888-279-0089
Part of the Spirit In The House Festival, with sponsorship from the Rimon Jewish Arts Fund (thanks, Rimon!)
February 27-March 8, 2009
www.amysalloway.com
CIRCUMFERENCE
It is then, as Ms. Gleby is announcing to the entire gym class that I’ve scored lower on the Presidential Physical Fitness Test than any student in the history of Cheese Creek Junior High, “lower even that the retards”, she barks, that I decide it. I can’t take this anymore. My body and I are getting a DIVORCE. Oh, it can hang there below my chin if it really wants to, but I will no longer speak to it or look at it or even acknowledge its presence. We are finished. Forever. Okay, I guess we might need to share custody of my mouth, cuz of nutrition and all, but other than that, I will live the rest of my life as a head. A floating head. That won’t be so bad…right?
The Ghosts of Gym Teachers Past meet the Fear of Fitness Centers Present and the Obsession with Weight Loss Future in this new solo comedy about size, sweat…and exercising your demons. From the creator of the hit touring productions “Does This Monologue Make Me Look Fat?” and "So Kiss Me Already, Herschel Gertz!” comes a funny and complicated look at the relationships we have with our bodies.
UPCOMING PERFORMANCES OF "CIRCUMFERENCE":
University of Rhode Island (sponsored by Hillel)
February 19, 2009
Swan Hall Auditorium
60 Upper College Road
Kingston, RI
Thursday, February 19, 2009
7:30pm
Admission — FREE FREE FREE!
401-874-2740
OpenStage Theatre of Harrisburg’s Flying Solo Festival
Harrisburg, PA
In June.
More info sune.
Stay tune(d).
PREVIOUS "CIRCUMFERENCE" GIGS:
* Six Figures Artists of Tomorrow Festival, NYC
* The Victoria Fringe Festival, Victoria BC!
* The Calgary Fringe, Calgary, AB ("Top 5 Shows To See"!)
* The Winnipeg Fringe, Winnipeg, MB (Best in Fest!)
* The Piggyback Fringe, Wakefield, QC
* The Ottawa Fringe, Ottawa, ON
* The Her-icane Festival of Women's Theatre, Saskatoon, SK
* StageNorth Theatre, Washburn, WI
* The SPACE: A Center for Creativity, New Richmond, WI
* Old Arizona Studio, Minneapolis, MN
* The Lowry Theatre Lab Fringe Invitational, Minneapolis, MN
* The 2007 MN Fringe Festival, Minneapolis, MN
* The 2006 Atlantic Fringe Festival, Halifax, NS (Best of Venue!)
REVIEWS of "CIRCUMFERENCE":
“ ✭✭✭✭1/2
Every so often there comes a show that is personal, funny, poignant and touching-- a show carefully crafted to take advantage of each moment's full emotional effect, whether highs or lows. This year at the Fringe, that show would seem to be Amy Salloway's Circumference.”
-- The Calgary Sun
"Amy Salloway's new monologue is delivered with such craft and assurance, and as a performer she has so much appeal, that it's easy to forget that her subject matter involves such a great deal of hardship and pain. While being considered for gastric-bypass surgery, Salloway recounts the results of a weight-loss program mandated by her insurance—the rush of getting in touch with her body after years of estrangement, the despair after a crush at the gym turned out to be unrequited. Digging into the past, she turns a Presidential Fitness Test into a verbal opera of cruelty. It's no small wonder that from all these experiences she creates a show that both entertains and elicits such strong affection from her audience."
—City Pages
“MUST-SEE: Salloway is a major-league writer and storyteller - poignant, sensitive and hysterically funny. Jewels of observation and awareness become transformative moments, and no audience can come away untouched by the gift of her experience.”
-- St. Paul Pioneer Press
“ ✭✭✭✭1/2 Possibly the best play Amy Salloway has put forth to date. As deeply personal as her previous efforts were, ‘Circumference’ goes one step deeper, something that could possibly hurt in the telling, but if it does then it is a healing pain. This is easily one of my favorite shows this year.”
-- MN Fringe Audience Review
“A-LIST: Salloway has a gift for detail, a technician's skill with words, and a dead-on instinct for finding humor where others might mine only darkness.”
— City Pages
“…a hilariously frantic performance and a well-crafted script with a strong emotional centre. Roundly charming and cleverly filled out, most people will burn more than a few calories laughing along with Circumference.”
-- Monday Magazine, Victoria BC
“… comical and endearing…takes us on a relatable journey.”
-- Winnipeg Sun
"Circumference is smart and poignant and heartbreaking and hilarious and Amy Salloway is an adorable, genuine, crazy-talented person.

-- Ottawa Fringe Audience Review
“✭✭✭✭ Salloway is a charming performer, and assumes the quirky characters of her story easily - in particular, the spazzy junior high friend and the Super America clerk with the accent straight out of Fargo. She gives a high energy performance that spreads to the audience.”
-- Uptown Magazine, Winnipeg
“Top Five Fringe Shows Not To Miss: “Circumference”
– Calgary Herald
"✭✭✭✭✭ Salloway is simply an amazing thinker, writer and performer, truly one-of-a-kind. I've loved her previous shows, but she really ups the emotional ante on this one -- such a heartbreakingly personal hour that you almost feel like you're eavesdropping rather than watching a stage show. She seamlessly weaves humor and despair without ever going for cheap laughs or maudlin sentimentality. One of those rare Fringe shows that I know I'll be thinking about for a long time."
-- MN Fringe Audience Review
“Anyone who’s struggled with their weight (or anything, for that matter) will immediately feel their hearts go out to Amy.”
-- The Jenny Review, Winnipeg
“✭✭✭✭ ‘Circumference’ cleverly uses humor and a whole lot of energy to delve into fat stereotypes, the haunting influence of a junior high school gym class and a unique way to get an extra serving of vegetables. …Extremely relatable for anyone who dislikes something about their body, and the near full house on opening night proved women’s body issues can also make the men in the crowd laugh.”
-- CBC Manitoba
"We may never have struggled with weight issues, but Amy's craft is such that the audience is rooting for her from the moment she steps on stage. Her bravery in giving voice to inner demons allows us to examine our own differences in light of hers and realize how alike we are."
-- Victoria Fringe Audience Review
“✭✭✭✭ Salloway is that rarity, an equally talented writer and performer… hilarious, honest, and unsparing, with a great sense of pace.”
– Calgary Herald
" ✭✭✭✭✭
 …it’s a wonder you laugh at her stories rather than cry. But laugh you do, and often."
-- MN Fringe Blogger Ben Sandell
“There’s nothing fat or sluggish about Salloway’s prose. Her frenetic energy powers her through a scintillating script peppered with ironic exaggeration and pre-emptive wisecracks. She flies like a hawk in a hurricane…she’s a born entertainer.”
-- The Halifax Herald
“ ✭✭✭✭ Circumference is all about how Salloway gets her life and her body back even as her plan to have gastric bypass surgery goes awry. It's smart, funny, and most importantly, honest. You can almost see her brain working towards a punch line as she tells us one of her fat horror stories, and then, at the last moment, going, oh, I'll just write the truth instead.”
-- Calgary Herald
“…gives so much to the audience. I would go see her, whatever she was offering.”
-- Victoria Fringe Audience Review
“✭✭✭✭ Salloway switches between characters with ease, and her use of minimal props and adult language and situations make for a well-rounded show with a straight-forward narrative that entertains throughout. The comedy in Circumference works because it's real. Salloway's show is an in-depth portrait -- from being the slowest girl in gym class to being an adult with such low self-confidence she sleeps in crumbs -- of a woman and her quest to make it up Confidence Hill amid societal pressure and her own self-loathing.”
-- Victoria Times-Colonist
"Amy Salloway is completely endearing on stage and has wonderfully, comically and painfully woven together her life from adolescence to adulthood. Her story speaks of the haunting pain of other people’s cruelty, but (she) doesn’t stand before us as a victim. She bravely and heroically lets us into her heart, her bedroom, and opens up her soul. She moved me to tears and the show has stayed with me. Go. This is a DO NOT MISS.
"
-- Ottawa Fringe Audience Review
“Dynamite…there's more content in this play than any others this reviewer has seen combined. Salloway gives a dead-on performance of a woman whose body shape is at odds against her love life, ability to make friends in school, and her gym teacher. Funny and touching, Circumference is what a play should be.”
-- The Halifax Coast
“…she’s got that brilliance for capturing what it means to be human.”
-- Ottawa Fringe Audience Review
“✭✭✭✭ The night before I saw Circumference, I asked some volunteers what their favorite shows so far had been and one said, 'Circumference--but it's about women's body image issues, so I don't know how much guys would be into it.' Memo to volunteer: guys invented women's body image issues. And we have a few of our own as well.
Circumference pulled a full house Monday, and it was an equal divide between guys and women. There was no divide between who was laughing, though: that would be everyone lucky enough to be at the show.”
-- The Calgary Herald
SO KISS ME ALREADY, HERSCHEL GERTZ!
Dear Lenore,
Please, please PLEASE help me get out of here! Today we had to choose ACTIVITIES. Every single one of them has to do with Judaism, or Israel, or both. I tried to pick the things that seemed the LEAST Jewish, but I still ended up with “A Nature Walk With Moses”, “Torah: Issues and Applications”, and “The Ancient Biblical Art of Macrame”. We aren’t allowed to listen to anything except Hebrew! music until the last day of camp, when there’s a COSTUME DANCE, and they’ll play normal music for us as a SPECIAL TREAT.
By then, I will be dead.
Love,
Amy
Milwaukee, Wisconsin. 1986. Amy has a plan for her 15th summer: Transform from total dorkwad to Material Girl. Build This City on rock and roll. And pine for her unrequited love Ross Buckman until he sees her True Colors shining through. Instead, her parents ship her off for eight weeks to uber-Jewish Camp L’Chaim, where “even the mosquitoes wear yarmulkes!” How Amy survives as the pork chop in an all-Kosher world “combines poetry, comedy, pathos and plain good storytelling" (--The Halifax Herald).
UPCOMING PERFORMANCES OF "SO KISS ME ALREADY, HERSCHEL GERTZ!":
Umass-Dartmouth (aka, the University of MA at Dartmouth)
The Center For Jewish Culture
Fine Arts Building, Room 153
Dartmouth, MA
Wednesday, February 18, 2009
7:00 pm
Admission – FREE FREE FREE!
Sponsored by the Center for Jewish Culture and the Women's Resource Center
Contact Rabbi Jacqueline Satlow
[email protected]
508-910-6551
Congregation B’nai Emet
3115 Ottawa Avenue South, St. Louis Park, MN 55416
Saturday, March 7th, 2009
7:30 pm
Tickets $15.00 general public, more for reserved seats (see website for more info)
952-927-7309
Www.bnaiemet.org
"So Kiss Me Already, Herschel Gertz!" premiered in the 2005 Minnesota Fringe Festival. Appearances of "So Kiss Me Already…" have included:
* The 2005 Atlantic Fringe, Halifax, Nova Scotia
* The 2006 Rogue Performance Festival, Fresno, CA
* The Loring Playhouse, Minneapolis, MN
* Stage North Theatre, Washburn, WI
* The Oh Solo Mio Festival of Solo Performance, London, ON
* The 2006 Cincinnati Fringe, Cincinnati, OH
* The 2006 Ottawa Fringe, Ottawa, ON
* The 2006 Winnipeg Fringe, Winnipeg, MB, where it sold out six of nine performances and won “Best of the Fest”
* The Baltimore Creative Alliance
* The Jewish Museum of Maryland
* The 2007 Orlando Fringe, Orlando, FL
* The 2007 Berkshire Fringe, Great Barrington, MA
* The 2007 Victoria Fringe, Victoria BC
* The 2007 Vancouver Fringe, Vancouver BC, where it sold out almost all its performances and received "Pick of the Fringe"
* The 2008 International TeatroNetto Festival of Solo Performance, Jaffa, Israel
* The Manhattan JCC, NYC
* Park Theatre, Hayward, WI
...and many colleges, synagogues and Jewish events.
REVIEWS CLIPS FOR "HERSCHEL GERTZ"....
“Do we really need another one-person show about Jewish adolescent angst? If it's performed by Amy Salloway of Minneapolis, we certainly do. Salloway has a mobile face, an expressive body and a knack for words... Whether she's describing a fresh container of margarine as looking like "an unexplored canola planet," dancing divinely to the Go-Gos, or winning the heart of Herschel Gertz, Amy could well be the funniest, most appealing character you'll meet at this year's Fringe.”
-- The Ottawa Citizen
****" …energetic and hilarious. You’ll relate to Amy Salloway’s tender and very funny coming-of-age comedy regardless of summer camp experience or religious persuasion – (it’s) universal and charming enough to win anyone over.”
-- CBC Manitoba
“A MUST SEE. Amy Salloway belongs to a rare and crafty class of clowns: she writes comedy as deftly and as perceptively as she performs it. To see her new (show) is to wonder which to admire more, her original ideas or her warm, winning revelation of them.”
-- Cincinnati CityBeat
“Sweet, funny…busting with youthful energy.”
– The Winnipeg Sun
“Our favorite self-loathing performer/writer from the Minnesota Fringe Festival is back for another helping of self-humiliation. Amy Salloway may be riddled with insecurity, but her writing is loaded with so much skill and good humor that her pain winds up being our pleasure.”
– The Rake
"Writer-performer Amy Salloway delivers great comic characterizations, vivid images, and hilarious one-liners. Behind the comedy, Salloway poignantly captures the innocence and confusion of first love."
-- The Georgia Straight
"FRINGE BEST BET: a sweet and endearingly funny coming of age story that deftly avoids the overly sentimental trappings of sweet and endearingly funny coming of age stories. Based on Salloway's own camp experience, the writing is sharply witty and packed with teen spirit from start to finish."
-- The Vancouver Globe and Mail
***** “Absolutely fabulous. The story of a 15 year-old girl at a boy/girl camp is always fodder for humor but in the hands and mind of Amy Salloway it is a masterpiece. A must-see, or you'll feel like such a putz.”
-- MN Fringe Audience Review
“Salloway is a mega-talented writer and performer. (She) offers the audience a world of empathy as she travels in and out of characters, addressing bigger issues of peer pressure and feeling left out of the crowd.”
– The Two Jew Review
***** “Not just for Jewish people…for anyone who hated camp or loved it and anyone who remembers their first kiss or is still trying to block it out.”
-- MN Fringe Audience Review
"Salloway channels her inner teenager, zits and all. She can be innocent and imaginative as easily as she can be shrill and self-absorbed. Ultimately, though, she's a poignantly vulnerable character whose story works through her struggle to find acceptance and spirituality.."
-- The Victoria Times-Colonist
***** “David Sedaris has met his female match!”
-- MN Fringe Audience Review
DOES THIS MONOLOGUE MAKE ME LOOK FAT?
Amy's having one of those LIVES. Her uterus is rebelling, her perfect younger sister is destined for stardom, her boyfriend won't give her a kidney, and the body-image workshop she signs up for becomes a surreal lesbian adventure. Is this going to be another night spent commiserating with pot pies in the frozen foods aisle…or somewhere, somehow, can a single, spherical girl figure out where she fits?
This hit touring show from Minnesota won Lavender Magazine's vote for "Best Solo Performance of 2003", Critic's Pick of the 2005 Cincinnati Fringe, and Best Script and Best Comedy at the Columbus GLBT Theatre Festival. "Smart, funny, fearlessly candid" – The Georgia Straight. "Superbly crafted…utterly brilliant" – The Halifax Herald. And from the Minneapolis Star-Tribune: "An A for chutzpah!
UPCOMING PERFORMANCES OF "DOES THIS MONOLOGUE MAKE ME LOOK FAT?":
Check back for updates!
"Does This Monologue Make Me Look Fat?" debuted in the Minnesota Fringe Festival in the summer of 2003, and has gone on to be performed in and at…
* Bedlam Studio’s 2003 Best of the Fest, Minneapolis, MN
* The 2004 UNO Festival of Solo Theatre, Victoria, BC
* The 2004 hunder Bay Fringe Festival, Thunder Bay, ON
* The 2004 Minnesota Fringe Festival, Minneapolis, MN
* The 2004 Atlantic Fringe, Halifax, NS
* The 2004 Vancouver Fringe, Vancouver, BC
* The 2004 Artists of Tomorrow Festival, NYC, New York
* Breathe In, Sing Out Benefit, Minneapolis
* The 2005 Cape May Stage Flying Solo Festival, Cape May, NJ
* The 2005 Cincinnati Fringe Festival, Cincinnati, OH
* The 2005 Berkshire Fringe, Great Barrington, MA
* The 2006 WomenSpeak Series, OpenStage of Harrisburg, Harrisburg, PA
* The 2006 Columbus National GLBT Theatre Festival, Columbus, OH
* Rainbow Resources, Winnipeg, MB
* The 2007 Ottawa Fringe Festival, Ottawa, ON
MORE REVIEWS OF "DOES THIS MONOLOGUE"....
“Salloway is smart, funny, observant and honest, with a mind that zooms into orbit around a yet-to-be-discovered planet.”
– The Cincinnati Enquirer
"Salloway is...an appealing and marvellously funny performer. With 'Monologue', you can also add the adjectives brave and original. How else to describe this fireball of talent, who opens her show with an ode to her uterus?"
-- The Ottawa Citizen
"Amy Salloway lays her stories out for all to see - and occasionally get her knees up in the air for all to see as well. A good physical character and mimic brings together herself and her mother, a reluctant boyfriend, and a cadre of ample lesbians, while only Amy takes the stage. Much recommended."
-- MN audience review
“A MUST-SEE: poignant, revelatory and funny”
– St. Paul Pioneer Press
"...endlessly clever and accessible. Her insightful study makes for great theater; her self-deprecating candor makes for great fringe."
-- Cincinnati CityBeat
"Salloway's writing is superbly crafted, her delivery polished, her comic-timing unsurpassed, and her raging imagination harnessed to her theatrical art like the radioactive core of a nuclear reactor."
-- The Halifax Herald
"Amy Salloway is an adorable bundle of talented energy, the kind who can deliver graphic details about participating in an eight-woman orgy that time she became a weekend lesbian and make the experience seem entirely relatable and not at all weird."
-- The Ottawa Sun
"...brilliantly funny, radiantly rendered"
-- MNartists.org
"beautifully done, with a great eye for detail. Funny, fascinating, and poignant."
-- MN audience review
"I have not laughed and been touched by something this much in a very long time. Hearing her stories, laughing while feeling her pain made me feel a little less lonely."
-- MN audience review
"Destined to be famous, Amy Salloway is refreshingly wide-eyed and open-hearted in a medium dominated by cynicism and smart-ass comments. And then there's the sex thing. A truly endearing production."
-- David Hansen, artistic director, Cleveland’s Bad Epitaph Theatre
"Yay to Amy Salloway for her amazing monologues, for the way she connected with SO many of us in the audience tonight, for her sparkling turns of phrases, for her seasoned and so damn well rehearsed performance, for earning every good word that people are saying about her show. Yay for the good guys getting what they deserve. It's about time."
-- MN audience review
"If by "fat" you mean "intelligent, adorable, and hilarous..." then yes, Amy Salloway, you are huge."
-- MN audience review
For more info on So Kiss Me Already, Herschel Gertz!, Does This Monologue Make Me Look Fat? and Amy's newest show, Circumference, please visit: www.amysalloway.com .
Thanks for stopping by!