Jan 1st - 45 minutes of New Year's Eli

You don't have to be lucid, or even conscious, just please come!

I will be playing my guitar ditties (and singing along to them) on the very first night of 2008.

I'm just so excited that I can't stop emailing. So excited that I'm not even thinking about how far 2008 is from 2000 (which is when I thought I'd have bought my first castle.)

JAN 1st, 2008 - 8pm sharp
FREE SHOW
The Sidewalk Cafe
96 Avenue A
(corner of 6th Street, East Village, back room)

Hear some of my songs at: Eli and the Indoor Boys

The Huge Fucking Eagle Has Landed

Eli's Review of Cymbeline at Lincoln Center

My dating life summed up in The Eli James Theater Awards.

You know you're officially a critic when someone lets you write a Year-End list.

I can't believe a magazine actually let the following fly:

Eli James Theater Awards in The L Magazine


PS - I did NOT write the intro sentence. Mine was way cooler.

Just 'cause I can, and not 'cause it's relevant, here was the intro sentence I had proposed:

The Tony's, Drama Desks, and Critics' Circle Awards recognize plays for what they do for the medium and to the world. The Eli James Awards seek to acknowledge certain plays for what they did to me personally.

You've got three more days to see me in a wife-beater.

Unless you come over while I'm cooking spaghetti, and if you bring over a wife-beater.

Iphigenia at Aulis featuring Eli.

One of New York's Hottest Understudies

I've spent most of my adult life being something of an understudy - just waiting for someone to die so that I can have a chance at showing the world what I do. (whatever that is.)

Now I'm no longer something of an understudy. I am a REAL LIVE understudy. That's right. It's the next level.

I'm going to cover both roles in a two-man play called "The Four of Us" at Manhattan Theatre Club this spring. And now I'm realizing that this will actually be a much harder job than being cast as one of the actual performers, even though they'll probably be making more money.

How do you memorize an entire script? That's my next question. If there are any books on the subject, or if someone has done this before, please feel free to let me know.

Two Achilles down, seven left to go.

So, this play I'm in opened on Friday. "Iphigenia at Aulis" In it I play Achilles, half-man half-god (see below, re: typecasting.) For a very talky show, performed in a theater with extreme sight line and acoustical problems, the first two performances have actually been pretty good.

What qualifies as "pretty good" to an actor in a play? I don't know. Very hard to define. Largely it's defined by its negatives or opposites. I'm led to believe the performances were pretty good because I experienced a pronounced lack of self-hatred or hatred for others while on stage.

My first-ever piece for Time Out. Out today.

Need a "chart-icle" writer? I'm now, officially, your man.

This coming to you from none other than the good people at Time Out New York! No, I didn't know what a "chart-icle" was either 'til I wrote one.

Online Version of Eli's Time Out Chart-icle

It's way cooler to look at it in print, but if you want immediate gratification, click away.

It's a graph detailing what might happen if several lesser-known unions went on strike in New York. It was very hard to make union issues funny, I don't know if I succeeded, and the research required nearly killed me.

However, this is a great occasion for me, if for no other reason than I've learned what kind of work goes into a good piece of fluff, how much of what one writes actually makes the article, and how many words get changed by the staff (answer: a lot). Those of you who know me, see if you can guess which jokes are pure Eli, which are pure editor.

But I have absolutely no cause to gripe. My name's in a glossy magazine, and at least two of the jokes remained intact. That's actually a lot when you think about it!

I'm in this play. It's older than Jesus.

It runs December 7th - 16th on the Lower East Side, NYC. And in it I play Achilles, half-man half-god.

Goddamn typecasting. Show Info and Tix

"I'm Not There" is a complete load of shit.

More to come on this topic. However, off the top of my head I can say that this movie's success is why our country is going wrong.

Please agree to disagree with this review:
New York Times Review

And agree with this one:
New Yorker Review