MATTHEW PILLSBURY: TALK AND BOOK SIGNING
Matthew Pillsbury, “Sitting on the High Line, Thursday, November 10, 2011,” archival pigment ink print (image courtesy Bonni Benrubi Gallery, New York)
CITY STAGES
Aperture Gallery and Bookstore
547 West 27th St. between Tenth & Eleventh Aves.
Wednesday, March 12, suggested donation $5, 6:30
Exhibition continues through March 27
www.aperture.org
www.matthewpillsbury.com
In such series as “Screen Lives,” “Time Frame,” and “City Stages,” French-born photographer Matthew Pillsbury has taken pictures of New York and other urban locations (London, Paris, Vancouver, Las Vegas, San Francisco, Miami) with a black-and-white eight-by-ten camera, using exposures ranging from a few minutes to an hour. The results are mysterious, mesmerizing photos that capture several moments in time at once, a kind of past, present, and future rolled together in an often ghostly evocation of an alternate reality mimicking our own. “City Stages” features such locales as Zuccotti Park, the High Line, the Main Reading Room in the New York Public Library, and Washington Square Park in addition to such events as the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, the Village Halloween Parade, and the Lunar New Year Parade, while “Time Frame” goes to the Guggenheim, Grand Central, and the American Museum of Natural History; “Screen Lives” features more personal interiors, with shots of people in rooms with a television on. In conjunction with his current show at Aperture, Pillsbury will be at the Chelsea gallery on March 12 at 6:30 to lead a tour of the exhibition and to sign copies of his first monograph, City Stages (Aperture, October 2013, $55.25), which contains works from all three series. The “City Stages” exhibit will remain on view through March 27 at Aperture; in addition, Pillsbury’s “Nate and Me,” which focuses on the photographer and his former partner who still works with him, is running at Sasha Wolf on Orchard St. through April 20.
CHARACTER MAN
Jim Brochu looks back at his long life in musical theater in CHARACTER MAN (photo by Carol Rosegg)
30th Street Theatre at Urban Stages
359 West 30th St. between Eighth & Ninth Aves.
Wednesday – Monday through March 30, $35
212-868-4444
www.jimbrochu.com
www.urbanstages.org
Award-winning actor and playwright Jim Brochu pays tribute to the Broadway character actors of old in his charming one-man show, Character Man. Brochu, who won a Drama Desk Award for his previous solo presentation, Zero Hour, in which he portrayed Zero Mostel, this time tells his own story, about growing up in the theater surrounded by such character actors as Jack Gilford, Lou Jacobi, Jack Albertson, George S. Irving, Barney Martin, Jack Klugman, Robert Preston, and his mentor and longtime friend, two-time Tony winner Davy Burns. As Brochu shares intimate tales of his childhood and career, with a focus on his relationship with his father — including how Joan Crawford almost became his stepmother — old photos and video appear on three screens hanging from the ceiling. Brochu moves across the small stage, relaxing in a red theater seat (that matches his tie and pocket square), sitting at a dressing-room makeup table, or walking to the back, where he mimics selling orange drink at the Alvin Theatre, his first job in show business. Each vignette features a related Broadway tune accompanied by Carl Haan on piano, among them “Everybody Ought to Have a Maid” from A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, “(Ya Got) Trouble” from The Music Man, the haughty “The Butler’s Song” from the ill-fated So Long, 174th Street, and, perhaps most appropriately, “Mr. Cellophane” from Chicago, in which he sings, “And even without clucking like a hen / Everyone gets noticed, now and then / Unless, of course, that personage should be / Invisible, inconsequential me!” Such is the character man’s fate, never to be the famous star, although Brochu has crafted a witty and poignant little musical memoir that deservedly puts him front and center. Character Man continues at Urban Stages through March 30; there will be post-show spotlights the next three Wednesdays, looking at David Burns with Sondra Lee and Lee Roy Reams on March 12, Jack Gilford and Zero Mostel with Joe Gilford and Josh Mostel on March 19, and current character actors with Richard Kind and Tony Sheldon on March 26.
THANK YOU FOR COMING: ATTENDANCE
Faye Driscoll brings audience and performers together in THANK YOU FOR COMING (photo by Aram Jibilian)
THANK YOU FOR COMING: ATTENDANCE
Danspace Project
131 East Tenth St. between Second & Third Aves.
March 11, 13-14, $15-$20, 8:00
866-811-4111
www.danspaceproject.org
www.fayedriscoll.com
“OK, I think Fun is my F word. I think it can be a big no-no in the avant-garde world,” choreographer Faye Driscoll told us last week in our twi-ny talk with the new Guggenheim Fellow. “And isn’t really good fun also a little bit dangerous?” The creator of such innovative works as You’re Me, 837 Venice Boulevard, and There is so much mad in me reaches new heights (literally) with her latest evening-length piece, Thank You for Coming: Attendance. The title is no mere cliché; Driscoll really means it, since the audience is intrinsically part of the show as she transforms Danspace’s room in St. Mark’s Church in-the-Bowery into a dazzling, participatory happening in which you never know what’s going to take place next. Upon entering the religious-like space, everyone must hang up their coat and take off their shoes, then choose a seat either on the floor or on benches surrounding an elevated center stage. After having walked around the room several times, the five dancers (Giulia Carotenuto, Sean Donovan, Alicia Ohs, Brandon Washington, and Nikki Zialcita) and Driscoll appear on the balcony, singing the rules of the show in harmony. The dancers then make their way to the stage, where their bodies meld into one, colliding, pushing, embracing, kicking, and supporting one another in breathtaking, seemingly impossible, and often humorous configurations, the only sound coming from their movement on the cloth atop the stage. Once Driscoll slides underneath the stage, just about anything can and does happen as she deconstructs and reconstructs Nick Vaughan and Jake Margolin’s visual design, Sarah Thea Swafford’s costumes come off and on, Michael Kiley’s acoustic music gets personal, and audience members can choose to become just about as involved as they want to be as the piece builds to its swirling finale. This first section of the Thank You for Coming trilogy, very appropriately titled “Attendance” (a word that of course includes “dance”), with “Play” and “Space” to follow, evokes the work of such giants as Anna Halprin and Pina Bausch as well as such contemporaries as Emily Johnson while still being completely Driscoll’s as she continues her exploration into the complex, ever-developing relationship between choreographer and dancer, performer and audience, consistently challenging expectations while defying classification. Although advance tickets are sold out, there’s a wait list at every show beginning at 7:15, with a few dozen additional lucky people likely to be able to get in each night to take part in this fun, certainly a little dangerous, and endlessly entertaining and surprising avant-garde happening.
BACK TO THE ENCHANTMENT UNDER THE SEA DANCE
Marty McFly (Michael J. Fox) has to save himself and his family at the Enchantment Under the Sea dance
BACK TO THE FUTURE (Robert Zemeckis, 1985)
St. Patrick’s Gymnasium
268 Mulberry St.
Saturday, March 22, 7:00, $45
Sunday, March 23, 6:00, $38
www.bbqfilms.com/enchantment
Get that flux capacitor ready and prepare for 1.21 gigawatts of inspired fun at the Back to the Enchantment Under the Sea Dance. On March 22 & 23, BBQ Films, the team that turns movie screenings into interactive participatory events, are this time going back to the crazy days of 1985 — and 1955 — as Marty McFly (Michael J. Fox) tries to save his family’s future without bedding his hot-to-trot mother (Lea Thompson) while attempting to pair him up with his ultra-nerdy father (Crispin Glover) by the time of the Enchantment Under the Sea high school dance. And the only way Marty can accomplish this desperate task is with the help of mad scientist Doc Brown (Christopher Lloyd) and a specially outfitted DeLorean. Each night, the re-created prom will begin an hour before the screening of Robert Zemeckis’s runaway hit, Back to the Future, with appropriate 1950s attire recommended for all attendees. There will be live music from the Tee-Tones (no relation to Chuck Berry), beer from Brooklyn Brewery and wine from Vinos Libres (the first drink is free), a photobooth, a swing dance demonstration, futuristic 3D glasses, giveaways, an event poster, and gourmet popcorn in addition to an after-party with Mr. Nice, DJ sets from a place both wonderful and strange and GHOST COP, and freaky visuals courtesy of CHNNLS. Tickets go fast for all BBQ Films gatherings, so you might have to hit eighty-eight miles an hour to get them in time. A portion of the proceeds will be donated to the Michael J. Fox Foundation for Parkinson’s Research.
TICKET ALERT: TASTING BROOKLYN
The fourth annual Tasting Brooklyn festival will be held April 29 at the Green Building in Carroll Gardens
TASTING BROOKLYN
The Green Building
452 Union St. at Bond St.
Tuesday, April 29, $55-$80, 5:30 – 9:00
www.brooklynexposed.com
In November 2012, Josh Ozersky wrote an article in the New York Observer tearing apart Brooklyn as a culinary destination. “Brooklyn, taken as a restaurant city, sucks,” he wrote in “The Truth about Brooklyn’s Overhyped, Undercooked Restaurant Scene.” Whether you agreed with Ozersky or not back then, you can judge for yourself on April 29 at the fourth annual Tasting Brooklyn gastronomic festival, taking place at the Green Building in Carroll Gardens. The evening will feature food and drink from some of the borough’s best and brightest, with tasty delights from 1 Knickerbocker, Benchmark, Dinosaur BBQ, Dosa Royale, El Born, Falansai, Hunter’s, Luke’s Lobster, Martha, Palo Santo, Taco Santo, Tchoup Shop, St. Austere, the Pines, Zona Rosa, Robicelli’s, Baked, Fabipops, and even sponsor Fairway, all competing for the Best Dish prize. Liquid libations will be provided courtesy of Alice’s Arbor, Brooklyn Oenology, Cacao Prieto, Huckleberry Bar, Lavender Lake, Owney’s Rum, Sixpoint Beer, White Pike, and Widow Jane, with the aptly named DJ Nutritious spinning tunes. Tickets are on sale now and range from $55 for a two-and-a-half-hour feeding frenzy to $80 for VIP admission, which includes an extra hour of eating as well as a VIP gift bag.
VIDEO OF THE DAY: STEAFÁN HANVEY
Northern Irish singer-songwriter Steafán Hanvey was born in 1972, right in the midst of the Troubles. Both of his parents were musicians; his father, Bobbie, was a photojournalist and radio host as well. On his second album, last winter’s Nuclear Family, the follow-up to his 2006 debut with his band, the Honeymoon Junkies, Hanvey, “a man whose bad dreams have already come true,” explores the complications of relationships on such songs as “Secrets and Lies,” “Marta’s Always Coming Home,” “Darling Please,” and “Leaving What You Know.” He has combined his past with the present in his deeply personal and political traveling show, “Look Behind You! A Father and Son’s Impressions of the Troubles in Northern Ireland through Photograph and Song,” which is profiled by NPR in the above video. On March 8, Hanvey will be giving a rare solo performance for “Belfast Rocks the Craic” at Mercury Lounge, part of the sixteenth annual Craic Fest; Duke Special and Rams’ Pocket Radio are also on the bill.
A MARRIAGE: 2 (WEST-ER)
Nick Vaughan and Jake Margolin head west to explore same-sex relationships in follow-up to “A Marriage: 1 (Suburbia)”
A MARRIAGE: 2 (WEST-ER)
Invisible Dog Art Center
51 Bergen St.
March 8 - April 12
www.theinvisibledog.org
www.nickandjakestudio.com
Last spring, married multimedia artists Nick Vaughan and Jake Margolin staged “A Marriage: 1 (Suburbia)” at HERE downtown, delving into the American Dream in the twenty-first century through language, video, sculpture, literature, cut maps, and live performance. “Even growing up in a hyperliberal place,” Jake told twi-ny last spring, “I had a sense of gay people as being abnormal – a deviance from the norm that are tolerated because Berkeleyites are tolerant and open-minded people, but still a group of people who are in some way going to have to live on the outside of mainstream society. As many things about gay culture have been accepted into the mainstream since we were kids, now that set of aspirations that were traditionally exclusively for heterosexuals, aspirations towards suburbia, the nuclear family, and all of that – are on the table.” The third part of Nick and Jake’s continuing series heads out west for “A Marriage: 2 (West-er),” running at the Invisible Dog in Brooklyn through April 12. In the show, they reference Scottish adventurer Sir William Drummond Stuart, Hollywood hunk John Wayne, and partners Robert Campbell and William Sublette as they investigate homosexuality and social mores across the vast frontier. Their preparation took them to such states as Wyoming, Nebraska, Kansas, Missouri, and Colorado as they incorporated their own relationship into the narrative as well. The exhibit will be open Thursdays through Saturdays from 1:00 to 7:00 and Sundays till 5:00, with daily durational actions in addition to artist talks on March 25 and April 8 at 6:00. The opening reception takes place March 8 from 6:00 to 10:00, while closing day, April 12, will feature a live spray performance.
