Son of George, featuring empathetic Coney Island singer-songwriter Dave Doobinin, will be at Rockwood Music Hall on Saturday night
Rockwood Music Hall Stage 1
196 Allen St. between Houston & Stanton Sts.
Saturday, April 16, free, 10:00
212-477-4155
www.rockwoodmusichall.com
www.sonofgeorge.com
For his debut as Son of George, native New Yorker Dave Doobinin (skywriter) worked with Steve Schiltz of Longwave, the two of them playing all the instruments in a home studio in Queens. The result is a five-track EP of shimmering, poetic, ethereal songs, enhanced by using a 1970s Electra Delay pedal to treat Doobinin’s voice. A self-described “wandering spirit, hopeless romantic, world traveler, and artistic soul,” Doobinin, who lives in Coney Island, is an empathetic singer-songwriter; he actually visited a cemetery on City Island to help inspire him for the Potter’s Field song “Forgotten Ones,” in which he sings, “There’s a place / where ‘Hallelujah’ means nothing at all . . . / Is there a way / to shoot an arrow straight into the sun / Shine a light for all the forgotten ones.” He goes falsetto on “Hummingbird” and “Summertime,” the latter also featuring a fresh guitar line. Doobinin, who has also released such solo albums as 2004’s What Your Money Wants and 2008’s The Birth of Wonder, will be at Rockwood Music Hall on April 16 at 10:00 on a bill that also includes Sarah Jarosz (8:00), Tallahassee (9:00), Air Traffic Controller (11:00), and the Queen Killing Kings (12 midnight), among others.
In Bertrand Tavernier’s sweeping romantic epic, young and beautiful Marie de Mézières (Mélanie Thierry) has a big problem: It seems that every man she meets falls in love with her. Already in a passionate relationship with the heroic Henri de Guise (Gaspard Ulliel), a leader of the Catholics against the Protestant Huguenots in the French Wars of Religion of the 1560s, Marie is suddenly part of a shady deal between her father (Philippe Magnan) and the Duke de Montpensier (Michel Vuillermoz), marrying her off to the rather uninspiring though steadfast Prince Philippe de Montpensier (Grégoire Leprince-Ringuet), who warms to his bride much quicker than she to him. Returning to the battlefield, Philippe asks his mentor, the older and wiser Count de Chabannes (Lambert Wilson), to teach Marie in the ways of the court to prepare her for meeting Catherine de Medici, but even such a solid, moralistic man as Chabannes — who deserted from the army after killing a peasant family, supposedly in the name of his lord and saviour — cannot prevent himself from succumbing to the many charms of his unaware charge. And when she meets the wild and unpredictable Duke d’Anjou (Raphaël Personnaz), the king’s brother is smitten as well. But through it all, Marie, a modern woman who wants to learn to write and make her own choices, remains fiercely drawn to Henri, a forbidden love that threatens dire consequences. Based on the 1662 novella by Madame de La Fayette, The Princess of Montpensier is a thrilling tale of love and war, of honor and betrayal. Master filmmaker Tavernier (The Clockmaker of Saint-Paul, A Sunday in the Country), who cowrote the daring script with longtime collaborator Jean Cosmos and François-Oliver Rousseau, focuses on character and story rather than pomp and circumstance, creating an intoxicating intimacy often missing from the genre. Thierry is alluring as Marie, who can be seen as an early feminist in a time when women were little more than possessions. Even at two hours and twenty minutes, the film flies by; you’ll feel sorry you can’t spend more time with the many wonderfully drawn characters who help make The Princess of Montpensier such a marvelous treat.
