Yearly Archives: 2012

TICKET GIVEAWAY: THE BAD AND THE BETTER

The Peter Jay Sharp Theater
416 West 42nd St.
June 14 – July 21, $49.95
www.thebadandthebetter.com
www.theamoralists.com

Last summer, the “rocking, rebellious, and raw” Amoralists theater company presented Derek Ahonen’s sexually charged Pink Knees on Pale Skin as part of the HotelMotel double feature set inside a makeshift room at the Gershwin Hotel. This summer the Amoralists are back with associate artistic director and cofounder Ahonen’s detective noir The Bad and the Better, running June 14 through July 21 at the more traditional Peter Jay Sharp Theater on West 42nd St. Featuring a cast of more than two dozen, the story follows two brothers who are caught up in internal and external battles with hypocrisy, injustice, corruption, and family loyalty. The show is directed by Daniel Aukin, who is also currently elming the multiple-Obie-winning 4000 Miles at the Mitzi E. Newhouse.

TICKET GIVEAWAY: We have a pair of tickets to give away for free for The Bad and the Better, good for any night in June. Just send your name, daytime phone number, and all-time favorite detective-noir story to contest@twi-ny.com by Thursday, June 14, at 3:00 to be eligible. All entrants must be twenty-one years of age or older; one winner will be selected at random.

TITLE AND DEED

Conor Lovett asks the audience to join him on an unusual but rewarding journey in Will Eno’s TITLE AND DEED (photo by Joan Marcus)

The Pershing Square Signature Center
The Alice Griffin Jewel Box Theatre
480 West 42nd St. between Tenth & Eleventh Aves.
Through June 17, $25
212-244-7529
www.signaturetheatre.org

Written specifically for actor Conor Lovett, Will Eno’s Title and Deed is an endearingly existential foray into language, communication, and humanity’s deep-seated need to be part of a greater whole. In a stunningly understated solo performance, Lovett stars as a soft-spoken man who has just arrived in America, either from another country or a different planet. Speaking directly to the audience, the unnamed character has trouble finishing sentences, and he allows his mind to wander away on the sound and meaning of words, gets caught up in tangential soliloquys, or just plain loses his train of thought. He bandies about ideas and then watches them float away as he mutters under his breath or mumbles asides that are not nearly as random as they might first appear. For seventy minutes, Lovett shuffles across the nearly bare stage on a journey to find a new home, and he welcomes — actually, a better word might be “needs” or even “requires” — the audience to help him find it. Award-winning Brooklyn-based playwright Eno (Middletown, Oh, the Humanity and other exclamations) has crafted an offbeat, involving little slice of theater that is heavily inspired by Beckett, primarily Waiting for Godot, and directed by Lovett’s wife, Judy Hegarty Lovett; the Lovetts have previously collaborated on such productions as Molloy, First Love, and, not surprisingly, The Beckett Trilogy. Running in the Signature’s cozy Alice Griffin Jewel Box Theatre through June 17, Title and Deed will have you taking a trip through your own mind, with plenty of strange yet calming detours.

LARRY RIVERS: LATER WORKS

Larry Rivers, “Art and the Artist: Mondrian,” oil on canvas mounted on sculpted foamboard, 1992 (courtesy Tibor de Nagy Gallery)

Tibor de Nagy Gallery
724 Fifth Ave. between 56th & 57th Sts.
Tuesday – Friday through June 15, free, 10:00 am – 6:00 pm
212-262-5050
www.tibordenagy.com

Born Yitzroch Loiza Grossberg in the Bronx in 1923, multidisciplinary artist and jazz saxophonist Larry Rivers, who died ten years ago at the age of seventy-eight, was a key influential figure in the ever-changing world of twentieth-century art, impossible to pigeon-hole into any one specific category or movement. This refusal to maintain the status quo is evident in his current solo show at Tibor de Nagy, which focuses on paintings and drawings made between 1975 and 2002. “A number of things strike me about Rivers’s late work. One is its range,” writes American poet and critic John Yau in the exhibition’s hardcover catalog. “He can go from doing a self-mocking send-up of his friend, the French artist Jean Hélion, to sensitively addressing the legacy of the Holocaust. This alone convinces me that his late work needs a longer and deeper look, and that his entire oeuvre needs to be reconsidered.” Indeed, the pieces on view deal with two primary subjects: three-dimensional sculpture paintings that pay homage to other artists, and poignant drawings that address family and loss, especially in regard to World War II. What first jumps out at Tibor de Nagy are brightly colored depictions of Groucho Marx, Charlie Chaplin, Piet Mondrian, Henri Matisse, Hélion, and others at work, painted on intricately sculpted foamboard that gives added life to them without feeling gimmicky. Rivers also re-creates Matisse’s “La Danse” with a more abstract vision. Meanwhile, in the back room, such poignant color pencil drawings as “The Frank Family,” “Four Seasons: Fall in the Forest of Birkenau,” and “Erasing the Past I” and “Erasing the Past II” take on a more serious tone, the yellow stars on the subjects’ tattered clothes emerging as haunting reminders of the Holocaust. While the works might evoke a wide range of emotions, from glee and wonder to sadness and pain, they are all about one thing, a past as remembered by a truly American artist.

TASTE OF TIMES SQUARE 2012

Live music and a wide variety of food are on the menu at annual Taste of Times Square

46th St. between Broadway & Ninth Ave.
Monday, June 11, most dishes $2-$6, 5:00 – 9:00
www.timessquarenyc.org

The international culinary flavor of the Times Square area will be on display tonight at the annual Taste of Times Square, where more than fifty local restaurants will be serving their signature dishes on West 46th St. The menu lineup, with most dishes costing between two and six dollars (purchased with dollar tasting tickets), incudes blackened tenderloin tips from Shula’s American Steakhouse, pork and bean sausage with Tori’s buffalo chips from Ca Va Brasserie, beef sliders from the Library at the Paramount Hotel, salmon caviar blini and chicken Kiev from Firebird, traditional spinach and feta cheese spanakopitas from Hourglass Tavern, chicken pot pie from O’Lunney’s, empanadas from Nuchas, sliced steak sandwiches from Gallagher’s, Memphis pork ribs from Virgil’s, lobster rolls from Snackbox, paella from Meson Sevilla, doners from Dervish, pulled pork sandwiches from Joe Allen, steak frites sushi hand rolls from Mr. Robata, penne alla vodka from Carmine’s, crespelle alla Savolarda from Barbetta, and yellowfin tuna, pickled enoki, miso aioli, and ginger soy glaze from Nios. For dessert, there’s the classic Junior’s original cheesecake, Le Rivage’s bread pudding with crème Anglaise, flan from Sangria 46, strawberry sundaes from Blue Fin, gelato from Salume, and shaved ice from Rickshaw Dumpling Bar. Free live entertainment will be provided by Paul Mueller, the Ebony Hillbillies, the Baby Soda Jazz Band, Mariachi Real de Mexico, Moses Josiah, Alais Lucette, Don Witter Jr., the Jazz Collective, and George Gee and the Jump Jive n’ Wail Swing Orchestra.

ADAM CAROLLA BOOK PARTY AND WEBINAR

Carolines on Broadway
1626 Broadway between 49th & 50th Sts.
Tuesday, June 12, $22 (plus two-drink minimum), 8:00
Stand-up: June 14-16, $53
212-757-4100
www.carolines.com
www.adamcarolla.com

“Let’s talk houses,” Adam Carolla writes in the introduction to his new memoir, Not Taco Bell Material (Crown Archetype, June 12, $25). “As a kid the places I called home were cracked stucco, dirt lawns, and furniture raccoons wouldn’t fuck on. But there’s another way of looking at homes. They are where you create memories with your family, good and bad, and the pad you launch from when you start your own life. . . . This book will be a journey from the plethora of dumps I was raised in, through the shithole apartments I rented in my twenties, to the homes I purchased and personally renovated when I found some success.” And what a series of dumps and shitholes they were. In his follow-up to the New York Times bestseller In Fifty Years We’ll All Be Chicks, the former star of The Man Show and current host of The Car Show and The Adam Carolla Show begins each new chapter with a photo and statistics about the house he was living in at that time as he leads readers on a very personal and funny trip down memory lane. He writes about his extremely strange family, toiling in construction, his up-and-down professional career, and the many celebrities he has worked with. He adds “Tan Gent” sidebars along the way that allow for additional rants and raves. Carolla will be celebrating the release of the book with a special presentation, signing, and webinar June 12 at Carolines with Artie Lange that will be broadcast live online to the first ten thousand people who sign up for the free event here. Carolla, who has also starred in the films Ace in the Hole and The Hammer, will follow that up with three nights of stand-up at Carolines June 14-16.

DOCUMENTARY IN BLOOM: TAHRIR

Stefano Savano puts viewers right in the middle of the recent Egyptian rebellion in TAHRIR

TAHRIR: LIBERATION SQUARE (Stefano Savona, 2011)
Maysles Institute
343 Malcolm X Blvd. between 127th & 128th Sts.
June 11-17, suggested donation $10, 7:30
212-582-6050
www.mayslesinstitute.org

As soon as Stefano Savano heard about the people’s rebellion going on in Egypt’s Tahrir Square in January, the Italian filmmaker grabbed his camera and headed over to Cairo, where he had been many times before over the previous twenty years, and just started filming what he saw. As hundreds of thousands of Egyptians flooded the area, singing, protesting, and demanding that President Hosni Mubarak step down, Savano followed around various individuals and groups, including Elsayed, Noha, and Ahmed, getting them to share their thoughts on revolution and change, capturing intimate moments of their fight for freedom. When violence erupts, Savano fearlessly heads to the source, rocks flying through the air, bleeding men being carried past him. The film has no narration and no textual information; instead, Savano places the viewer right in the middle of the action, as if we’re there with him in Tahrir Square. “I’m not a journalist, and I don’t pretend to be one,” Savano pointed out in a Skype press conference following a New York Film Festival preview screening of the film last year. Over the course of two weeks last summer, Savano and Penelope Botroluzzi edited down thirty-five hours of visuals and twenty-five hours of sound into this ninety-minute inside look at democracy in action, although it does get repetitive in the second half. Once again Savona, whose previous films include 2002’s A Border of Mirrors, 2006’s Notes from a Kurdish Rebel, and last year’s Spezzacatene, focuses more on the human element than the political, adding a coda during the credits that places much of what went on before into intriguing perspective. Tahrir: Liberation Square will be screening June 11-17 as part of the Maysles Institute’s Documentary in Bloom series curated by Livia Bloom.

ANT FEST / soloNOVA ARTS FESTIVAL

Kelly Zen-Yie Tsai’s FORMOSA is part of ANT Fest 2012 at Ars Nova

ANT Fest 2012, Ars Nova, 511 West 54th St., through June 28, $10
SoloNOVA Arts Festival, the New Ohio Theatre, 154 Christopher St., through June 17, $20

This month, it’s easy to get confused with a concurrent pair of theater festivals that offer fresh new work at low prices but boast similar names and unusual capitalization. At Ars Nova on West 54th St., the fifth annual ANT Fest continues through June 28, focusing on all-new talent (ANT) presenting genre-defying work, with all tickets a mere ten bucks. The festival includes such intriguing productions as Kelly Zen-Yie Tsai’s Formosa, which involves a 1960s Taiwanese Barbie doll factory; the historical musical Folk Wandering; Andrew Scoville’s Love Machine, Part 1 . . ., about a NASA-obsessed teenage girl; and the one-man show Oomphalos: Evening of Diagrams, Theories, and Preposterous Arcana from the Face Hole of Brendan Hughes. At terraNOVA, the ninth annual soloNOVA Arts Festival highlights one-person shows for twenty dollars. The series continues through June 17 with such productions as unFRAMED, in which Iyaba Ibo Mandingo combines storytelling with poetry and painting; the multimedia comedy I Light Up My Life: The Mark Sam Celebrity Autobiography; Daniel Irizarry’s UBU, about the King of the Great Expanding Universe and his love of steak; Human Fruit Bowl, in which Harmony Stempel portrays a naked model preparing for a different kind of still-life; and the dark Convergence, with Avery Pearson facing some deep-seated fears.