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CYRANO DE BERGERAC

Award-winning production of Cyrano de Bergerac swashbuckles into BAM April 5 to May 22 (photo by Marc Brenner)

Who: Jamie Lloyd Company
What: US premiere of award-winning production of Edmond Rostand play
Where: Harvey Theater at the BAM Strong, 651 Fulton St.
When: April 5 – May 22, $45-$310
Why: It’s not always clear why an old classic suddenly becomes sizzling hot; this time around, it’s Edmond Rostand’s 1897 favorite, Cyrano de Bergerac, about a relatively unattractive soldier in love with a beautiful woman who falls for a not-too-bright handsome gent who gets his poetic, romantic words from Cyrano. In 2012, the Roundabout staged a version at the American Airlines Theatre on Broadway directed by Jamie Lloyd and starring Douglas Hodge as the title character. In Theresa Rebeck’s 2018 Bernhardt/Hamlet, at the same theater, Rostand is a minor character who is rewriting Hamlet for Sarah Bernhardt but turns his attentions instead to Cyrano. Franco-British actor, writer, and director Alexis Michalik made Cyrano, My Love, in 2018, following his stage version of Edmond in 2016. In 2019, the New Group presented a musical version at the Daryl Roth Theatre starring Peter Dinklage as Cyrano, adapted and directed by his wife, Erica Schmidt, that was turned into a 2021 film directed by Joe Wright. Also in 2021, Andrey Cheggi Chegodaev performed My Cyrano, a melding of Cyrano de Bergerac and Tanya Lebedinskaya’s poem “My Cyrano,” at the Center at West Park.

Now the Dorset-born Lloyd, whose other acclaimed works include Betrayal, Macbeth, Three Days of Rain, Passion, and Evita, comes to BAM for the first time for the US premiere of his Olivier-winning production of Cyrano de Bergerac. This new adaptation by Martin Crimp stars Scottish actor James McAvoy (The Ruling Class, The Last King of Scotland) in the role previously performed by Ralph Richardson, Derek Jacobi, Richard Chamberlain, Christopher Plummer, Gérard Depardieu, Steve Martin, and Kevin Kline, among others over the last century-plus. Eben Figueiredo is Christian, with Michele Austin as Ragueneau, Adam Best as Le Bret, Sam Black as Armand, Tom Edden as De Guiche, Adrian Der Gregorian as Montfleury, and Evelyn Miller as Roxane. The set and costumes are by Soutra Gilmour, with lighting by Jon Clark and music and sound by Ben and Max Ringham. The 170-minute show, which won the Olivier Award for Best Revival (in addition to four other nominations), runs April 5 through May 22.

MOVING BODY – MOVING IMAGE: THE MOVING BODY WITH DISABILITIES

Dancer Kayla Hamilton is not about to let visual impairment get in the way of her career in Vision Portraits (photo by Kjerstin Rossi)

Who: Moving Body — Moving Image
What: ScreenDance Film Festival
Where: Barnard College Department of Dance Movement Lab, Glicker Milstein Theatre in the Diana Center, 3009 Broadway at 116th St., and online
When: Sunday, April 3, free with advance RSVP, noon – 6:00 pm (festival continues through April 11)
Why: The Moving Body — Moving Image Biennale Festival was founded in 2018 by choreographer, dancer, teacher, filmmaker, and curator Gabri Christa to “give voice to social and social justice themes,” two years before dance films began reaching new heights of creativity during the pandemic lockdown, with a concerted focus also on social justice. The third iteration, “The Moving Body with Disabilities,” is underway now at Barnard College, with an international collection of six installation films, eight shorts, one feature, and three online-only works. On Sunday, April 3, Barnard’s Glicker Milstein Theatre will host a full in-person afternoon at its Morningside Heights home, with screenings of all films in addition to a panel discussion. “We are stunned by how much demand there was for the festival films among the global audiences,” Christa, whose now-wheelchair-bound mother was a special ed teacher, said in a statement. “Also, I hope that the pandemic isolation brought greater awareness around social inequity and perhaps more understanding of racism, ageism, and ableism.” The themes of the previous festivals were “Moving Brown Body” in 2018 and “Aging & Othering” in 2020.

The festival begins at noon with welcome remarks, followed by two shorts programs, at 12:30 and 2:00. Part I consists of Robert Dekkers’s Flutter (with AXIS Dance Company and others), Stephen Featherstone’s Stopgap in Stop Motion (with Stopgap Dance Company), Katrina MacPherson’s Uath Lochans (with Marc Brew), and Karina Epperlein’s Phoenix Dance (with Homer Avila, Andrea Flores, and choreographer Alonzo King). The second program comprises Ralph Klisiewicz’s Moods in Three Movements (with Kris Lenzo), Pioneer Winter’s Gimp Gait (with Marjorie Burnett and Pioneer Winter), Alison Ferrao’s From Me (with the Dancer Development Course at Magpie Dance), and Katherine Helen Fisher’s One + One Makes Three (with Jerron Herman, Laurel Lawson, Brandon Kazen-Maddox, Catherine Nelson, and choreographer Alice Sheppard). The feature presentation at 3:00 is Rodney Evans’s 2019 documentary, Vision Portraits, about three artists with vision impairment, made by the blind Evans. Admission is free with advance registration. If you can’t make it to Barnard, all of the films and events will be available online through April 11, including Anna-Lena Ponath’s Eudaimonia, Yannis Bletas’s How to Train an Antihero, and Alexandros Chantzis’s Who Is Honorine Platzer?

Filmmaker Rodney Evans explores his increasing blindness in Vision Portraits (photo by Kjerstin Rossi)

VISION PORTRAITS (Rodney Evans, 2019)
Barnard College, Glicker Milstein Theatre in the Diana Center, 3009 Broadway at 116th St.
Sunday, April 3, free with advance RSVP, 3:00
www.thefilmcollaborative.org

“In a lot of ways, I feel like I’m just looking for guidance in how to be a blind artist,” filmmaker Rodney Evans says in Vision Portraits, his remarkable documentary. Evans follows three artists as they deal with severe visual impairment but refuse to give up on their dreams as he seeks experimental treatment for his retinitis pigmentosa. Manhattan photographer John Dugdale lost most of his eyesight from CMV retinitis when he was thirty-two but is using his supposed disability to his advantage, taking stunning photos bathed in blue, inspired by the aurora borealis he sees when he closes his eyes. “Proving to myself that I could still function in a way that was not expected of a blind person was really gonna be the thing,” he says. “It’s fun to live in this bliss.” Bronx dancer Kayla Hamilton was born with no vision in one eye and developed iritis and glaucoma in the other, but she is shown working on a new piece called Nearly Sighted that incorporates the audience into her story. “How can I use my art form as a way of sharing what it is that I’m experiencing?” she asks.

Canadian writer Ryan Knighton lost his eyesight on his eighteenth birthday due to retinitis pigmentosa, but he teaches at a college and presents short stories about his condition at literary gatherings. “I had that moment where I had a point of view now, like, I realized blindness is a point of view on the world; it’s not something I should avoid, it’s something I should look from, and I should make it my writerly point of view,” Knighton explains. Meanwhile, Evans heads to the Restore Vision Clinic in Berlin to see if Dr. Anton Fedorov can stop or reverse his visual impairment, which is getting worse.

Vision Portraits is an intimate, honest look at eyesight and art and how people adapt to what could have been devastating situations. Evans, who wrote and directed the narrative features Brother to Brother and The Happy Sad, also includes animated segments that attempt to replicate what the subjects see, from slivers of light to star-laden alternate universes. The Moving Body — Moving Image screening at Barnard will be followed by a discussion with Evans and Hamilton.

IN CONVERSATION: THE PHOTOGRAPHY OF EDVARD MUNCH

Who: Patricia G. Berman, MaryClaire Pappas, Edward Gallagher
What: Live virtual discussion and exhibition tour
Where: Scandinavia House YouTube
When: Saturday, April 2, free, 1:00 (exhibition continues at 58 Park Ave. at 38th St. through June 4)
Why: Norwegian painter and sculptor Edvard Munch “seems to have been one of the first artists in history to take ‘selfies,’” notes the introductory wall text to the Scandinavia House exhibition “The Experimental Self: Edvard Munch’s Photography.” As the free show — which has been brought back, with some wonderful design changes that provide deeper perspective, for an encore run extended through June 4 — reveals, that statement does not just refer to Munch’s penchant for self-portraiture, as demonstrated in the 2018 Met exhibit “Edvard Munch: Between the Clock and the Bed,” which included a detailed look at Munch’s depiction of himself over the years. “Munch painted self-portraits throughout his career, but with increased intensity and frequency after 1900,” Gary Garrels, Jon-Ove Steihaug, and Sheena Wagstaff write in the introduction to the Met catalog. “These ‘self-scrutinies,’ as he called them, provide insight into his perceptions of his role as an artist, as a man in society, and as a protagonist in his relationships with others, especially women. . . . Using himself as subject but always allowing technique to influence effect, Munch was able to powerfully investigate the interplay between depicting external reality and meditating on painterly means.”

Edvard Munch, “Self-Portrait at the Breakfast Table at Dr. Jacobson’s Clinic,” gelatin silver contact print, 1908-09 (courtesy of Munch Museum)

At Scandinavia House, this is evident in his fascination with photography, which he took up during two periods of his life that were fraught with physical and health issues. Munch snapped photographs between 1902 and 1910, after his lover, Tulla Larsen, shot him in the left finger, and again from 1927 to the mid-1930s, suffering a hemorrhage in his right eye in 1930. He also took home movies with a camera in 1927. As in his paintings and particularly his prints, Munch experimented with photographic images, playing with exposure length, camera angles, movement, and shadows for his Fatal Destiny portfolio and individual works. He is purposely blurry in “Self-Portrait in Profile Indoors in Åsgårdstrand,” “Self-Portrait at the Breakfast Table at Dr. Jacobson’s Clinic,” and “Self-Portrait ‘à la Marat,’ Beside a Bathtub at Dr. Jacobson’s Clinic.” He is completely naked, holding a sword in 1903’s “Edvard Munch Posing Nude in Åsgårdstrand,” a kind of companion piece to 1907’s “Self-Portrait on Beach with Brushes and Palette in Warnemünde,” in which he holds a paintbrush. The woman in “Nurse in Black, Jacobson’s Clinic,” from 1908-09, has a lot in common with Munch’s 1891 oil painting, “Lady in Black.” There are multiple, ghostly images of both subjects in 1907’s “Edvard Munch and Rosa Meissner in Warnemünde,” evoking the phantasmic bodies in several prints on view, including “Moonlight II.”

On April 2, American-Scandinavian Foundation president Edward Gallagher will moderate a special live, online presentation with curator Patricia G. Berman giving an up-close look at several photographs in the show, ASF Research Fellow MaryClaire Pappas talking about Munch’s self-portraiture, and a panel discussion on Munch’s relevance to twenty-first-century photography. You can check out the exhibit from home using the new virtual tour here.

Edvard Munch, “Self-Portrait on Beach with Brushes and Palette in Warnemünde,” Collodion contact print, 1907 (courtesy of Munch Museum)

In the Met catalog, in her essay “The Untimely Face of Munch,” Allison Morehead explains, “‘He is not attached to any school or any direction,’ wrote the Norwegian critic and art historian Jappe Nilssen in 1916, ‘because he himself is one of those who advances and creates his own school and forges his own direction.’ Surely with Munch’s complicity, Nilssen described his friend as both stereotypical avant-garde outsider and chronological anomaly, as an art history unto himself, his own school, his own doctrine, and his own teleology. Perhaps then it is little wonder that Munch made so many self-portraits from the beginning to the end of his career, regularly depicting himself in paintings, prints, drawings, and photographs, and also little wonder that art historians have found them so preoccupying.’”

The Scandinavia House show, which has added a case of vintage camera equipment and a short video by Berman and is divided into such sections as “Landscape of Healing,” “Munch’s Selfies,” and “The Amateur Photographer,” concludes with a short compilation of home movies Munch shot with a Pathé-Baby camera, in which the artist once again focuses on himself as his subject. “I have an old camera with which I have taken countless pictures of myself, often with amazing results,” he said in 1930. “Some day when I am old, and I have nothing better to do than write my autobiography, all my self-portraits will see the light of day again.” It’s fascinating to consider just what Munch, who died in 1944 at the age of eighty, would have thought of contemporary social media and the selfie, offering new opportunities to shine a light on himself.

WILL SMITH vs. CHRIS ROCK: THE REMATCH

Chris Rock and Will Smith will face off against each other at Madison Square Garden on October 1 (photo by Neilson Barnard/Getty Images)

THE REMATCH
Madison Square Garden
31st – 33rd Sts. between Seventh & Eighth Aves.
Saturday, October 1, $99-$999
www.SmithVsRockThe Rematch.com

I wasn’t planning on writing anything about the Will Smith / Chris Rock debacle at this year’s Oscars, but this is just too good to pass up, especially for those who thought that the whole Slap Heard Round the World was staged. In another confrontation that no one saw coming, Smith, who won the Best Actor Oscar for his portrayal of the father of Venus and Serena Williams in King Richard, and Rock, a former Oscar host who wrote, directed, and starred in Top Five, are actually stepping into the ring in a rematch taking place October 1 at Madison Square Garden. (Rock is currently on his Ego Death national tour that brings him to Radio City Music Hall October 6-7.) They won’t be donning gloves and fighting at the bell, but they will be entering the famous squared circle and going at it Eminem style, attacking each other with raps, spoken word, and jokes.

Judging ringside will be Dwayne “the Rock” Johnson, Michael “Are You Ready to Rumble!” Buffer, and Robin Givens, who was married to former heavyweight champ Mike Tyson for one tumultuous year. The exact details, including the specific rules, have not been announced, but there are rumors that the national anthem will be performed by Whoopi Goldberg. Tickets go on sale today (April 1) at noon; there are VIP packages for $999 in which guests can get a photo with Rock, who was born in South Carolina in 1965, and Smith, who was born in Philly in 1968, surrounded by Smith’s Oscar and Grammy and Rock’s three Grammys and four Emmys.

BROKEN BOX MIME THEATER: TAKE SHAPE

BXBX’s Take Shape begins to take shape as company rehearses in masks without makeup

Who: Broken Box Mime Theater
What: New devised physical theater piece
Where: Jeffrey and Paula Gural Theatre at A.R.T./NY Theatres, 502 West Fifty-Third St.
When: Thursday – Monday, April 1 – May 1, $25 in advance, $30 at door
Why: Founded in 2011, Broken Box Mime Theater, known as BXBX, focuses on simple storytelling by contemporizing mime as a theatrical art form. In such shows as Skin, See Reverse, Above Below, and Topography, the NYC-based company explore relationship issues, political protest, gender roles, and racial identity, among other topics, using light, sound, and body movement. The troupe’s latest presentation, Take Shape, opens April 1 at the Jeffrey and Paula Gural Theatre at A.R.T./NY Theatres on the far West Side.

The eighty-minute work comprises ten short pieces that involve heists, cooking, isolation, transformation, the apocalypse, and other nonverbal narratives. It was devised by cast members Nick Abeel, Becky Baumwoll, Ismael Castillo, Julia Cavagna, Géraldine Dulex, Blake Habermann, David Jenkins, Tasha Milkman, Marissa Molnar, Kristin McCarthy Parker, Regan Sims, and Jae Woo and will feature live music by Jack McGuire. The lighting is by Jamie Roderick, with projections by Gregg Bellón; other collaborators include Dinah Berkeley, Duane Cooper, Joél Pérez, Leah Wagner, Joshua Wynter, and Matt Zambrano. There will be special relaxed performances in addition to an educator night, parents night, industry night, global night, and deaf night.

ALEX EDELMAN: JUST FOR US

Alex Edelman’s one-person Just for Us is a riotously funny exploration of Judaism and whiteness (photo by Monique Carboni)

JUST FOR US
SoHo Playhouse
15 Vandam St. between Varick St. & Sixth Ave.
Monday – Saturday through April 23, sold out
www.sohoplayhouse.com
Greenwich House Theater
27 Barrow St.
Monday – Saturday, June 14 – September 2, $40-$65
www.justforusshow.com

Near the end of Alex Edelman’s hysterical one-person Just for Us, the comedian tells the audience how much he loves doing it and asks them to tell their friends and everyone we know to come check it out so he can keep performing it.

So that’s exactly what I’m doing: Go see this show! It opened in December at the Cherry Lane, then moved to SoHo Playhouse, where I saw it, and will have an encore run at Greenwich House beginning June 14. (It will sell out, so act fast.)

In Just for Us, the New York City–based, Boston-raised Edelman describes an unusual recent adventure; shortly after getting into a Twitter war with hundreds of anti-Semites over an episode of his BBC radio program, Peer Group, he was intrigued by this tweet:

“Hey — if you’re curious about your #whiteness — and you live in New York City — come to [STREET ADDRESS] tomorrow night at 9:15.”

He immediately thought to himself, “I live in New York City. And I’m free tomorrow night at 9:15. And as a Jew I’m curious about my whiteness.” So off he went to what ended up being a meeting of seventeen neo-Nazis in Astoria, one of whom he was instantly attracted to. “You never know,” he says about his chances with her, dreaming that it could make for a great rom-com.

As he tells the riotous story of what happened that night in Queens, involving the alluring Chelsea, the suspicious Cortez, and an elderly racist jigsaw puzzle aficionado, among other white supremacists trying to hold on to their status in the world, he interweaves flashbacks from his past, primarily focusing on the role Judaism has played in his life. “I always feel a little bit weird. I always feel too Jewish,” he admits. “It is a mailing list you can never unsubscribe from.”

Alex Edelman’s Just for Us will be moving from SoHo Playhouse to Greenwich House in June (photo by Monique Carboni)

His full name could not be much more Jewish: David Yosef Shimon ben Elazar Reuven Alex Halevi Edelman. “I’ve got cousins Menachem and Yitzhak,” he says. “You can’t even spell their names right in English ’cause there’s no English letter for phlegm.”

His shirt nerdily buttoned up all the way, he shares the four words that will always help you through a conversation when you don’t know what else to say, points out that he usually doesn’t discuss politics in his act, details his brother’s attempt to make the Olympics as a skeleton racer for Israel, shares his love of Robin Williams (and his friendship with Koko the gorilla), and talks about going to Yeshiva. “I am white, but, like, I grew up in a place where there were different kinds of white people,” he explains when considering his whiteness. “I grew up in Boston. I grew up in this really racist part of Boston called Boston.”

The centerpiece of his memories is an unforgettable story about the time his deeply Jewish family celebrated Christmas. It’s not only funny and poignant but it shines a light on how religion should, in theory, bring people of different faiths together instead of tearing them apart. There’s no need to fear; Edelman never gets preachy. But he does advise, “If you came to the show tonight not wanting to hear a bunch of Jewish material, I am so sorry about this.”

(To paraphrase an old ad campaign for Levy’s rye bread, you don’t have to be Jewish to love Just for Us. But it helps if you’re not a white supremacist.)

In his third solo presentation, Edelman (Everything Handed to You, Millennial) is utterly charming, wonderfully self-deprecating, and downright funny. Directed by Adam Brace, the seventy-five-minute show features no accoutrements, just Edelman walking back and forth across the stage, empty of all but a few stools, holding the microphone as he continues his banter, including interacting with the audience, which the night I went included a group from his school that clearly adores him.

Just for Us might be about divisiveness, but Edelman has created a welcoming space where we all can laugh despite such serious topics. I could relate to so much of his story that all of my nodding in agreement nearly started to hurt my neck.

Early on, when an older gentleman got up from his seat and headed for the aisle, Edelman stopped the show and inquired, “Bathroom or political issue?” When the man returned a few moments later, Edelman asked him if everything went well.

By the end of the show, everyone answered with a resounding yes.

I AGREE TO THE TERMS

The audience participates on Zoom and their smartphone in I Agree to the Terms (photo by Giada Sun)

I AGREE TO THE TERMS
The Builders Association
NYU Skirball Zoom
Friday – Sunday, March 25 – April 3, $15, 2:00 & 5:00
nyuskirball.org
new.thebuildersassociation.org

The Builders Association goes back to the beginning of World Wide Web bulletin boards (BBS) in I Agree to the Terms, an uneven but ultimately fun virtual journey into the strange world of MTurks, short for Mechanical Turks. These Amazon microworkers are defined as “a crowdsourcing marketplace that makes it easier for individuals and businesses to outsource their processes and jobs to a distributed workforce who can perform these tasks virtually.” The program, which began in 2005, well before the pandemic had so many people around the world working from home, offers anyone the opportunity to perform HITs, or Human Intelligence Tasks, that computers are unable to do, such as evaluating consumer behavior, reviewing product similarities, and other skills that require more than just 0s and 1s. The employees make a minuscule amount of money as they complete each HIT, mere pennies, but the MTurks say that it has the potential to add up to a decent living.

Moe Angelos and David Pence host the show from MITU580 in Brooklyn; participants, using both a desktop computer and a mobile device, are sent a QR code a few hours before it starts, which offers advance reading material so they will be a bit more familiar with what is about to be experienced. From a room filled with old computer equipment, the earliest forms of online communication are depicted on out-of-date monitors as Angelos and Pence read BBS chats aloud, mostly from early adopters trying to help one another navigate this new environment.

Moe Angelos and David Pence host interactive show from Brooklyn

They also present excerpts from a series of manifestos about the future of the internet by such key figures as Stewart Brand, who predicted in 1985 that “personal ‘computer networking’” was going to “become as widespread eventually as the telephone and television”; Art Kleiner, who also in 1985 claimed that “addiction, for most, is short-lived”; and John Perry Barlow, the internet pioneer and Grateful Dead lyricist, who declared in 1996 that he came “from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind.” These sections are clunky, as the text from the chats and manifestos also appears in its original font on your smartphone, so you’re not sure where to look and listen and how much of the material you’re supposed to digest. In addition, the images are lo-fi, which might be the point, but it still feels less than fully formed.

Things pick up significantly when director Marianne Weems, who founded the troupe in 1994, switches over to interviews with four actual Turkers: Adah Deveaux, Noel Castle, Sybil Lanham, and Michelle Brown, who describe what they do and how much they can earn. They’re not actors, so don’t expect a smooth, flowing narrative, but we do get such lines as “Jeff Bezos is my pimp daddy.” The audience is then divided into four breakout rooms led by each MTurk, where you participate in HITs, answering questions on your mobile device.

Before you begin, however, you have to agree to a ridiculously long list of terms and conditions that would probably take hours to read through (longer than a CVS coupon printout), but if you want to play the game, you need to sign off on it regardless, just as we do all the time online these days. There’s a running score that measures your percentage, and you accumulate a tiny amount of money for each completed HIT that isn’t rejected, with a chance to use that cash in a “Builders Marketplace.” Essentially, Amazon has created a virtual company town and store where MTurks are unlikely to get rich as they make Bezos wealthier and wealthier in this unregulated territory.

The Obie-winning Builders Association has previously staged such works as the innovative, interactive Elements of Oz, a unique reimagining of The Wizard of Oz, and House/Divided, a multimedia investigation of the 2008 mortgage crisis as seen through John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath. Their latest piece, in which just about everything is real — for example, the video with Sharon Chiarella is legitimate, as she was the Amazon VP who launched the MTurks program — is being livestreamed six more times April 1-3; tickets are only $15, but whatever you make on the survey platform will not be applied to that cost. As Barlow wrote for the Dead, “You imagine sipping champagne from your boot / For a taste of your elegant pride / I may be going to hell in a bucket / But at least I’m enjoying the ride.”

On March 30 at 7:00, there will be a free Zoom webinar, Meet the Artists: Office Hours, featuring Builders Weems and James Gibbs, Clay Shirky of NYU, and Turkers Deveaux, Castle, Lanham, and Brown.