featured

F. GARY GRAY IN ACTION

Biopic follows N.W.A straight outta Compton as they take their case to the people

STRAIGHT OUTTA COMPTON (F. Gary Gray, 2015)
Metrograph
7 Ludlow St. between Canal & Hester Sts.
Saturday, August 19, 9:40, and Sunday, August 20, 9:10
Series runs August 11-20
www.straightouttacompton.com
metrograph.com

Born in New York City and raised in South Los Angeles, F. Gary Gray got his start making hip-hop videos for such artists as Outkast, Dr. Dre, TLC, and Ice Cube before directing his first film, the 1995 favorite Friday, starring cowriter Ice Cube, Chris Tucker, and Nia Long. Since then he has nine more films under his belt, focusing on action crime thrillers.

Running at Metrograph August 11-20, “F. Gary Gray in Action” consists of five of his hottest flicks, beginning with 2009’s Law Abiding Citizen, in which an honest man (Gerard Butler) battles a prosecutor (Jamie Foxx) after a home invasion. In 1996’s Set It Off, Jada Pinkett, Vivica A. Fox, Kimberly Elise, and Queen Latifah play friends who decide to rob a bank. In 2005, Gray helmed Be Cool, the sequel to the 1995 smash Get Shorty, both based on Elmore Leonard novels; this follow-up brings back John Travolta as Miami mobster Chili Palmer, who now gets involved in the music industry, joined by Uma Thurman, Vince Vaughn, Cedric the Entertainer, Andre Benjamin, Steven Tyler, Christina Milian, Harvey Keitel, Dwayne Johnson, and Danny DeVito. Gray’s 2003 remake of Peter Collinson’s 1969 heist comedy, The Italian Job, upped the action ante, with Mark Wahlberg, Charlize Theron, Edward Norton, Jason Statham, Mos Def, Franky G, and Donald Sutherland.

The ten-day series concludes with 2015’s Straight Outta Compton, which comes barreling out of the gates with all the rage and fury of the 1988 title track that kicks off with Dr. Dre declaring, “You are now about to witness the strength of street knowledge.” The energetic film traces the rise and fall, or creation and dissolution, of N.W.A, the seminal south L.A. hip-hop group that changed music forever. In the late 1980s, Ice Cube (O’Shea Jackson Jr.), Dr. Dre (Corey Hawkins), Eazy-E (Jason Mitchell), MC Ren (Aldis Hodge), and DJ Yella (Neil Brown Jr.) formed a rap group that sought to capture the sound and feel of what was happening on the streets of Compton, from drugs and gangs to racist cops and poverty.

They were a smash hit, particularly their controversial song “Fuck Tha Police,” which set up confrontations with authorities as the band hit the road on a nationwide tour. But when Cube and Dre start questioning where all the money is going — Eazy-E and manager Jerry Heller (Paul Giamatti) seem to be doing a lot better than the rest of them — everything they have built up threatens to unravel. And once Suge Knight (R. Marcus Taylor) enters the picture, the violence level increases, and things start getting even more out of control.

Life threatens to get outta control for N.W.A in Straight Outta Compton

With Ice Cube, Dr. Dre, and Tomica Woods-Wright, Eazy-E’s widow, among the producers, Straight Outta Compton doesn’t pussyfoot around as the various characters make their cases for artistic and financial freedom while reinventing the music business. Juilliard graduate Hawkins (BlacKkKlansman, In the Heights) is outstanding as Dre, maintaining a calm demeanor even as all hell breaks loose around him, while Jackson Jr. (Just Mercy, Cocaine Bear) has trouble hitting the high notes portraying his father, Cube, and Mitchell (Detroit, Mudbound) gives Eazy-E an unpredictable nuance. Taylor (Baby Driver) wreaks havoc as Knight, the extremely dangerous cofounder of Death Row Records, who makes sure he gets what he wants, while Oscar nominee and Emmy winner Giamatti (Cinderella Man, Sideways) has a steady disposition as a white man in a black man’s world.

The music scenes are spectacular, especially a Detroit concert that turned into a showdown between the cops and N.W.A, and it’s cool to see Snoop Dogg (Keith Stanfield), Chuck D (Rogelio Douglas Jr.), and Tupac Shakur (Marcc Rose). The film wavers a bit when it tries to get overly sentimental or inject too many side stories; it’s best when it just forges ahead with the frenzy and furor that was N.W.A, taking on exasperating social conditions the only way they knew how. Straight Outta Compton also features several scenes in which primarily white cops harass black men and women that evoke what is still going on today around the country. Gray (Men in Black: International, A Man Apart) even throws in a fun reference to Friday when the band throws a naked woman out of a hotel party, telling her, “Bye, Felicia.” (If you don’t get the reference, look it up.) At the end of the song “Straight Outta Compton,” N.W.A concludes, “Damn, that shit was dope.” The same can be said of Gray’s dynamic film. Up next for Gray is the January 2024 Netflix heist thriller Lift, starring Kevin Hart.

[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]

HARLEM WEEK: A GREAT DAY IN HARLEM AND MORE

Who: Uptown Dance Academy, the Gospel Caravan, IMPACT Repertory Theatre, Mama Foundation’s Sing Harlem! Choir, Bishop Hezekiah Walker & Choir, Ray Chew & the Harlem Music Festival All-Star Band featuring Nona Hendryx, more
What: Annual Harlem Week celebration
Where: U.S. Grant National Memorial Park, West 122nd St. at Riverside Dr.
When: Sunday, August 13, free, noon – 7:00 pm (festival runs August 9-16)
Why: One of the centerpieces of Harlem Week is “A Great Day in Harlem,” which takes place Sunday, August 13, as part of this annual summer festival. There will be an international village with booths selling food, clothing, jewelry, and more, as well as live music and dance divided into “Artz, Rootz & Rhythm,” “The Gospel Caravan,” “The Fashion Flava Fashion Show,” and “The Concert Under the Stars.” Among the performers are the Uptown Dance Academy, the Gospel Caravan, IMPACT Repertory Theatre, the Sing Harlem! Choir, and Bishop Hezekiah Walker & Choir. In addition, Ray Chew & the Harlem Music Festival All-Star Band, featuring Nona Hendryx, will perform a tribute to the one and only Tina Turner, who died in May at the age of eighty-three; Harry Belafonte, Tony Bennett, Miriam Makeba, and Tito Puente will also be honored.

The theme of the forty-ninth annual Harlem Week is “Be the Change: Hope. Joy. Love.”; it runs August 9-16 with such other free events as the panel discussion “Climate & Environmental Justice in Harlem: Storms, Heat & Wildfires,” A Harlem SummerStage concert, Senior Citizens Day, the Uptown Night Market, the Percy Sutton Harlem 5K Run & Walk & Children’s Run, “Choose Healthy Life Service of Renewal and Healing,” Great Jazz on the Great Hill in Central Park with Wycliffe Gordon and Bobby Sanabria, Imagenation Outdoor Film Festival screenings of Beat Street with DJ Spivey and Max Roach: The Drum Also Waltzes, a Youth Conference & Hackathon, Economic Development Day, an Arts & Culture Broadway Summit, Harlem on My Mind Conversations, a Jobs & Career Fair, and more. “We continue to build a stronger, more united Harlem, radiating hope, joy, and love throughout our beloved city,” Harlem Week chairman Lloyd Williams said in a statement.

[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]

GEORGIA O’KEEFFE: TO SEE TAKES TIME

Georgia O’Keeffe, Evening Star No.III, watercolor on paper mounted on board, 1917 (Museum of Modern Art, New York. Mr. and Mrs. Donald B. Straus Fund, 1958. © 2022 Georgia O’Keeffe Museum / Artists Rights Society, New York)

GEORGIA O’KEEFFE: TO SEE TAKES TIME
MoMA, Museum of Modern Art
11 West 53rd St. between Fifth & Sixth Aves.
Through August 12, $14-$25 (sixteen and under free)
212-708-9400
www.moma.org

In the catalog for the 1950 exhibition “An American Place,” Georgia O’Keeffe wrote, “A flower is relatively small. Everyone has many associations with a flower — the idea of flowers. You put out your hand to touch the flower — lean forward to smell it — maybe touch it with your lips almost without thinking — or give it to someone to please them. Still — in a way — nobody sees a flower — really — it is so small — we haven’t time — and to see takes time, like to have a friend takes time. If I could paint the flower exactly as I see it no one would see what I see because I would paint it small like the flower is small.”

Appropriately born in a town called Sun Prairie in Wisconsin in 1887, O’Keeffe is beloved for her colorful paintings of flowers, animal skulls, and the desert. In the exhibition “To See Takes Time,” MoMA offers a rare look at her series of works in charcoal, pencil, watercolor, and pastel, with 90 of the more than 120 drawings and paintings dating from 1915 to 1926, before she moved to Santa Fe, where she died in 1986 at the age of 98. Organized by Samantha Friedman with Laura Neufeld and Emily Olek, the show introduces viewers to other, unexpected sides of O’Keeffe, steeped in abstraction.

The works range from the swirling, colorful 1915 pastel Special No. 33 and a trio of 1916 line drawings done in charcoal, watercolor, and watercolor and pencil, respectively, to fourteen 1959-60 pieces depicting similar shapes in nature, culminating in the 1964 oil painting On the River, the latest work in the show.

Georgia O’Keeffe, Seated Nude XI, watercolor on paper, 1917 (Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Purchase, Mr. and Mrs. Milton Petrie Gift, 1981. © 2023 Georgia O’Keeffe Museum / Artists Rights Society, New York)

The show features such other highlights as four 1916 works on paper of the inside of a tent, made when O’Keeffe was studying at the University of Virginia; 1916-17 pencil drawings of Palo Duro Canyon; all eight 1917 Evening Star watercolors; eight early nudes; charcoal drawings of New York City from 1926 and 1932; a quartet of portraits of artist Beauford Delaney from 1943; and a pair of exquisite pencil on paper drawings of a patio door that recalls the work of Danish painter Vilhelm Hammershøi.

And no need to worry; purists will also find a handful of banana flowers and canna lilies as well as an orchid and a few vaginal works.

In the 1950 catalog, O’Keeffe continued, “So I said to myself — I’ll paint what I see — what the flower is to me but I’ll paint it big and they will be surprised into taking time to look at it — I will make even busy New-Yorkers take time to see what I see of flowers.”

So, tourists and busy New-Yorkers, take your time once you get to MoMA, but get there soon, because the exhibition closes August 12.

[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]

THE COTTAGE

Sylvia (Laura Bell Bundy) and Beau (Eric McCormack) discuss their future in The Cottage (photo by Joan Marcus)

THE COTTAGE
Hayes Theater
240 West Forty-Fourth St. between Broadway & Eighth Ave.
Tuesday – Sunday through October 29, $109-$169
thecottageonbroadway.com

“Why do I have a sense of impending disaster?” a character asks early in Tom Stoppard’s 1981 farce, On the Razzle. “One false move and we could have a farce on our hands.”

The best farces build comedy around impending disasters, usually involving class and romance, from Noël Coward’s Present Laughter and Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest to Michael Frayn’s Noises Off and Molière’s The Miser. But the less-successful farces are hampered by too many false moves.

Sandy Rustin’s 2014 drawing room comedy of manners, The Cottage, which opened July 24 at the Hayes Theater on Broadway, starts off well enough. As the audience enters the space, the stage is covered by a screen depicting the image of a colorful, idyllic cottage covered in plants and flowers — as well as several pairs of animals engaged in overt sexual behavior; a bra dangles from a tree branch, hinting at what is going on inside. The screen is then raised to reveal Paul Tate dePoo III’s wonderful set, which deservedly gets its own applause. The large room is filled with elegant furniture, sculptures, books, paintings, a bar, a globe, a gramophone, and seemingly endless knickknacks.

It’s June 1923, and Beau (Eric McCormack) is at his family’s cottage in the English countryside, in the midst of his annual tryst with Sylvia (Laura Bell Bundy), which has been going on for seven years. Sylvia is ready to take their relationship to the next level, but Beau is apprehensive.

An all-star cast cannot save the Broadway debut of The Cottage (photo by Joan Marcus)

“I wish you were my husband,” she says.

“If I were your husband you would despise me just as you despise Clarke and you would spend your evenings wishing to make love to him and not me,” Beau replies, referring to his brother, Clarke (Alex Moffat), who is married to Sylvia. “Romance, my dear, is for fairy tales. This is not a romance. This is sex,” Beau adds. “Un-wifely sex.”

Beau is none-too-thrilled when Sylvia announces that she has sent telegrams to both Clarke and Marjorie (Lilli Cooper), Beau’s wife, revealing the affair. Clarke and Marjorie soon arrive separately with secrets of their own, followed by Dierdre (Dana Steingold), a whirling dervish who is in love with Beau and is worried that her husband, Richard (Nehal Joshi), will find out where she is and kill him — but not before they all have some fun. “I didn’t expect a party. Will there be games?” Dierdre declares. The fun and games take a drastic downturn in the far-less-effective second act.

Subtitled “A Romantic and (Not Quite) Murderous Comedy of Manners,” The Cottage could be renamed The Farce That Goes Wrong. The all–North American cast (McCormack is Canadian) speaks in overly dramatic British accents. Many of the props offer surprise jokes that quickly become repetitive, while others are just plain head scratchers — antlers, I’m talking about you.

The play, gleefully helmed by the Tony-winning, Emmy-nominated Jason Alexander (Seinfeld, Jerome Robbins’ Broadway) in his directorial debut, does have its fair share of amusing exchanges, particularly in the first act, and there were two genuinely funny moments that appeared to be spontaneous, one involving a shoe, the other a bunch of grapes, resulting in the actors trying their best to hold back their own laughter and failing wonderfully. Unfortunately, there was not nearly enough of that.

Sydney Maresca’s costumes are appropriately genteel, from Clarke’s tweed suit to Sylvia’s white negligee to Beau’s smoking jacket. Justin Ellington’s sound design is overwhelmed by the actors speaking way too loud, which often impacts the believability of the plot; numerous times, characters have discussions they don’t want others to hear, but it’s hard to believe that a person knocking at the front door can’t hear what two people are saying as they shout right on the other side.

The cast is all in, but the lack of subtlety drags the show down; it might have worked better as a ninety-minute one-act instead of two hours with intermission. The actors, particularly Saturday Night Live veteran Moffat and Steingold (Beetlejuice, Avenue Q), display a talent for physical comedy, but a gaggle of gags feels tossed in purely for giggles, not organic to the story. A stage farce needs to be clever and witty first, without the pratfalls, in order to capture the audience; otherwise, as with The Cottage, you end up with an overlong episode of a mediocre sitcom or SNL skit.

[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]

BEAUTIFUL BINOCHE

Quad series celebrating Juliette Binoche runs August 4-10 (artwork by Brianna Ashby)

BEAUTIFUL BINOCHE
Quad Cinema
34 West 13th St. between Fifth & Sixth Aves.
August 4-10
quadcinema.com

In preparation for the August 11 opening of her latest feature, Emmanuel Carrère’s Between Two Worlds, the Quad is taking a look back at the career of award-winning French actress Juliette Binoche with eight of her most well known works. “Beautiful Binoche” kicks off August 3 with Philip Kaufman’s 1988 adaptation of recently deceased Czech author Milan Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being, which had been thought to have been impossible to film. The nearly three-hour story of a love triangle set in the Czech Republic in the late 1960s is screening August 4 at 3:30 and 7:00; the first show will be introduced by Columbia professor and author Annette Insdorf, the second by producer Paul Zaentz.

Insdorf will also introduce the 5:00 screening on August 6 of Krzysztof Kieślowski’s 1993 Three Colours: Blue, about tragedy and liberty, the first of a trilogy, while Zaentz will be back August 6 at 7:00 to introduce Anthony Minghella’s 1996 The English Patient, for which Binoche won a Best Supporting Actress Oscar for her portrayal of a French-Canadian combat nurse during WWII. Louis Malle’s 1992 Damage, in which Binoche stars as a political femme fatale involved with a Member of Parliament played by Jeremy Irons, screens twice on Saturday, while Claire Denis’s 2017 Let the Sunshine In, loosely adapted from Roland Barthes’s A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments, is being shown twice on August 10, with the 5:00 screening introduced by Jourdain Searles.

Binoche, who has appeared in more than seventy films since her 1983 debut, has perhaps worked with more of the world’s greatest directors than any other living performer, an astounding array of international creators that also includes André Téchiné, Jean-Luc Godard, Leos Carax, Lasse Hallström, John Boorman, Abel Ferrara, Amos Gitai, Hou Hsiao-hsien, David Cronenberg, Sylvie Testud, Hirokazu Kore-eda, and Christophe Honoré. Below is a look at the three other films that are part of the Quad series, which runs August 4-10 and concludes with a sneak preview of Between Two Worlds.

Daniel Autieul and Juliette Binoche star in Michael Haneke’s Caché

CACHÉ (HIDDEN) (Michael Haneke, 2005)
Monday, August 7, 5:00 & 7:30
quadcinema.com
sonyclassics.com/cache

Michael Haneke was named Best Director at Cannes for Caché, a slow-moving yet gripping psychological drama about a seemingly happy French family whose lives are about to be torn apart. The film stars Daniel Auteil as Georges, the host of a literary public television talk show, and Juliette Binoche as his wife, Anne, a book editor. One day a mysterious videotape is left for them, showing a continuous shot of their house. More tapes follow, wrapped in childish drawings of a boy with blood coming out of his mouth. Fearing for the safety of their son, Pierrot (Lester Makedonsky), they go to the police, who say they cannot do anything until an actual crime has been committed. As the tapes reveal more information and invite more danger, Georges’s secrets and lies threaten the future of his marriage.

Caché is a tense, involving thriller that is both uncomfortable and captivating to watch. Haneke zooms in closely on the relationship between Georges and Anne, keeping all other characters in the background; in fact, there is no musical score or even any incidental music to enhance the searing emotions coming from Auteil and Binoche. Winner of numerous year-end critics awards for Best Foreign Language Film, Caché is screening August 5 at the Quad. Oh, and be sure to pay close attention to the long final shot for just one more crucial twist that many people in the audience will miss.

William Shimell and Juliette Binoche both play annoying characters you will not want to hang out with in Certified Copy

CERTIFIED COPY (COPIE CONFORME) (Abbas Kiarostami, 2010)
Tuesday, August 8, 5:00 & 7:00
quadcinema.com
www.ifcfilms.com

Writer, director, poet, photographer, editor, graphic designer, and painter Abbas Kiarostami was one of Iran’s leading filmmakers for nearly forty years before his death in 2016, compiling a resume that includes such important international films as Under the Olive Trees (1994), Taste of Cherry (1997), and The Wind Will Carry Us (1999). Certified Copy was his first feature made outside of his home country, a dreadfully boring and annoying art-infused romantic comedy set in Italy. Juliette Binoche was named Best Actress at Cannes for her starring role as an unnamed single mother and antiques dealer who is obsessed with English author James Miller’s (British opera star William Shimell) book on the history and meaning of art replicas, titled Certified Copy. Inexplicably, the two strangers are soon on a bizarre sort-of date, driving through Tuscany and becoming involved in a series of vignettes about love and marriage, literature and art, and other topics.

Both characters are seriously flawed and emotionally unstable in ways that make them unattractive to watch, especially in obvious set-ups that either go nowhere or exactly where you think they’re going. While Julie Delpy and Ethan Hawke made the somewhat similar Before Sunrise and Before Sunset, in which two strangers from different countries spend a day together (but mostly by themselves), the sexual tension and excitement always building, Certified Copy is more reminiscent of Hans Canova’s ridiculous Conversations with Other Women, in which Aaron Eckhart and Helena Bonham Carter play wedding guests with a past whom viewers can’t wait to just shut up and get off the screen. Don’t let the supposed adult dialogue of the overrated Certified Copy fool you into thinking it’s an intelligent, mature look at believable relationships; instead, it feels like a staid copy of other, better films you think you’ve seen but can’t remember — and won’t care. Certified Copy is screening on August 8 at the Quad; the 7:00 show will be introduced by film critic Simon Abrams, who likely appreciates it more than I do.

Juliette Binoche and Kristen Stewart mix fact and fiction in Olivier Assayas’s Clouds of Sils Maria

CLOUDS OF SILS MARIA (Olivier Assayas, 2014)
Wednesday, August 9, 5:00 & 7:30
quadcinema.com
www.ifcfilms.com

The related concepts of time and reality wind through Olivier Assayas’s beautifully poetic, melancholy Clouds of Sils Maria, much like actual snakelike clouds slither through the twisting Maloja Pass in the Swiss Alps, as life imitates art and vice versa. Juliette Binoche stars as Maria Enders, a famous French actress who is on her way to Zurich to accept an award for her mentor, playwright Wilhelm Melchior, who eschews such mundane ceremonies. But while en route, Maria and her personal assistant, the extremely attentive and capable Valentine (Kristen Stewart), learn that Wilhelm has suddenly and unexpectedly passed away, and Maria considers turning back, especially when she later finds out that Henryk Wald (Hanns Zischler), an old nemesis, will be there to pay homage to Wilhelm as well, but she decides to go ahead after all. At a cocktail party, Maria meets with hot director Klaus Diesterweg (Lars Eidinger), who is preparing a new stage production of Wilhelm and Maria’s first big hit, The Maloja Snake, but this time Maria would play Helena, an older woman obsessed with ambitious eighteen-year-old Sigrid, the role she originally performed twenty years earlier, to great acclaim. Klaus is planning to cast Lindsay Lohan–like troublemaking star and walking tabloid headline Jo-Ann Ellis (Chloë Grace Moretz) as Sigrid, which does not thrill Maria as her past and present meld together in an almost dreamlike narrative punctuated by the music of Handel and cinematographer Yorick Le Saux’s gorgeous shots of vast mountain landscapes.

Valentine (Kristen Stewart) and Maria (Juliette Binoche) go in search of the Maloja Snake in the Swiss Alps

Clouds of Sils Maria resonates on many levels, both inside and outside of the main plot and the film itself. Assayas (Irma Vep, Demonlover) cowrote André Téchiné’s 1983 film, Rendez-Vous, which was Binoche’s breakthrough; Assayas and Binoche wouldn’t work together again until his 2008 film Summer Hours, similar to the relationship between Wilhelm and Maria. Meanwhile, the story of the play-within-the-film is echoed by the relationship between Maria and Valentine, who are having trouble separating the personal from the professional. It is often difficult to know when the two women are practicing lines and when they are talking about their “real” lives. Binoche is simply extraordinary as Maria, a distressed and anxious woman who is suddenly facing getting older somewhat sooner than expected, while Stewart became the first American woman to win a French César, for Best Supporting Actress, for her sensitive portrayal of Valentine, a strong-willed young woman who might or might not be holding something back. The scenes between the two are riveting as they venture in and out of the reality of the film, their onscreen chemistry building and building till it’s at last ready to ignite. Art, life, cinema, theater, fiction, and reality all come together in Clouds of Sils Maria, as Maria, Assayas, and Binoche take stock of where they’ve been, where they are, and where they’re going.

LINCOLN CENTER SUMMER FOR THE CITY: THE BESSIE AWARDS

The Illustrious Blacks wil host the 2023 Bessie Awards outside at Lincoln Center (photo by Gregory Kramer)

THE BESSIE AWARDS
Damrosch Park, Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts
Friday, August 4, free (Fast Track RSVP available), 7:30
www.lincolncenter.org
bessies.org

In 1984, Dance Theater Workshop executive director David R. White founded the Bessie Awards, named after dance teacher Bessie Schönberg and given to outstanding work in the field of independent dance. Among the winners in the inaugural year were Trisha Brown, Pina Bausch, Yoshiko Chuma and the School of Hard Knocks, Mark Morris, Anne Bogart, and Eiko & Koma, a lofty group of creators. This year’s ceremony will take place August 4 at 7:30 at Lincoln Center’s Damrosch Park as part of the Summer for the City program, with free admission to all; it’s a fantastic opportunity to join in the celebration of movement while seeing some of the best contemporary performers and choreographers.

Pina Bausch’s Água (1995/2023) is up for Outstanding Revival at the 2023 Bessies (photo by Julieta Cervantes)

The thirty-ninth annual event will be hosted by the Illustrious Blacks (Manchildblack x Monstah Black) and feature performances by Dance Theatre of Harlem (in honor of Lifetime Achievement in Dance recipient Virginia Johnson), Princess Lockerooo’s Fabulous Waack Dancers, Earl Mosley’s Diversity of Dance, Ladies of Hip-Hop Collective (in honor of Service to the Field of Dance honoree Michele Byrd-McPhee), and students from AbunDance Academy of the Arts. Presenters include Mireicy Aquino, George Faison, Jhailyn Farcon, Dionne Figgins, Erin Fogerty, Tiffany Geigel, Dyane Harvey Salaam, Karisma Jay, Gian Marco Riccardo Lo Forte, Fredrick Earl Mosley, Abdel Salaam, Paz Tanjuaquio, and Ms Vee; this year’s jury panel consists of Ayodele Casel, Kyle Marshall, and luciana achugar.

Awards will be given out in the following categories: Outstanding Choreographer / Creator, Outstanding “Breakout” Choreographer, Outstanding Performer, Outstanding Revival, Outstanding Sound Design / Music Composition, and Outstanding Visual Design, for works presented at such venues as the Joyce, Gibney, the Shed, BAM, Danspace Project, Movement Research at the Judson Church, Performance Space New York, City Center, Arts on Site, and New York Live Arts (formerly Dance Theater Workshop). Nominees include Pina Bausch & Tanztheater Wuppertal, Camille A. Brown & Dancers, marion spencer, Vanessa Anspaugh, Sidra Bell, Rennie Harris, Deborah Hay, Shamel Pitts, and Niall Jones.

Following the ceremony, there will be a special Bessies Silent Disco After-Party with DJ Sabine Blazin on Josie Robertson Plaza, where a giant disco ball dangles over the Revson Fountain.

THE LITTLE SHAKESPEARE FESTIVAL

THE LITTLE SHAKESPEARE FESTIVAL
UNDER St. Marks
94 St. Marks Pl.
August 3-19, $20 streaming, $25 in person
www.frigid.nyc/festivals/shakesfest

One of the most important aspects of William Shakespeare’s canon is how open each play is to interpretation and adaptation. The Bard’s works are regularly retold with changes in time and location, race and gender, style and genre. It’s gotten so that it is rarer to see a traditional production than one involving significant alterations, including such elements as contemporary pop music, modern-day political issues, the rise of a minor character, and zombies.

Presented by FRIGID New York, the Little Shakespeare Festival offers Bard fans the opportunity to see seven shows that take unique looks at different aspects of Shakespeare’s genius. Running August 3-19 at UNDER St. Marks in the East Village, the third annual fest is curated by Conor D Mullen, who created As You Will with David Brummer and George Hider, an unscripted evening of improv in which the audience shouts out titles of plays that Shakespeare might have written had he not died in 1616 at the age of fifty-two, and then the cast acts them out; among the past titles are Eight Merry Spiders, That Doth Not Go There, and 1601: A Space Odyssey.

Kristina Del Mar stars in Djingo Productions’ Wheel of Fortune at Little Shakespeare Festival (photo by Miguel Garzón Martínez)

“Sitting in UNDER St. Marks, it’s not too hard for me to imagine William Shakespeare working here,” Mullen said in a statement. “He’d have used his words to turn this space into a Roman dungeon, a Scottish castle, or a moonlit Athenian forest. His actors would have loved having the audience so close they could speak with them directly. And, of course, he would have been very approving of a bar inside the theater, since in his own time audience members who wanted a drink had to leave the theater and visit a local bar. It’s a reminder for me that Shakespeare doesn’t just live on when performed in giant, open air amphitheaters or big, Broadway houses; he also lives in these most humble of places, where I think he would have felt quite at home. Here, with you and me, at the Little Shakespeare Festival.”

Five of the six presentations (one is a double bill) are also available as livestreams so you can watch them in your own home. Barefoot Shakespeare Company’s Lady Capulet, written by Melissa Bell and directed by Emily Gallagher, is a prequel to Romeo and Juliet that explores the role of women in today’s society; Jianzi Colón-Soto stars as Rose Capulet. Djingo Productions’ Wheel of Fortune, written and directed by Jing Ma, is a problem play dealing with isolation, connection, and mass shootings in the digital age. C.A.G.E. Theatre Company’s THE ROOM of Falsehood, written and directed by Michael Hagins, reimagines Tommy Wiseau’s late-night cult favorite, The Room, through a Shakespearean lens. First Flight Theatre Company’s Shakespeare’s Deaths and Shakespeare’s Ladies at Tea, both directed by Frank Farrell, are a forty-five-minute double header in which, first, five actors depict all major deaths in Shakespeare, and then, second, eight female Bard characters sit down for a chat in which they can only speak lines that Shakespeare wrote for them. And in Hamlet Isn’t Dead’s Shrew You! written by David Andrew Laws and directed by Sophia Carlin, four actresses repair The Taming of the Shrew.

Most of the shows run an hour or less (Lady Capulet is 110 minutes); in-person tickets are only $25, while livestream access is $20, in order to get an intimate little taste of Shakespeare in 2023.

[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]