Raven Halfmoon will discuss High Line commission West Side Warrior on March 3 (photo by twi-ny/mdr)
Who:Raven Halfmoon,Cecilia Alemani What: Artist talk about West Side Warrior Where: Friends of the High Line Headquarters, 820 Washington St., fourth floor When: Tuesday, March 3, free with RSVP, 12:30 Why: In a July 2023 interview with Forbes, artist Raven Halfmoon (Caddo Nation) explained, “When I was in those anthropology classes [at the University of Arkansas], not only was I learning about my own tribe and our histories, but also about the Olmec heads in Mexico and the Easter Island heads and then not only that, but the earthworks that are in America: Spiro Mounds in Oklahoma, Moundville in Alabama, Serpent Mound in Ohio. A lot of those earthworks my ancestors made, Caddo ancestors, especially in the Mississippi region, so I was always interested in large scale works and being a part of that, the idea of community being in those works.”
That description fits well with her latest piece, the High Line commission West Side Warrior, in which Halfmoon employs the ancient coiling method as she honors tradition and her heritage while exploring gender and personal experience. Located on the old railway at Little West Twelfth St., the bust, sitting on a plinth, depicts a Native American female horse rider in a cowboy hat, her left side white, her right side black; there are four vertical tattoos on her face and three stars on the back of her head, representing the Red River. In addition, the hand of the artist is present in the clay, which is not smooth. The piece refers not only to the American West, where she is from, but also to the West Side Cowboys, who protected pedestrians and carriages on Death Avenue by guiding New York Central freight trains down the street beginning in the 1850s.
Raven Halfmoon’s West Side Warrior explores indigenous culture, the Old West, gender, and High Line history (photo by twi-ny/mdr)
On March 3 at 12:30, Halfmoon, who is based in her hometown of Norman, Oklahoma, will discuss West Side Warrior with High Line Art chief curator Cecilia Alemani inside the Friends of the High Line Headquarters on Washington St.; admission is free with advance RSVP. The next scheduled talk takes place March 12 at 6:30, when Saba Khan will discuss her three videos, Leaking Ocean,Water Lords, and The Dolphin, with High Line associate curator Taylor Zakarin.
[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer; you can follow him on Substack here.]
Four businesswomen toast to their success in Alex Lin’s Chinese Republicans (photo by Joan Marcus)
CHINESE REPUBLICANS
Laura Pels Theatre
Harold and Miriam Steinberg Center for Theatre
111 West 46th St. between Sixth & Seventh Aves.
Tuesday – Sunday through April 5, $69-$102 www.roundabouttheatre.org
Despite an intriguing title and a promising premise, Alex Lin’s Chinese Republicans turns out to be a disappointing, clichéd, problematic melodrama with ill-defined characters and subplots.
In a September 2022 study, the Association of Asian American Investment Managers reported that “more than 80% of Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) women say the bamboo ceiling effect is real. Additionally, 65% of AAPI women disagree that opportunities for advancement are equitable regardless of race or gender. This new report aims to reveal the unique challenges faced by AAPI women who struggle to break through the ‘bamboo glass ceiling.’”
In the ninety-five-minute Roundabout production, making its world premiere at the Laura Pels Theatre through April 5, it’s 2019, and four politically conservative women who work at the Friedman Wallace investment bank meet every third Tuesday of the month at the Golden Unicorn in Chinatown in an “affinity group” one of the members calls “Asian Babes Changing the Game.” Phyllis Ong (Jodi Long) is an elegant but tough-talking sixty-five-year-old bad-ass who was the first Chinese woman to be managing director in New York City and has no time for bleeding-heart liberals. Her protégée, forty-eight-year-old Chinese American Ellen Chung (Jennifer Ikeda), initially joined the firm to help Chinese people who don’t speak English, like her parents, with loans, mortgages, credit, and other financial needs; she is divorced and childless, concentrating fully on her career, even Anglicizing her name from Ailin in order to fit in and eventually make partner. Iris (Jully Lee) is a thirty-one-year-old Chinese immigrant and software engineer in America on an H1b visa who’s preparing to apply for a green card, so she is not seeking any trouble. Twenty-four-year-old Chinese American Katie Liu (Anna Zavelson) is the new kid on the block, a former intern who is eagerly and excitedly on the fast track to success.
They sit at a table in front of a black-and-white calligraphic painting and show they can be just as snarky and vindictive as their male counterparts, needling one another on their Mandarin, their personal lives, and even how they treat the waiter (Ben Langhorst). An early exchange sets the tone.
Iris: Oh my god, your Mandarin is so bad. It sounds like diarrhea in your mouth — Ellen: Just get it — Iris: Why — Ellen: Katie’s a vegetarian now. Iris: Since when? Phyllis: Are animal products slowing her down? Ellen: No, she’s on the up and up! Hired straight from intern to research associate level two last year — and already up for a promotion — doesn’t happen every day. Get the turnip cake, too, that’s her favorite. Iris: Turnip cake has meat, Ellen. Phyllis: Just don’t tell her. Ellen: Tricking a vegetarian into eating meat, sounds real ethical. Phyllis: She needs to build strength. Or her annual review will grind her to dust.
Ellen takes Katie under her wing, much as Phyllis did with her, stressing the important tenet, “You can’t help others if you can’t help yourself.” But where Ellen envisions a future in which the firm is renamed Friedman Wallace Chung Liu, Phyllis is critical of Katie’s desire to have a life and a boyfriend along with her career.
“Honestly, I feel bad for your generation. All you want is instant gratification — ‘You can have it all!’ Yeah, they pulled the same stunt with me,” Phyllis tells Katie. “They’ll throw you a bone by paying you a little more or make you feel safe with these little affinity groups. But you still have to wear makeup, don’t you? You still have to fix your hair, wear the right shoes, be feminine enough without being a woman — and don’t even get me started on having kids. . . . The moment you think the world is making progress is the moment you become outdated.”
In addressing that progress, the play itself is outdated.
A game-show dream sequence tests the proper usage of Mandarin (photo by Joan Marcus)
The title, Chinese Republicans, feels more like click bait than a good name for the play. The women do praise Ronald Reagan and Rudy Giuliani and disparage Barack Obama, Bill de Blasio, and “weird PC crap,” and Phyllis notes, “Once a Democrat, always a Democrat,” when Ellen admits that she was blue until 2001, but Lin (Laowang: A Chinatown King Lear,Bad Chinese Daughter), who made 2026’s Forbes “30 Under 30” list in the Hollywood & Entertainment category (along with Mikey Madison, Chase Infiniti, and Emma Myers) focuses far more on their being Chinese than GOP cheerleaders. And the plot takes a bizarre diversion when Katie becomes a rabble-rousing Libertarian-Socialist Conservative intent on unionizing the company. “You guys, all of the greatest Republicans in America have been Socialists!” she declares.
Oddly, there is no mention of Donald Trump, who had a lot to say about the financial sector and, particularly, China even before the pandemic.
Director Chay Yew (Mojada,Good Enemy) stumbles through Lin’s choppy narrative as Wilson Chin’s set revolves between the restaurant — which recalls David Mamet’s toxic-masculinity-heavy Glengarry Glen Ross, although the women here are not so profane and desperate — and inside and outside Friedman Wallace, where one-on-one discussions take place. The four women are sharply dressed in Anita Yavich’s costumes, with unobtrusive lighting by Jeanette Oi-Suk Yew and original music and sound by Fabian Obispo. Hanah Kim’s projections get out of hand during a surreal game-show scene about Mandarin usage that takes place inside Ellen’s mind. That strange dream sequence and several moments involving some of the women going into the kitchen to chastise the waiter are unnecessary, adding to the erratic structure.
The quartet of Ikeda (Vietgone,BAD NEWS! I was there . . .), Lee (KPOP The Musical,Hannah and the Dread Gazebo), Emmy winner Long (Flower Drum Song,Fern Hill), and Zavelson (The Notebook,Masquerade) never achieve the kind of rhythm or balance among the characters; it’s difficult to understand what the women get out of the meeting, except for Phyllis, who revels in dishing out verbal abuse.
While the play attempts to tackle such issues as bigotry, misogyny, partisan politics, assimilation, and intergenerational conflict, it runs roughshod over itself as it loses control and becomes more and more scattershot and disorganized.
As Phyllis likes to say, “Thanks, Obama.”
[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer; you can follow him on Substack here.]
Ronald K. Brown/EVIDENCE returns to the Joyce for fortieth anniversary celebration
Ronald K. Brown/EVIDENCE, a Dance Company
Joyce Theater
175 Eighth Ave. at 19th St.
February 25 – March 1 (Curtain Chat February 25), $32-$82
212-645-2904 www.joyce.org evidencedance.com
Ronald K. Brown/EVIDENCE celebrates its past while looking toward the future in its annual winter season at the Joyce, running February 25 through March 1. Because of the blizzard, opening night, February 24, has been canceled, but a 7:00 show has just been added, and great seats are available if you hurry.
The Brooklyn-based company will be presenting two exciting programs as part of its fortieth anniversary. The first honors longtime collaborator Wunmi Olaiya, a composer, costume designer, dancer, and visual artist who has been working with Brown since 1992, while the second pays tribute to TU Dance cofounding artistic director Toni Pierce-Sands, who danced with Alvin Ailey and EVIDENCE and would begin every TU Dance production with the Ulysses Dove mantra “Nothing to prove, only to share”; Pierce-Sands passed away in November at the age of sixty-three.
“Celebrating Wunmi” — born in London and raised in Lagos, she goes by one name — begins with Ebony Magazine: To a Village, a 1996 piece for Cleo Parker Robinson Dance Ensemble that EVIDENCE debuted in March 1998, featuring music and costumes by Wunmi centered around the repeated phrase “do you see what I see.” Clear as Tear Water is a 2006 solo originally choreographed for Pierce-Sands; at the Joyce, six different dancers will perform the work, which will be set to Wunmi’s “Woman Child” in Program A and Meshell Ndegeocello’s “Heaven” in Program B. Next is 1999’s Gatekeepers, a piece originally for Philadanco that delves into Native American mythology and African traditions, with music and costumes by Wunmi. Following intermission, the evening concludes with the rousing, nonstop Upside Down, an exhilarating excerpt from Brown’s 1998 Destiny, in which the company cuts loose to music by Wunmi, which she will play live with two drummers.
“With the trust Ron affords me, I dare to dream and visualize what the work he is creating is speaking on,” Wunmi explains in a Joyce interview. “Ron tells stories of human beings making their way . . . and, in there, I create costumes to make them visible. Thankful, trust is alive and well.”
Ronald K. Brown, Wunmi Olaiya, and Arcell Cabuag at the 2024 Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater gala
Planned prior to Pierce-Sanders’s death from cancer, “A Celebration of the Life and Legacy of Toni Pierce-Sands” kicks off with 2012’s Torch, a touching tribute to former Brown student and dance enthusiast Beth Young, who passed away in January 2012, followed by Clear as Tear Water. The company premiere of 2017’s Where The Light Shines Through, originally commissioned for TU at the Ordway, is choreographed by Brown and his partner, Arcell Cabuag, and set to music by Ndegeocello, Susana Baca, Ballet Folklórico Cutumba de Santiago, and Black Motion. The finale is the spectacular 1999 favorite Grace, originally choreographed for Alvin Ailey, which features twelve dancers moving, in costumes by Wunmi, to a melding of modern dance and West African idioms as only Brown and Cabuag can do, with music by Duke Ellington, Roy Davis Jr., and Fela Aníkúlápó Kuti and live vocals by Gordon Chambers; the beats will stay with you long after the show is over.
“This celebration is long overdue and I am happy the time is now,” Brown says in a program note.
The time is always now to see this extraordinary company, still going strong after forty marvelous years.
[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer; you can follow him on Substack here.]
BUG
Samuel J. Friedman Theatre
261 West Forty-Seventh St. between Broadway & Eighth Ave.
Tuesday – Sunday through March 8, $92-$407 www.manhattantheatreclub.com
It’s been several weeks since I saw the Broadway debut of Tracy Letts’s Bug, and I’m still feeling all itchy and out of sorts, scratching myself all over, thinking I’m being invaded by tiny killer insects.
Straight psychological horror plays don’t have a particularly impressive history on Broadway. While there have been plenty of successful spooky musicals, the same has not been true of legitimately frightening dramas. Recently, Levi Holloway’s thrilling Grey House got short shrift, closing early, and while Stranger Things: The First Shadow keeps going strong at the Marquis, it’s not pure horror, especially with its awkward Oklahoma! high school musical subplot. The last time I felt so shuddery after a Broadway play might go all the way back to watching Frank Langella from the front row of the Martin Beck Theatre in the 1977 smash Dracula.
Bug premiered in London in 1996 and came to New York eight years later, starring Shannon Cochran, Michael Shannon, Michael Cullen, Amy Landecker, Brían F. O’Byrne, and Reed Birney. It was adapted into a film in 2006, directed by William Friedkin (The Exorcist,The French Connection) and featuring Ashley Judd, Harry Connick Jr., and Michael Shannon.
Its Broadway bow at the Samuel J. Friedman is led by the sizzling hot Carrie Coon, Letts’s wife, a four-time Emmy nominee who has delighted in such series as The White Lotus,The Leftovers,Fargo, and, currently, The Gilded Age. In Bug she plays Agnes White, a forty-four-year-old woman living in a motel room outside of Oklahoma City. The opening moment is stark and beautiful: Agnes stands near the door, smoking a cigarette and holding a wineglass, looking outside as if the world is not for her. The phone rings but nobody says anything on the other end; Agnes assumes it’s her ex-husband, Jerry Goss (Steve Key), calling from prison. “I got a gun,” she warns the caller.
Next she’s having a crack, coke, and booze party with her best friend, the wild R.C. (Jennifer Engstrom), and a guy R.C. just met, a veteran named Peter Evans (Namir Smallwood). Agnes is suspicious of Peter, saying, “He’s a fuckin’ maniac, for all I know. . . . He’s a maniac DEA ax murderer, Jehovah’s Witness.” R.C. assures her he’s okay, as does Peter, whose first words are, “I’m not an ax murderer.” Agnes takes a liking to Peter and lets him stay while R.C. goes off to another shindig.
Peter explains to Agnes that he makes people nervous and uncomfortable with his talent for picking up on things, telling Agnes that he is a preacher’s son just looking for a connection to other people. When Peter starts hearing a chirping he can’t identify, Agnes at first thinks it’s a cricket. “Don’t kill him. It’s bad luck,” she says. It turns out to be the battery in the smoke alarm, which Peter claims is “more radioactive than plutonium.” He gets rid of it outside, disposing of a warning system that both of them will need as they go down a rabbit hole of conspiracy theories centered around Peter’s insistence that the room is crawling with dangerous bugs that are immune to standard sprays. “They’re blood-sucking aphids,” he later tells R.C. and Agnes, “and we’re infested.”
By the time Dr. Sweet (Randall Arney) arrives, it might already be too late.
A Steppenwolf production presented by Manhattan Theatre Club, Bug is a dark dive into paranoia, perhaps even more relevant today than it was in 1996 or 2006, given the vast reach of social media, where anyone can say anything about whatever they want and watch their beliefs, regardless of facts and the truth, spread across the internet and, potentially, into mainstream society — and the government.
The play is like the bizarre offspring of Francis Ford Coppola’s brilliant 1974 The Conversation, in which Gene Hackman stars as Harry Caul, a surveillance expert who soon thinks he himself is the target being bugged, and — stay with me, now — the 1941 Popeye cartoon Flies Ain’t Human, in which the spinach-gulping hero tries his darnedest to kill flies in his home, even using a rifle.
Takeshi Kata’s hotel-room set is appropriately claustrophobic, especially in the second act. Heather Gilbert’s lighting maintains the dark mysteries hovering over it all, while Josh Schmidt’s sound ranges from a chilling quiet to brash noises.
Tony winners Letts (The Minutes,Mary Page Marlowe) and director David Cromer (Meet the Cartozians,Prayer for the French Republic) allow the plot to slowly slither along until some major set changes during intermission — which the audience can watch — ratchet up the tension for the even creepier second act as the characters’ perspectives on reality shift dramatically.
Tony nominee and Obie winner Coon (Mary Jane,Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?) is hypnotic as Agnes, a strong-minded, independent woman who gets caught up in something she may not be able to get out of; you can’t take your eyes off her as her immediate future grows more and more ominous. Smallwood (Pass Over,Pipeline) portrays Peter with a keen ambiguity; you never know what he’s going to say or do. Their long nude scene together — the reason audience members must place their phones in Yondr pouches for the duration of the show — binds them to each other in a moving and emotional way. (The naturalistic costumes are by Sarah Laux.)
Bug is a taut, involving thriller, with authentic scares that get under your skin. It will also make you feel genuinely threatened the next time you’re itchy, searching for a creepy crawly creature — or following a military industrial complex conspiracy theory — with an unusual taste for human blood.
[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer; you can follow him on Substack here.]
Ethan Slater cowrote and stars as a famous French mime in Marcel on the Train (photo by Emilio Madrid)
MARCEL ON THE TRAIN
Classic Stage Company, Lynn F. Angelson Theater
136 East 13th St. between Third & Fourth Aves.
Tuesday – Sunday through March 22, $66-$136 www.classicstage.org
In his 1997 film Life Is Beautiful, cowriter-director Roberto Benigni portrays a Jewish Italian bookstore owner who protects his young son from the horrors of the Holocaust and a concentration camp by bravely performing silent, physical comedy for him. Although fictional, the movie was inspired by the real experiences of Italian author Rubino Romeo Salmonì in Auschwitz. Life Is Beautiful was nominated for seven Oscars and won three, for Best Music, Best Foreign Language Film, and Best Actor.
In Marcel on the Train, making its world premiere at Classic Stage, cowriter Ethan Slater portrays Jewish French mime Marcel Marceau, who was part of the resistance during WWII, joining with his cousin Georges Loinger and the OSE (Oeuvre de Secours Aux Enfants) to help save Jewish children, bravely performing silent, physical comedy for them as they tried to escape the Nazis. However, Marcel on the Train sputters, a bumpy ride that loses gas while sharing its remarkable tale.
The hundred-minute play opens with the twenty-year-old Marceau — born Marcel Mangel in Strasbourg, son of a Polish kosher butcher and Ukraine-born mother — performing mime on a bare wooden platform stage. He plucks a flower and follows some butterflies before a train whistle blows, several benches rise up from the floor, and he is joined by four hungry, tired children disguised as boy scouts: the serious, intelligent Berthe (Tedra Millan), the knowledgeable but cynical Adolphe (Max Gordon Moore), the talkative Henri (Alex Wyse), and Etiennette (Maddie Corman), who never speaks.
“Sorry. I was having a dream,” Berthe says to Marcel. “I’ve had it before, I think. It’s the future and everyone I know is old. But I’m twelve still because I never got to get old.” Marcel can’t hear her because of the train noise, so he mimics slamming the window shut, then makes a joke that Berthe doesn’t laugh at. “Don’t worry, I have others,” he promises. The exchange sets the tone for the show, which explores the loss of childhood innocence, communication between children and adults, and courage in the fight against fascism.
Marcel Marceau (Ehan Slater) entertains four adolescents as they try to escape the Nazis in fictionalized play (photo by Emilio Madrid)
The drama switches, sometimes awkwardly, to the past and the future. The first such time shift is told from the point of view of Georges (Aaron Serotsky), who tells Marcel, who is expertly forging documents for the cause, “Ooh, we’d be fucked without you, cousin. . . . Your artistry is a gift.” Marcel replies, “I am gifting the resistance my skill, my attention to detail, not my artistry. Charlie Chaplin wouldn’t just forge thirty identification papers, he’d turn them into, I don’t know, thirty baby ducks farting on Hitler.” (Ouch.)
They design a plan to meet up in Roanne, then make their way through the woods into Switzerland. Back in the present, Marceau mimes juggling apples to keep the four twelve-year-olds’ minds off their dire situation. A second trip to the past introduces Marcel’s father, Charles, (Serotsky), who is not thrilled by his son’s heroic exploits. “You know what you should do? Return to Warsaw, play the Grand, could you imagine?” Charles says, but Marcel is determined to be part of the resistance, even as the present-day journey grows more serious when they discover Georges is not waiting for them at Roanne and a Nazi officer (Serotsky) is approaching on the train.
Marcel on the Train, begins and ends with Marceau alone, miming to the audience; the emotional impact has changed because of what has happened in between, but it feels outside of the play. While it’s a showcase for Slater’s talent and virtuosity as Marceau’s alter ego, Bip the Clown, both frame pieces go on too long. Tony nominee Slater (SpongeBob SquarePants, Wicked) and cowriter and director Marshall Pailet (Private Jones,Who’s Your Baghdaddy) never find quite the right track for the narrative, which presents a surprising, relatively new, and utterly fascinating part of Marceau’s life to explore, previously detailed in several books and films over the last fifteen years, including Jonathan Jakubowicz’s fictionalized 2020 Resistance, starring Jesse Eisenberg as Marceau.
The pace stops and starts and gets caught up in tangents that are difficult to recover from, and the tension is overly manufactured. Jill BC DuBoff’s sound, Studio Luna’s lighting, and Sarah Laux’s costumes create the right atmosphere on Scott Davis’s spare set, but adult actors Corman (Accidentally Brave), Millan (Leopoldstadt), Moore (Tammy Faye), and Wyse (Good Night, Oscar) are hamstrung as the four adolescents by the inconsistent dialogue, as is Serotsky (August: Osage County), who plays everyone else.
Marceau and his brother and cousin were members of the French resistance, rescuing children, but the play has been fictionalized into disparate elements that don’t form a solid whole. There’s a great story to be told, but unfortunately Marcel on the Train too often gets diverted as it shows that life can also not be beautiful.
[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer; you can follow him on Substack here.]
The life and career of Billy Preston held many surprises revealed in documentary
BILLY PRESTON: THAT’S THE WAY GOD PLANNED IT (Paris Barclay, 2024)
Film Forum
209 West Houston St.
Opens Friday, February 20 filmforum.org
“Will it go ’round in circles? / Will it fly high like a bird up in the sky?” Billy Preston sang in his 1973 smash hit. He might not have realized it then, but that line foretold his career, which had a seemingly endless series of ups until it all came crashing down.
The rise and fall of one of popular music’s most talented and beloved figures is intimately detailed in Paris Barclay’s revelatory documentary, Billy Preston: That’s the Way God Planned It.
Born in 1946 and raised in the church by his mother, gospel singer Robbie Lee Williams, Preston began playing the piano at age three, appeared on The Nat “King” Cole Show in 1957, accompanied Mahalia Jackson and Pearl Bailey on keyboards in the 1958 film St. Louis Blues, played with the gospel group the Cogics (Church of God in Christ), and as a teenager toured with Little Richard and the Rolling Stones. An enthusiastic man with an infectious gap-toothed smile and a collection of impressive wigs, Preston was soon recording with the Stones, Sam Cooke, Sly Stone, Ray Charles, and Aretha Franklin.
He singlehandedly rescued the Beatles when the Fab Four was preparing the Let It Be album and concert, just dropping by to say hello but then taking a seat at the organ and starting to improvise with John, Paul, George, and Ringo, infusing them with the energy they had been previous lacking as rumors swirled that the band was breaking up. The tabloids nicknamed him the Fifth Beatle and the Black Beatle. “He never put his hands in the wrong place,” Starr says in the film.
Preston might have been the ultimate sideman, but when performing he couldn’t help himself, often getting up and dancing wildly, joy emanating out of every pore. He couldn’t read music and never used charts but just felt the music blaze through him, even when playing backup. “He would steal the record without you even knowing until later, and you’d go, ‘He’s done it again,’” Clapton explains.
When Preston brought an original song to George Harrison for a potential solo LP, the Quiet Beatle quickly assembled an all-star roster to back him up: Harrison, Eric Clapton, Keith Richards, and Ginger Baker.
In the 1970s, he hit the charts with such songs as “Outa-Space,” “Will It Go Round in Circles,” “Nothing from Nothing,” and “With You I’m Born Again,” all of which are featured prominently in the film. He was a musical guest on the very first episode of Saturday Night Live. Most people don’t realize that Preston wrote and originally recorded “You Are So Beautiful,” made famous by Joe Cocker; one of the highlights of the documentary is Preston’s performance of the song at the Apollo 50 celebration, joined by Cocker and Patti LaBelle on vocals. We also learn that it is a love song — to his mother, who he also plays it with in the film.
But his life started falling apart as he got lost in a haze of drugs and alcohol (Courvoisier, coke, eventually crack), starred as Sgt. Pepper in the ill-fated movie Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, and continued to hide his sexuality, even though his friends, family, and musical colleagues knew he was gay going back to his youth. He was often seen with young men he referred to as cousins, but he was overcome with loneliness.
In their debut documentary, three-time Emmy winner Barclay (NYPD Blue,Glee) and cowriter Cheo Hodari Coker (Ray Donovan,Luke Cage) also delve into the sexual abuse Preston suffered as a child, which added to his problems as an adult. In the 1990s, he was arrested for DUI, charged with assault and child molestation, and spent time in prison, but he kept on playing music until his death in 2006 at the age of fifty-nine.
“He couldn’t move on,” soul and gospel singer Merry Clayton says. “No one knew what had transpired but us, the inner circle, family people. He’d have that smile, but his heart would be broken.”
Producer Suzanne de Passe notes, “Billy Preston was a gifted, genius, wonderful, talented human being, and he had a very, very self-destructed aspect to who he was. I wish I could have been more of a help in the parts that weren’t any of my business.”
Similarly, engineer Bob Margouleff says wistfully, “I don’t think anyone, including me, knew how to help him.”
The film has a bevy of revelatory archival material, from photographs and home movies to rare clips of Preston from childhood through his entire career, including key segments from a 2004 live appearance. Barclay also speaks with Billy Porter, producer Tony Jones, recording artists Gloria Jones and Blinky Williams, Pastor Sandra Crouch, musician Cory Henry, A&M publicist Don Mizell, biographer David Ritz, Preston’s cowriter Bruce Fisher, his nephew Derrick Preston, his managers Bob Ellis and Joyce McRae Moore, and numerous members of his bands, who all share poignant stories of Preston as a performer and a human being, a man bursting with life but hiding so much inside.
“I just want to be free, to play the music that God’s given to me,” Preston says.
It’s a tragic, if not unfamiliar, story, in this case happening to a cherished person who could not conquer his demons. But as he sang in his first big hit: “Let not your heart be troubled / Let mourning sobbing cease / Learn to help one another / And live in perfect peace.”
[Billy Preston: That’s the Way God Planned It opens February 20 at Film Forum, with Q&As with the filmmakers and special guests at the 7:00 shows on Friday and Saturday.]
[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer; you can follow him on Substack here.]
The second Dance Reflections by Van Cleef & Arpels Festival returns to New York City with sixteen performances and twenty-four workshops by some of the finest companies in the world, running February 19 through March 21.
The exciting series kicks off February 19-21 with the Lyon Opera Ballet presenting Merce Cunningham’s BIPED and Christos Papadopoulos’s Mycelium at City Center and the Ballet national de Marseille bringing (LA)HORDE’s Age of Content to BAM’s Howard Gilman Opera House from February 20 to 22. The lineup continues with such shows as Jan Martens’s The Dog Days Are Over 2.0 at NYU Skirball, Leïla Ka’s Maldonne at New York Live Arts, Noé Soulier’s The Waves at the Joyce, and Lucinda Childs’s Early Works for the Guggenheim’s Works & Process program.
Below is a look at five more of the highlights.
LA Dance Project’s On the Other Side is part of triptych at PAC NYC (photo by Jade Ellis)
BENJAMIN MILLEPIED AND THE L.A. DANCE PROJECT: REFLECTIONS: A TRIPTYCH
Perelman Performing Arts Center (PAC NYC)
251 Fulton St.
Saturday, February 21, 8:00, and Sunday, February 22, 3:00, $61-$157 www.dancereflections-vancleefarpels.com pacnyc.org
Benjamin Millepied merges dance, music, and visual art in the New York premiere of Reflections: A Triptych, three pieces inspired by precious stones. The thirty-minute Reflections (2013) boasts a score by David Lang and a bold scenic design by Barbara Kruger, with six dancers musing on longing and memory. The seventeen-minute Hearts and Arrows (2014) features a set by Liam Gillick, music by Philip Glass performed by Kronos Quartet, and fab costumes by Janie Taylor. Several Glass compositions and a set by Mark Bradford anchor the forty-five-minute On the Other Side (2016), which explores communal human experience. Audrey Sides will teach a “Hearts & Arrows Repertory” workshop at the New York Center for Creativity & Dance on March 12.
Trisha Brown and the Merce Cunningham Trust celebrate their extensive collaboration with Robert Rauschenberg, and the artist’s recent centennial, with two classic works for which Rauschenberg created the visual design and the costumes. Commissioned by BAM in 1983, Set and Reset is a postmodern masterpiece, with music by Laurie Anderson, that was recently reconceived as an art installation at the Tate. The vaudevillian pièce de résistance Travelogue (1977) is set to John Cage’s “Telephones and Birds,” which has been adapted for mobile devices, and is performed within Rauschenberg’s Tantric Geography environment. “I feel like this is the one time I can let the cat out of the bag and let you know just how dear this man is to me,” Brown once said about Rauschenberg. “Bob understands how I construct movement.” Bob returned the compliment: “Particularly with Trisha, it’s always a challenge because she remains so unpredictably fresh.” Cecily Campbell and Jamie Scott will lead a “Trisha Brown Discovery” workshop at the New York Center for Creativity & Dance on February 28.
Benjamin Millepied reconfigures his Romeo & Juliet Suite specifically for Park Ave. Armory
Benjamin Millepied follows up his PAC NYC Reflections tryptych with an eighty-minute multimedia adaptation of Sergei Prokofiev’s 1930s ballet Romeo and Juliet, combining dance, theater and film reconfigured specifically for the entire Park Ave. Armory building. The cast of eighteen dancers will rotate as Shakespeare’s doomed young couple, with the presentation spreading from the Wade Thompson Drill Hall to the historic period rooms and other spaces, so be sure to get there early. “Of all the places I’ve shown Romeo & Juliet Suite, the armory is by far the most fitting, as it provides the massive scale, flexibility, and grandeur needed to present this work at its fullest potential,” Millepied, who will participate in an artist talk with NYU professor André Lepecki on March 4, said in a statement. “I invite audiences to forget what you think you know about the story of these two star-crossed lovers — and how it should be told — and open your mind to experiencing a radically reimagined tale about love suited for modern day.”
Exciting Belgian choreographer Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker displays her principle of “My walking is my dancing” in Exit Above, in which thirteen dancers move to the sounds of Meskerem Meesre interpreting the blues of Robert Johnson in addition to music by TC Matic’s Jean-Marie Aerts and dancer-guitarist Carlos Garbin, with scenic design by Michel François, costumes by Aouatif Boulaich, and opening text taken from Walter Benjamin’s “On the Concept of History.” In a 2023 interview, De Keersmaeker explained, “Less is more, I increasingly think. For me that means going back to the source, to the real thing. Blues goes all the way back to that essence, also content wise: It is about sorrow and joy, my sorrow, my joy but also our sorrow, our joy. Both individual and collective: That tension is crucial to me. Blues the ultimate emotional alchemy: we sing about our sadness, but by singing about it with others we transform it into a strength, something joyful. Singing about sorrow immediately contains the consolation for that sorrow. Isn’t this ultimately why we make art? To mourn together and to celebrate joy together. Beauty and solace. I know that beauty is considered to be old-fashioned, but we need it more than ever: Our relationship with nature is disturbed, we are living on the edge of an ecological catastrophe. When you’re lost, it’s a good idea to retrace your footsteps.” Jacob Storer and Clinton Stringer will lead an Exit Above workshop at the New York Center for Creativity & Dance for professionals on March 6 and everyone on March 7.
Compagnie Hervé KOUBI will worship the sun again in Sol Invictus at the Joyce (photo by Nathalie Sternalski)
French choreographer Hervé Koubi studied dance and biology at the University of Aix-en-Provence, and he combines the two elements gorgeously in Sol Invictus as his company of eighteen performers pushes the limits of what the human body can do. Previously staged at the Joyce in 2023, Koubi calls the seventy-five-minute piece “a manifesto for life,” and he fills it with sections that explore ritual, worship, faith in a higher power — in this case, the sun — and life, death, and rebirth. “I want to talk about light, solidarity, and those bonds that unite us,” Koubi explains about the work, which features music and soundscapes by Mikael Karlsson, Maxime Bodson, Beethoven (the funeral procession from the Seventh Symphony), and Steve Reich and costumes by musical arranger Guilaume Gabriel. Several of the dancers will lead a “Sol Invictus Discovery” workshop at the New York Center for Creativity & Dance on March 13, and there will be a Curtain Chat following the March 11 show.
[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer; you can follow him on Substack here.]
