Once again inspired by the 2009 picture book Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Flake, in which writer Mike Reiss and illustrator Roger Chouinard tell the story of a snowflake discovering the Saks Fifth Avenue holiday window display, Saks is presenting its sixth annual 3-D musical projection on the iconic store’s Fifth Ave. facade. “The Snowflake & the Bubble Spectacular” begins with a gear countdown, then turns windows into doors that creak open to reveal falling snowflakes and pipes that emit bubbles that explode, set to a newly commissioned soundtrack. The window displays themselves are based on the book Who Makes the Snow?, Naresh Ramchandani and Ilyanna Kerr’s children’s book about little Holly, Yottoy the Yeti, and Saks, with elements from the story accompanied by fashion creations from Alexander McQueen, Nina Ricci, Proenza Schouler, Stella McCartney, Haider Ackermann, Naeem Khan, Rag & Bone, Olivier Theyskens, Marchesa, and Erdem.
The Acorn Theater at Theatre Row
410 West 42nd St. between Ninth & Tenth Aves.
Tuesday, December 20, $51.25 – $71.25, 7:00 www.hdcny.com
The Hip-Hop Dance Conservatory Repertory Company is presenting a very different take on the classic fairy tale “Little Red Riding Hood” on December 20 with Epitaph. Artistic director Safi A. Thomas has created a brutal, violent version of Charles Perrault’s story of the girl in red who meets the big bad wolf, incorporating elements from tales by such other masters as the Brothers Grimm and Hans Christian Andersen (“The Little Match Girl”). The thirty-minute piece, which explores issues of gender, sexuality, patriarchy, and female empowerment, will be followed by a thirty-minute Q&A with the cast and creative team and a forty-five-minute reception. Premium tickets include a commemorative booklet, with part of the proceeds benefiting the Crime Victims Treatment Center of St. Luke’s Roosevelt Hospital.
THOMAS JEFFERSON, MARIA COSWAY, AND THE MUSIC AND PHILOSOPHY OF THE ENLIGHTENMENT
Abigail Adams Smith Auditorium
417 East 61st St. between First & York Sts.
Saturday, December 17, $50-$100, 8:00 www.mbhe.charityhappenings.org
It’s right there in the Bill of Rights at the very beginning. Adopted on December 15, 1791, the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution says, “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.” The separation of church and state has been a central issue in America for hundreds of years, and with good reason as fundamentalists from many religions continue to seek to take hold of the political discourse. Since 1947, the nonprofit Americans United for Separation of Church and State has sought to “preserve the constitutional principle of church-state separation as the only way to ensure religious freedom for all Americans.” On Saturday, December 17, the organization, headed by executive director Barry W. Lynn, will host a benefit at the Abigail Adams Smith Auditorium in Manhattan, raising funds and strongly defending the very basic need for the separation of church and state. Award-winning actors Melissa Errico, Matthew Modine, and Kathleen Chalfant will read from the letters of Thomas Jefferson and composer-artist Maria Cosway, who had a lifelong correspondence after meeting when Jefferson was the U.S. envoy in Paris. “Those, which depend on ourselves, are the only pleasures a wise man will count on, for nothing is ours which another may deprive us of,” Jefferson wrote to Cosway in his famous “Dialogue of the Head vs. the Heart” in 1786. “Hence the inestimable value of intellectual pleasures. Even in our power, always leading us to something new, never cloying, we ride serene & sublime above the concerns of this mortal world, contemplating truth & nature, matter & motion, the laws which bind up their existence, & that eternal being who made & bound them up by those laws. Let this be our employ.” The two also discussed art and music, some of which will be performed by members of the Clarion Society Orchestra and guest soloists Jessica Gould (soprano) and Karim Sulayman (tenor), including works by Sacchini, Hewitt, Corelli, Duphly, and Cosway. Directed by Erica Gould, the evening will take place in the elegant auditorium at the Mount Vernon Hotel Museum and Garden, a historic location built in 1799, during the time that Jefferson and Cosway were well in the midst of their very passionate epistolary relationship.
Charles Dickens’s original marked-up manuscript of A CHRISTMAS CAROL is on view at the Morgan
Morgan Library & Museum
225 Madison Ave. at 36th St.
Friday, December 16, free, 6:30 – 8:30
212-685-0008 www.themorgan.org
As part of its free Friday programming on December 16, the Morgan Library will feature singers from the Mannes College the New School for Music performing Christmas carols throughout the museum from 6:30 to 8:30. And you can continue the holiday spirit at the Morgan exhibition “Charles Dickens at 200,” which celebrates the Christmas Carol scribe’s life and career with original manuscripts, letters, books, photographs, illustrations, caricatures, and more. There will be a docent tour of the show, which runs through February 12, on Sunday at 2:00. As Dickens wrote in the preface to the book in 1843, “I have endeavoured, in this Ghostly little book, to raise the Ghost of an Idea, which shall not put my readers out of humour with themselves, with each other, with the season, or with me. May it haunt their houses pleasantly, and no one wish to lay it!” To which we add, “Merry Christmas to all, and to all a good night.”
Maurice Sendak has gathered together menorahs for the Jewish Museum exhibition “An Artist Remembers” (photo of final illustration of GRANDPA’S HOUSE courtesy the Maurice Sendak Collection, Rosenbach Museum & Library)
Jewish Museum
1109 Fifth Ave. at 92nd St.
December 15-27, free – $20
212-423-3337 www.thejewishmuseum.org
What better place to celebrate Hanukkah than at the Jewish Museum? The stately Fifth Ave. institution will be partying up for the Festival of Lights with a series of programs and exhibitions over the next two weeks. On Thursday night, December 15 ($12-$15, 8:00-11:00), “Cheryl Does Chanukah” will feature techno dreidels, sweet sufganiot, a one-hour open bar, a dance party hosted by DJ Nick, and a live performance by Brooklyn-based quartet Cheryl. On Saturdays, admission to the museum is free, so be sure to check out the special exhibition “An Artist Remembers: Hanukkah Lamps Selected by Maurice Sendak,” a group of lamps chosen by the children’s book legend from the Jewish Museum’s permanent collection. Sunday is Hanukkah Family Day, with a menorah workshop for children three and up and live music by Ben Rudnick and Friends. On Monday (free with museum admission, 12 noon – 3:00), there will be a tour of “An Artist Remembers,” followed by Hanukkah-themed tours of the permanent exhibition, “Culture and Continuity,” at 1:15 on December 22, 23, 26, and 27. The Macaroons will perform three holiday shows on Sunday ($15-$20, 11:00, 1:00, 3:00); look for such seasonal favorites as “Dreidel Bird” and “Hurry Up and Light the Candles.” And Frank London’s Klezmer Brass Band Allstars will say goodbye to Hanukkah by rocking out on December 27 ($45, 7:30) with their inspiring brand of Jewish roots music.
Melora Griffis, “bruised kite hope flares,” acrylic, gouache, and pastel on paper, 2010 (courtesy of the artist and 571 Projects)
571 Projects
551 West 21st St. #204A between Tenth & Eleventh Aves.
Thursday, December 8, free, 7:30
Exhibition on view Tuesday – Saturday through December 16, free, 12 noon – 6:00 pm
212-229-0897 www.571projects.com
In “wings and murmurs,” Melora Griffis’s intimate new solo exhibition at 571 Projects in Chelsea, many of the works feature variations on women’s faces, from the self-portrait “against the wall,” in which the painter, performance artist, and actress holds tight against the right side of the canvas, as if trying to hide from the viewer, to “sister,” which depicts a woman who looks like she has just been through a prizefight, and “unsichtbar,” in which the top part of the subject has been painted over in white, her face and head disappearing into the background. A bold mix of abstraction and figuration with a liberal use of white paint that melds into the small gallery space’s stark white walls, “wings and murmurs” beautifully displays Griffis’s confident brushstrokes and haunting color scheme, particularly in the ghostly “bruised kite hope flares,” which greets visitors as they enter the room. The show runs through December 16, with a special free event scheduled for December 8 at 7:30, “the paintings talk back,” in which poets Betty Harmon, Alystyre Julian, and Shelley Stenhouse will read pieces inspired by Griffis’s work, followed by an open dialogue and a musical performance by the artist.
Lady Gaga is determined to be part of your holiday season one way or another, whether you want her to be or not, and we can’t say that that’s necessarily a bad thing. Grand Central has just published the deluxe fifty-dollar hardcover Lady Gaga x Terry Richardson, a behind-the-scenes photography book in which the famed lensman follows around the former Stefani Joanne Angelina Germanotta from August 2010 to February 2011, while Interscope has just released Born This Way — the Remix, with Zedd, Goldfrapp, Foster the People, Metronomy, and others putting their own spin on the songs from the original disc, which has topped the five-million mark in sales. And now the native New Yorker has taken over Barneys with a collection of Gaga Goodies that can be found on the fifth floor of the shopping mecca, in a space designed by her Royal Gaga-ness with Nicola Formichetti and the art collective assume vivid astro focus, featuring special-edition designer cosmetics, toys, jewelry, candy, apparel, and other accessories, with twenty-five percent of all sales going to the Born This Way Foundation, which believes in “empowering youth” and “inspiring bravery.” She has also designed several of Barneys windows, filling them with the futuristic, streamlined Gagamachine, the inviting ice-blue Crystal Cave, and the Victorian-era Gaga’s Boudoir, along with the short musical film “Constellation.” On “You and I” from Born This Way, LG sings, “This time I’m not leaving without you”; this month it will be hard for holiday shoppers to leave without at least a little bit of Gaga.
