live performance

PASS OVER / SANCTUARY CITY

Moses (Jon Michael Hill) and Kitch (Namir Smallwood) are startled by the arrival of a white man (Gabriel Ebert) in Pass Over (photo by Joan Marcus)

PASS OVER
August Wilson Theatre
245 West Fifty-Second St. between Broadway & Eighth Ave.
Tuesday – Sunday through October 10, $39-$199
www.passoverbroadway.com

A pair of three-actor plays dealing with contemporary social issues, with spare sets and unique staging but curious endings, were among the first to open following the pandemic lockdown. Following earlier versions at Steppenwolf in Chicago in 2017 (which was filmed by Spike Lee) and at Lincoln Center’s Claire Tow Theater in the summer of 2018, Antoinette Chinonye Nwandu’s Pass Over, which deals with police brutality and the dreams of young Black men, made its Broadway debut at the August Wilson Theatre in August. Meanwhile, Martyna Majok’s Sanctuary City, a New York Theatre Workshop production at the Lucille Lortel, looks into the lives of DREAMers trying to stay in America.

Pass Over is a reimagination of Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot filtered through the biblical story of the exodus of Jewish slaves from Egypt along with the fairy tale “Little Red Riding Hood.” Kitch (Namir Smallwood) and Moses (Jon Michael Hill) are like brothers, two men hanging out on a ghetto street, rambling on about life. Wilson Chin’s set is a slightly raised sidewalk with a few pieces of detritus and a central lamppost evoking Beckett’s tree. The script explains that the time is “the (future) present / but also 2021 CE / but also 1855 CE / but also 1440 BCE,” identifying Moses as “a tramp / a n*gga on the block / but also a slave driver / but also the prophesied leader of God’s chosen” and Kitch as “a tramp / a n*gga on the block / but also a slave / but also one of God’s chosen.” Moses, the wiser of the two, tells his best friend, “yo ass gon rise up to yo full potential too / gon git up off dis block / matter fact / man / i’m gon lead you.” Kitch replies, “Amen!”

Moses (Jon Michael Hill) searches for the promised land in Pass Over (photo by Joan Marcus)

They are surprised when a white man (Gabriel Ebert), dressed in a white suit like a plantation owner, suddenly arrives out of nowhere, holding a picnic basket and telling them his name is Master. “What da fuck,” Kitch says upon hearing that. Master, who uses such trite language as “gosh golly gee” and “salutations,” offers them food from the basket he was going to bring to his mother before getting lost, but while Kitch wants to dig in, Moses is suspicious of this unexpected largesse.

Shortly after Master departs, Kitch and Moses are visited by Ossifer (Ebert), a uniformed police officer who says he will protect them but soon pulls out his gun and commands that they put their hands behind their heads. When the cop leaves, Moses is furious, but Kitch philosophizes, “damn man / we still here / sun comin up yeah / iss a new day / and we still on dis block / but damn n*gga / it cud be worse / we cud be dead / we still here / mean we still livin / so tomorrow / tomorrow.”

Fluently directed by Danya Taymor and featuring three all-star performances, Pass Over is riding smoothly until the final scenes. Nwandu significantly changed the ending for Broadway, and not necessarily for the better. It now attempts to make a grander statement about the times we live in and a possible future, with an added dash of stagecraft that is beautiful but feels out of place. It might be more hopeful, but it’s head-scratchingly confusing and strays too far from the tight, succinct narrative that led up to it. In the script, Nwandu writes, “This play should NOT have an intermission. If Moses and Kitch cannot leave, neither can you. (And if, by the end, the magic has worked, you shouldn’t want to.)” The same should have gone for the finale.

Childhood friends B (Jasai Chase-Owens) and G (Sharlene Cruz) encounter immigration issues in Sanctuary City (photo by Joan Marcus)

SANCTUARY CITY
New York Theatre Workshop at the Lucille Lortel Theatre
121 Christopher St.
Tuesday – Sunday through October 17, $30 (20% off with code FRIEND)
www.nytw.org/show

Sanctuary City takes a head-scratching turn as well as the ending approaches, detracting from everything that came before it, which was powerful and moving, as is the case with Pass Over. The play takes place in Newark between 2001 and 2006, as childhood friends B (Jasai Chase-Owens) and G (Sharlene Cruz) contemplate their immigration status, wondering whether they should stay in the United States or move back to their native countries. They walk across Tom Scutt’s spare stage, a cantilevered platform that more than hints at unease. Isabella Byrd has filled the Lucille Lortel with standard and unusual varieties of lighting, on the floor, on the walls, on the ceiling, and in unexpected places. Various lights flash on and off after short scenes that sometimes repeat themselves and travel through time, reminiscent of Nick Payne’s Constellations on Broadway, which also had a set by Scutt (and lighting by Lee Curran).

“She’s goin back,” B says about his mother. “She’s afraid of stayin in the country. There’s some shit at work, she said. Boss keeps takin money from her tips cuz, y’know, he can, what’s she gonna do? report it? to who? And she’s afraid what happened to Jorge’s gonna happen to her and so she’s goin back. And cuz of September. Cuz of the towers.”

G spends a lot of time at B’s apartment, often sleeping over in order to avoid repeated beatings by her stepfather. She skips school, pretending to be sick, but she is running out of excuses. “She’s scared they’ll send us back if they find out what’s goin on at home. She’s scared they’d separate us,” she says about her mother. “Who would send you back?” B asks. G: “America. If they wanted to investigate. If they like — checked. She worked with a fake social security for years. He’s threatened to report her before. Everyone’s more, y’know—” B: “Yeah.” G: “—cuz of September. Cuz of the towers. Or maybe they’d put me in some kind of — some place for kids — separate us. I don’t know if she even knows specifically what to be afraid of but she is. She’s scared.”

Sharlene Cruz and Jasai Chase-Owens star in new play by Martyna Majok (photo by Joan Marcus)

Without the DREAM Act, they are always in danger of being deported, so they can’t apply for student aid or other benefits. Since she sleeps over so much, G offers to pay rent to help B out, but he refuses to accept it. They grow closer and closer and soon are asking each other personal questions about their lives, preparing to get married strictly so B can get a green card. While G looks like she might be interested in something more, B stands back, keeping things platonic. A few years later, Henry (Austin Smith) enters the picture, creating an entirely new dynamic.

Pulitzer Prize winner Majok (Cost of Living, Ironbound), who was born in Poland and contributed short works to A Dozen Dreams and the Homebound Project during the pandemic, and director Rebecca Frecknall (Summer and Smoke, Three Sisters) have our full attention for two-thirds of the play, maintaining a compelling mystery about B and G as well as numerous plot intricacies, and Chase-Owens (The Tempest, A Midsummer Night’s Dream) and Cruz (Mac Beth, The Climb) are appealing as the two leads.

It all comes to a screeching halt when Henry arrives, through no fault of Smith (An Octoroon, Socrates). “Did I just fuck everything up?” Henry asks. Till then, the play had avoided theatrical clichés, challenging the audience to keep pace. But from this point on, it all becomes standard, losing the edge that had made it so compelling. The flash lighting is gone, and instead of quick, staccato scenes with cut-off, incomplete dialogue, the scenes become longer and more drawn out, crossing every T and dotting every I. As with Pass Over, Sanctuary City pulls us into its claustrophobic, carefully built world but then, when opening up, leaves us behind, no longer trusting its own dialectic.

HERSTORY OF THE UNIVERSE@GOVERNORS ISLAND

PeiJu Chien-Pott performs Amaterasu, part of site-specific dance presentation on Governors Island (photo by Slobodan Randjelović)

Who: Richard Move and MoveOpolis!
What: Site-specific dance performances
Where: Governors Island
When: Saturday, October 9 & 16, free with advance RSVP, 1:00 – 4:00
Why: Governors Island is an oasis in New York City, a historic area initially settled by the Lenape before being stolen by the Dutch and later taken over by the British and the United States. It was home to a fort and a castle that held Confederate prisoners during the Civil War and served as headquarters for the army and the coast guard prior to opening to the public in 2003 as a park. On October 9 and 16, the island will host its first-ever performance commission, the site-specific Herstory of the Universe@Governors Island by Richard Move and MoveOpolis! The three-hour show will move across the island, making six fifteen-minute stops, at Nolan Park, Hammock Grove, Outlook Hill, and Rachel Whiteread’s Cabin sculpture, among other locations. Robyn Cascio, Megumi Eda, Lisa Giobbi, Celeste Hastings, PeiJu Chien-Pott, Natasha M. Diamond-Walker, and Gabrielle Willis will perform such pieces as Demolition Angels, Ascent, and Amaterasu, making use of the trees, the buildings, the grass, the rocks, and other natural and manufactured elements of the beautiful island, celebrating its unique ecosystem, storied past, and outstanding views.

Gabrielle Wills and Natasha Diamond Walker rehearse Demolition Angels on Governors Island (photo by Slobodan Randjelović)

Commissioned by the Trust for Governors Island, Herstory invites the audience to follow along with a special keepsake map designed by Connie Fleming, which can be picked up at the Climate Museum in Nolan Park Building 18. A dancer, teacher, choreographer, and filmmaker, Move has previously created site-specific works for the European Capitol of Culture in France, the Guggenheim in New York, the Parrish Art Museum on Long Island, the Cannes Film Festival, the Asian Civilizations Museum in Singapore, and the LMCC Sitelines Festival as well as at a bus station in Sao Paulo. If you haven’t been to Governors Island in a while, Herstory provides an excellent opportunity to refamiliarize yourself with its majesty, which currently also includes installations by Duke Riley, Mark Handforth, Beam Camp City, NYC Audubon, Pratt Gaud, West Harlem Art Fund, the Endangered Language Alliance, American Indian Community House, Harvestworks, Flux Factory, the Swale Floating Food Forest, and others, all free.

FJK DANCE: RESET

Who: FJK Dance
What: Two world premieres and a repertoire work
Where: New York Live Arts, 219 West Nineteenth St. between Seventh & Eighth Aves.
When: October 7-9, $20-$45, 7:30
Why: Founded in 2014 by Fadi J. Khoury and Sevin Ceviker, FJK Dance is devoted to multicultural movement that breaks down barriers and borders. This week the New York–based company emerges from the pandemic lockdown with Reset, consisting of two world premieres and one repertory piece, running October 7-9 at New York Live Arts. The program includes Mirage, incorporating human stories from the Middle East, set to Schubert’s piano trio in E-flat, performed by Tim Ward, Sarita Apel, Estefano Gil, Khoury, and Elisa Toro Franky; Khoury’s solo Forbidden, about seeking love, with music by Abdel Wahab and Hossam Shaker; and Ravel’s Bolero, a 2019 work that investigates duality.

Bolero is one of three pieces FJK Dance will perform at New York Live Arts

The evening is dedicated to editor and FJK Dance founding board member Genevieve Young, who passed away in February 2020 at the age of eighty-nine. “In this time of reflection and finding hope, the production of this program is a dream dedicated to all the souls that we have lost during this pandemic,” the company announced in a statement. Khoury, who was born in Baghdad and raised in Iraq and Lebanon, added, “What began as a blended choreographic form has become something larger — my role is not to just create fusion choreography but to use dance as a message of peace for the world at large.”

DEEP BLUE SEA

Bill T. Jones’s Deep Blue Sea is set within an illuminating, immersive environment at Park Ave. Armory (photo by Stephanie Berger)

DEEP BLUE SEA
Park Avenue Armory, Wade Thompson Drill Hall
643 Park Ave. at 67th St.
September 28 – October 9, $40
212-933-5812
www.armoryonpark.org

Bill T. Jones is in the midst of yet another well-deserved moment, culminating in the spectacular Deep Blue Sea, continuing at Park Avenue Armory through October 9. During the pandemic, the legendary dancer, choreographer, Kennedy Center honoree, and activist, along with his troupe, the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Company, streamed a reimagined version of 1991’s Continuous Replay. In May, after a one-month delay because of a Covid outbreak in the company, they staged Afterwardsness at Park Ave. Armory, a socially distanced and masked production that addressed racism, police brutality, classism, and the pandemic itself. In July, the documentary Can You Bring It: Bill T. Jones and D-Man in the Waters was released, a thrilling look at Jones’s seminal 1989 piece, D-Man in the Waters, exploring intergenerational tragedy and loss while drawing comparisons between AIDS and other crises.

Delayed a year and a half due to the pandemic, Deep Blue Sea is a one-hundred-minute multimedia meditation on being Black in America. As the audience enters the Wade Thompson Drill Hall, which features a large, rectangular central space with ten rows of rafters, starting about ten feet high, on all four sides, Jones, dressed in his trademark black, is moving determinedly across the floor, almost robotically. Some people recognize him; others walk right past him to their seats, oblivious. It’s Jones’s return to performing for the first time in ten years, when he appeared (nude) in a 2011 iteration of Continuous Replay at New York Live Arts. On every seat is a long sheet of paper with writing on both sides, in Jones’s handwriting; it reads in part: “Thank you, Mr. Melville! / Thank you for the Pip / Thank you for his music / Thank you for his fragile fear / Thank you for his loneliness in the ocean . . . / Thank you for not letting him drown. / Thank you for this floor we are moving on. Thank you for the ocean just now pretending to be a stage. / Thank you, Dr. King! . . . Thank you for words that I can shred, misunderstand, mangle and still they meet the air like singing.”

Bill T. Jones stands in the middle of it all in multimedia Deep Blue Sea (photo by Stephanie Berger)

The sixty-nine-year-old Florida native soon starts a long monologue in which he explains that he was disturbed to discover that, upon revisiting Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick, he had completely forgotten about Pip, the young Black cabin boy aboard the Pequod. “Pip was invisible to me,” he recalls. Using that as a metaphor, Jones, joined by ten dancers, delves into the lack of inclusivity in the word “we” in contemporary society. He incorporates text from W. E. B. DuBois’s The Souls of Black Folk, Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech, Kendrick Lamar’s “Never Catch Me,” and Moby-Dick, with live gospel, blues, and hip-hop performed by vocalists Philip Bullock, Shaq Hester, Prentiss Mouton, and Stacy Penson in red costumes and Jay St. Flono in more colorful African-inspired dress. (The costumes are by Liz Prince.) The dramatic score was composed by musical director Nick Hallett, accompanied by an electronic soundscape by Hprizm aka High Priest, Rena Anakwe, and Holland Andrews.

Choreographed by Jones, Janet Wong, and the company — Barrington Hinds, Dean Michael Husted, Jada Jenai, Shane Larson, s. lumbert, Danielle Marshall, Nayaa Opong, Marie Lloyd Paspe, Jacoby Pruitt, and Huiwang Zhang — Deep Blue Sea immerses the audience in a breathtaking visual environment designed by Elizabeth Diller, of Diller Scofidio + Renfro, with award-winning projection designer Peter Nigrini (Here Lies Love, Beetlejuice); the superb lighting is by Robert Wierzel. (You can watch an artist talk with Diller, Nigrini, and Hinds here.) I suggest wearing a white or light-blue mask for an added bonus when it gets dark.

The surprises are many, from a black spotlight following Jones to white spotlights on the other dancers that merge into amorphous bubbles, from mirrors that turn the space into a kind of three-dimensional infinity room to the appearance of a calming, gently rolling ocean. Snippets of text roll beneath the dancers. The face of a boy representing Pip dominates the floor, blinking up at us. Jones refers to the dancers by name several times, giving each their own identity and voice. Wearing everyday clothing, they run across the stage, form into a tight group, and line up on their backs, asserting themselves as individuals and a close-knit group. Jones expands the idea of community with an overly long though visually engaging conclusion in which ninety-nine local people share personal statements that begin, “I know . . . ,” after which the audience is encouraged to come down and mingle, becoming an ever-expanding “we.”

“[Pip] saw God’s foot upon the treadle of the loom, and spoke it; and therefore his shipmates called him mad,” Melville writes in Moby-Dick. “So man’s insanity is heaven’s sense; and wandering from all mortal reason, man comes at last to that celestial thought, which, to reason, is absurd and frantic; and weal or woe, feels then uncompromised, indifferent as his God.” At one point in Deep Blue Sea, the phrase “You can’t turn back” is projected onto the floor, Jones’s uncompromising approach to providing a way forward through indifference.

MOVEMENT WITHOUT BORDERS: A DAY OF PERFORMANCE TO CELEBRATE NEW YORK IMMIGRATION COALITION, UNLOCAL, AND GENTE UNIDA

Wladimiro Politano, The Expression of the Soul XLIX, 2010

Who: Mariana Valencia, Jimena Paz, Shamel Pitts, Francesca Harper, Francisco Cordova, Ernesto Breton/Rudy Perez, Edivaldo Ernesto, Horacio Macuacua, Emilio Rojas, Claudia Rankine, Margo Jefferson, Antonio Sánchez Band, Jonathan Mendoza, Gina Belafonte, Xaviera Simmons, Enrique Morones, Roger H. Brown, Raoul Roach, Adelita-Husni-Bey, Reverend Micah Bucey
What: Dance, poetry, music, film, and activism at historic location
Where: Judson Memorial Church, 55 Washington Square South between Thompson & Sullivan Sts.
When: Saturday, October 2, free with RSVP (suggested donation $20), 11:00 am – 6:30 pm; ninety-minute recorded version the next day at the Jersey City Theater Center
Why: An all-star lineup of artists and activists are coming together October 2 at Judson Memorial Church for “Movement without Borders: A Day of Performance to Celebrate New York Immigration Coalition, UnLocal, and Gente Unida,” honoring three organizations fighting for immigration rights. From 11:00 am to 6:30 pm, dancers and choreographers, musicians, poets, authors, visual artists, and more will honor the work being done by New York Immigration Coalition, UnLocal, and Gente Unida. Among the presenters are dancer/choreographers Mariana Valencia, Ernesto Breton/Rudy Perez, Jimena Paz, Francisco Cordova, Horacio Macuacua, Francesca Harper, Edivaldo Ernesto, and Shamel Pitts/TRIBE, multidisciplinary artist Emilio Rojas, the Antonio Sánchez Band (with Sánchez, Thana Alexa, Jordan Peters, Carmen Staaf, Noam Wiesenberg), Adelita Husni-Bey (who will screen her film Chiron), visual artist Xaviera Simmons, poets Jonathan Mendoza and Claudia Rankine, Gente Unida founder and director Enrique Morones, Sankofa executive director Gina Belafonte, music producer and activist Raoul Roach, and others. Conceived, directed, and produced by Richard Colton, “Movement without Borders” will also be available in a ninety-minute recorded version on October 3 at the Jersey City Theater Center as part of the third annual Voices International Theater Festival.

ENCORE PRESENTATION: WORLDS FAIR INN

Worlds Fair Inn explores nuclear annihilation and serial killing with a vaudeville sensibility (photo by Regina Betancourt)

ENCORE PRESENTATION: WORLDS FAIR INN
Axis Theatre
One Sheridan Sq. between West Fourth & Washington Sts.
Thursday – Saturday through October 23, $10-$30, 8:00
866-811-4111
www.axiscompany.org

On March 11, 2020, I was in Axis Theatre Company’s small, intimate downstairs space at One Sheridan Square, getting ready to watch artistic director Randy Sharp’s adaptation of Henry James’s Washington Square. Shortly before the show started, a few of us chuckled as a woman roamed the aisles, unable to choose a seat. (The venue is general admission.) When she was right behind me, I heard her mutter, “I’m not going to get sick. This virus is not going to get me.” A few of us looked at one another, thinking she had gone a bit overboard. Little did I know that Washington Square would be the last live theater with actors and an in-person audience I would experience for nearly fifteen months because of a virus that has killed more than six hundred thousand Americans and shuttered live entertainment venues around the globe.

On June 4, 2021, there I was, back at the Axis Theatre, to see my first indoor play with actors and an audience since the pandemic lockdown was lifted. It was the premiere of Sharp’s Worlds Fair Inn, performed by a cast of five to an audience of fifteen people in masks. Not only was it thrilling to be in the theater, but the hourlong work is a fab absurdist journey through madness and tragedy, a strange and enticing mix of Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley’s Frankenstein, and the Three Stooges.

Axis producing director Brian Barnhart stars as Frank, a creepy character right out of a low-budget Roger Corman horror-comedy, a composite of Victor Frankenstein, the fictional mad scientist who built a creature out of dead bodies; theoretical physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer, “the father of the atomic bomb”; and H. H. Holmes, a con artist and serial killer who owned the World’s Fair Hotel, aka the Murder Castle, near the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair. Two loony bowler-hatted fellows, Eric (George Demas) and Bill (Jon McCormick), arrive at the inn, seeking shelter and company. All three men wear dark clothing and giant Frankenstein-style shoes on a set littered with dozens of bottles of whiskey, a hotel front desk that doubles as a killing casket, and a neon sign advertising the name of the place. The set is designed by Sharp, with period costumes by Karl Ruckdeschel, fun props by Lynn Mancinelli, eerie lighting by David Zeffren, and playfully sinister sound and music by former Blondie member Paul Carbonara.

“What do you think it would take to make a living man out of a bunch of cut-up dead people? I mean if you cut them up and glued them together?” Frank, who boasts that he’s a scientist, a doctor, an American, and an architect, asks.

“Why wouldn’t you use whole dead people and bring them back to life?” Eric answers, pauses, then adds, “Oh! Maybe you need separate parts so you can see how to make them work? Then stick them back?”

“Right,” Frank responds. “Or maybe I would just use the whole person. I’m an architect. It’s scientific. I just want to see what happens.”

Eric and Bill jump at the chance to help Frank in his unnatural mission, displaying no hesitancy at the prospect of killing people, chopping them up, then assembling the pieces into a new whole. “We’re builders,” Bill offers. “Not scientists. Just to be sure. We can fix things! Hard workers! . . . We’re contractors!”

Frank’s first two victims are Machine (Edgar Oliver), an erudite oddball, and Lady (Britt Genelin), a coquettish factory worker; both fall for the men’s ruse, undone by their own pride in their willingness to embrace new ways.

Lady (Britt Genelin) brings light to the dark proceedings of Worlds Fair Inn (photo by Regina Betancourt)

Worlds Fair Inn feels like a uniquely charming, deranged vaudeville act with Moe/Shemp (Frank), Larry (Bill), and Curly (Eric) filtered through Corman’s Tales of Terror. The cast is wonderfully over the top, highlighted by the risible interplay between Demas (Maverick, Last Man Club) and McCormick (Dead End, Donkey Punch). Pay particular attention to McCormick even when he’s not talking; he moves in herky-jerky fits and starts, overcome by nerves and fear, often leaving his thoughts unfinished as his eyes dart about the stage.

Barnhart (High Noon, Dead End) channels Angus Scrimm from Phantasm and John Carradine in Woody Allen’s Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex* (*But Were Afraid to Ask) as he delivers his lines with great bombast. It’s fab to see Oliver, a solo specialist who has presented In the Park, East 10th St.: Self Portrait with Empty House, and Attorney Street at Axis, as part of an ensemble; he and Genelin (Washington Square, High Noon) are adorable as vaudeville versions of the Creature and the Bride of Frankenstein, trapped in a skit they don’t fully comprehend.

Writer-director Sharp (Strangers in the World, Seven in One Blow) adeptly maneuvers between high and low comedy as she takes on nuclear annihilation, a different kind of rather effective serial killing — Frank, Eric, and Bill bow every time Japan is mentioned — and melds Dr. Frankenstein’s laboratory, Oppenheimer’s Los Alamos, and Holmes’s murder hotel into a supremely funny and memorable show. As we finally emerge from this dark year, we may not have much hope for the future of humanity, but Axis gives us hope for the future of theater. (And I hope the woman I foolishly chuckled at in March 2020, before Washington Square at the Axis, is alive and well and gets to catch this terrific satire, as you should too. And now you have an added opportunity, as the play is back for a well-deserved encore run September 30 through October 23.)

THE GREAT ARIA THROWDOWN #2 – LES EDITION

LUNGS HARVEST ARTS FESTIVAL
Multiple locations
Daily through October 3, free
“The Great Aria Throwdown #2 — LES Edition”
Campos Community Garden, 640-644 East Twelfth St. at Ave. C
Friday, October 1, 6:30
www.lungsnyc.org

In 2011, community gardens in Loisaida, the Lower East Side, and the East Village came together and formed LUNGS, the Loisaida United Neighborhood Gardens; its mission is “to promote, protect, and preserve gardening and greening through cooperation, coordination, and communication.” The group is now hosting its tenth annual LUNGS Harvest Arts Festival, which runs through October 3 with free music and dance, knitting, activism, art exhibits, yoga, a dominos tournament, interactive workshops, classes, a treasure hunt, and more, in such locations as Green Oasis, Carmen’s Garden, LaGuardia Corner Gardens, Orchard Alley Community Garden, Creative Little Garden, La Plaza Cultural de Armando Perez, 6BC Botanical Garden, and other lovely oases.

One of the highlights is “The Great Aria Throwdown #2 — LES Edition,” taking place October 1 at 6:30 in Campos Community Garden on Twelfth St. & Ave. C. Presented by dell’Arte Opera Ensemble (dAOE), the evening features sopranos Bahati Barton and Diana Charlop, mezzo-soprano Perri di Christina, countertenor Jeffrey Mandelbaum, and pianist Pablo Zinger performing works by Bellini, Donizetti, Mozart, Purcell, and others.

“Dell’Arte Opera Ensemble is a bridge for emerging opera singers to work with accomplished professionals in the field,” dAOE executive director Marianna Mott Newirth explains. “‘The Great Aria Throwdown’ is a fun and free event that gives ‘stage’ to three sopranos and an outstanding countertenor singing with widely acclaimed pianist Pablo Zinger, producing a growing garden of sound on East Twelfth St. From Bellini to Monteverdi, we’re bringing opera to the LES! Campos Garden even has a chandelier they plan to raise just as the show begins — a nod to the new season starting at the Met after a year of darkness.” Below is the full program.

Diana Charlop: “Quel guardo il cavaliere” from Don Pasquale (Bellini)
Perri di Christina: “Deh, non voler costringere” from Anna Bolena (Donizetti)
Bahati Barton: “Ruhe Sanft” from Zaide (Mozart)
Jeffrey Mandelbaum: “If Music Be the Food of Love” (Purcell, Third Version)

Diana Charlop: “Padre germani addio” from Idomeneo (Mozart)
Perri di Christina: “Voi che sapete” from Le nozze di Figaro (Mozart)
Jeffrey Mandelbaum: “Sprezzami quanto sai” from L’incoronazione di Poppea (Monteverdi)

Perri di Christina: “Faites-lui mes aveux” from Faust (Gounod)
Bahati Barton: “Think of Me” from The Phantom of the Opera (Lloyd Webber)
Diana Charlop: “Obéissons quand leur voix appelle” from Manon (Massenet)
Jeffrey Mandelbaum: “Fra tempeste” from Rodelinda (Handel)