live performance

PHILIPPE PETIT: TOWERING!!

Philippe Petit will look back at his historic walk between the Twin Towers at special events at St. John the Divine (photo courtesy Man on Wire)

Who: Philippe Petit, Sting, Anat Cohen, Molly Lewis, Sophie Auster, Tim Guinee, Lorenzo Pisoni, Evelyne Crochet, Shawn Conley, James Marsh, Michael Miles, and students of Ballet Tech
What: Live performances celebrating fiftieth anniversary of Twin Towers high-wire walk
Where: The Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine, 1047 Amsterdam Ave. at 112th St.
When: Wednesday, August 7, and Thursday, August 8, $50-$500 (VIP $1800), 8:30
Why: It was an unforgettable moment in my childhood. On August 7, 1974, French tightrope artist Philippe Petit, six days shy of his twenty-fifth birthday, pulled off what he called “le coup”: After six years of secret planning, he snuck up to the top of the South Tower of the recently built World Trade Center and walked on a 131-foot-long wire he had strung to the other, 1,350 feet aboveground, traversing it eight times over forty-five minutes using a balancing pole. The crossing was completely unauthorized; spectators and security officers alike were stunned. It was a spectacular achievement that went viral well before there was anything like social media. It was all over the news, on television and in the papers, and it was all anyone was talking about.

“This is probably the end of my life to step on that wire,” Petit says in James Marsh’s 2008 documentary, Man on Wire. “Death is very close.”

The Twin Towers opened on April 4, 1973, and were destroyed on September 11, 2001.

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A post shared by Philippe Petit (@philippepetit_manonwire)

Petit has also walked the high wire at the Sydney Harbour Bridge, the Louisiana Superdome, the Centre Georges Pompidou, the Paris Opera, the Museum of the City of New York, the Eiffel Tower, and locations in Jerusalem, Tokyo, Vienna, Frankfurt, Belgium, Switzerland, and numerous US cities. In 1982, 1992, and 1996, he performed the feat at the Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine, where he has been an artist in residence for more than four decades.

On August 7 and 8, in honor of the fiftieth anniversary of his World Trade Center walk, called the “artistic crime of the century,” Petit has conceived and directed “Towering!!,” a special two-night multidisciplinary happening consisting of nineteen scenes at the cathedral, where he will be joined by clarinetist Anat Cohen, musical whistler Molly Lewis, singer-songwriter Sophie Auster, actors Tim Guinee and Lorenzo Pisoni, classical pianist Evelyne Crochet, bassist and composer Shawn Conley, musician, author, and educator Michael Miles, and students from Ballet Tech dance school.

Petit, who turns seventy-five on August 13, will walk the high wire and share stories about his WTC adventure. In addition, his good friend Sting will play three songs, including “Let the Great World Spin,” which was written specifically for this event, and Marsh will debut a short film about Petit.

Limited tickets are still available for several sections as well as VIP seating, which comes with Champagne and dessert with Petit after the performance. Part of the proceeds support programs at the cathedral and the preservation of Petit’s archives.

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

THE LITTLE SHAKESPEARE FESTIVAL: CAMARADERIE AND COMMUNITY

The Lark and the Nightingale explores friendship between Juliet and Desdemona

THE LITTLE SHAKESPEARE FESTIVAL
UNDER St. Marks
94 St. Marks Pl.
August 1-17, $20 streaming, $27.50 in person
www.frigid.nyc

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, incorporating such elements as contemporary pop music, modern-day political issues, the rise of a minor character, and zombies.

Presented by FRIGID New York, the 2024 Little Shakespeare Festival offers Willy fans the opportunity to see seven shows that take unique looks at different aspects of Shakespeare’s genius. Running August 1-17 at UNDER St. Marks in the East Village, the fourth annual fest, the theme of which is “Camaraderie and Community,” can be experienced in person or via livestreaming, with most shows clocking in at around sixty minutes.

As You Will is one of seven productions in 2024 Little Shakespeare Festival

Hamlet Isn’t Dead’s When My Cue Comes (August 1, 3, 11, 15, 17) is set in a waiting room filled with forgotten characters, including Reynaldo from Hamlet, Jaques de Boys from As You Like It, the boatswain from The Tempest, and a messenger, from multiple plays; the Bard himself works the front desk. Justin Hay’s solo My Own Private Shakespeare (August 1, 2, 3, 4) follows a Shakespearean actor on the edge. Conor D Mullen, David Brummer, and George Hider return with their unscripted, unpredictable As You Will (August 2, 4, 10, 17). In Ladies & Fools’ Fools in the Forest (August 3, 8, 16), writer Natalie Kane reimagines what happens at the end of As You Like It. Sean Gordon delivers a senior thesis in the one-person show Walter Schlinger’s Romeo and Juliet (August 4, 8, 16). Juliet and Desdemona search for happiness outside of their usual stories in Mindy Mawhirter and Alyssa Cokinis’s The Lark and the Nightingale (August 9, 10, 11, 15, 17). And Megan Lummus proffers a unique interpretation of Much Ado About Nothing (August 9, 10, 11), tinkering with character motivations over ninety minutes.

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

BROOKLYN MUSEUM FIRST SATURDAY: SOL/SOLEY/SOLO

Takashi Murakami adds unique characters to many of his Hiroshige re-creations in Brooklyn Museum exhibit (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

SOL/SOLEY/SOLO
Brooklyn Museum
200 Eastern Parkway at Washington St.
Saturday, August 3, free, 5:00 – 10:00
212-864-5400
www.brooklynmuseum.org

The Brooklyn Museum honors Caribbean culture with its free August First Saturday program, “Sol/Soley/Solo,” featuring live performances by Metro Steel Orchestra, RAGGA NYC DJs Oscar Nñ and Byrell the Great, Dada Cozmic, and Lulada Club; storytelling with Janet Morrison and Deborah C. Mortimer; a pop-up Caribbean market; pop-up poetry with Roberto Carlos Garcia, Omotara James, Anesia Alfred, and Christina Olivares; a hands-on art workshop in which participants will make Caribbean-inspired fans; and screenings of Ben DiGiacomo and Dutty Vannier’s 2023 documentary Bad Like Brooklyn Dancehall, followed by a talkback with Pat McKay, Screechy Dan, and Red Fox, moderated by Lauren Zelaya, and Eché Janga’s 2020 drama, Buladó. In addition, the galleries will be open late so you can check out “Nico Williams: Aaniin, I See Your Light,” “Paul McCartney Photographs 1963–64: Eyes of the Storm,” “Brooklyn Abstraction: Four Artists, Four Walls,” “The Brooklyn Della Robbia,” “The Dinner Party by Judy Chicago,” and more.

Paul McCartney, Self-portrait, London, 1963, large graphic reproduction (courtesy MPL Communications Ltd.)

It’s also your last chance to catch the must-see exhibition “Hiroshige’s 100 Famous Views of Edo (feat. Takashi Murakami),” which closes August 4. For the first time in more than two decades, the Brooklyn Museum is displaying its rare complete set of Utagawa Hiroshige’s “100 Famous Views of Edo,” an 1856–58 collection of woodblock prints of Edo, later to become Tokyo. Hiroshige, who died in 1858 at the age of sixty-one, captured everyday life in the gorgeous works, from flora and fauna to stunning landscapes to fish, cats, people, and weather patterns, including Nihonbashi, Clearing After Snow; Ryogoku Ekoin and Moto-Yanagibashi Bridge; Cotton-Goods Lane, Odenma-cho; Yatsukoji, Inside Sujikai Gate; Shitaya Hirokoji; Night View of the Matsuchiyama and Sam’ya Canal; View of Nihonbashi Tori-itchome; Sudden Shower over Shin-Ohashi Bridge and Atake; and Bamboo Yards, Kyobashi Bridge.

The show is supplemented with related objects, contemporary photographs of the locations by Álex Falcón Bueno, and, most spectacularly, Takashi Murakami’s re-creations of each view of Edo, many with gold or platinum leafing. Dozens of smaller 14 1/2 × 9 7/16 inch acrylics on canvas are arranged in three rows on the walls, as well as 39 3/8 × 25 9/16 inch works in two rows, but it’s the large-scale 137 13/16 × 89 9/16 inch pieces that demand intense scrutiny, as Murakami has added classic miniature characters from his oeuvre, hiding them in trees, behind bushes, on rooftops, and in other hard-to-find locations, in the same gallery space where “© Murakami” dazzled visitors in 2008.

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

DOGTEAM THEATRE PROJECT: LA VIUDA

Dogteam Theatre Project is presenting La Viuda in repertory with A Hundred Circling Camps (photo by Clinton Brandhagen)

LA VIUDA
Dogteam Theatre Project
Atlantic Stage 2
330 West Sixteenth St. between Eighth & Ninth Aves.
Tuesday – Sunday through August 4, $23.18-$33.85
www.dogteam.org

For many recent summers, I looked forward to the Potomac Theatre Project’s (PTP/NYC) annual residency at Atlantic Stage 2, where it presented works by such playwrights as Tom Stoppard, Caryl Churchill, Howard Barker, Robert Chesley, Vaclav Havel, and Steven Berkoff. Founded in 1987 by co-artistic directors Cheryl Faraone, Richard Romagnoli, and Jim Petosa at Middlebury College, PTP/NYC has now morphed into the Dogteam Theatre Project (DTP), under the leadership of cofounders Olga Sanchez Saltveit, Courtney Smith, and PTP/NYC veterans Alex Draper and Mark Evancho.

Its inaugural season is under way at Atlantic Stage 2, with Sam Collier’s A Hundred Circling Camps, about a 1932 protest by veterans over a promised bonus, running in repertory with the English-language US debut of María Irene Fornés’s 1961 epistolary play, La Viuda (“The Widow”). Havana-born Fornés’s first work, La Viuda was adapted from letters that a cousin of hers wrote from Seville, Spain, to her great-grandfather in Cuba. (Fornés’s final play, 2000’s Letters from Cuba, was also based on family correspondence.)

La Viuda takes place from 1899 to 1902, after the Spanish-American War in which Cuba sought its independence from Spain, as Angela Martin (Jay Romero) dictates a series of letters to a clerk (Zeph Santiago) in her Spanish home. Although there is a lovely writing desk in the room, the clerk sits on an uncomfortable stool at a music stand as Angela essentially narrates her life story upon learning that her long-estranged husband, Francisco de Arenal (Jesse Muñoz), known as Paco, has had a serious stroke and “has lost all rational capacity.” She is particularly concerned that she might be erased from Paco’s official documents in favor of his supposed wife in Cuba, even though he and Angela, who lived in separate countries for decades, never divorced.

“I believe it is the illness of a remorseful conscience for having lived like a libertine in free love with that . . . thing,” she says to her cousin David. “My marriage has never been dissolved. However, my loyal friend, Casimiro Paz, has sent me a newspaper clipping that says: ‘Seen among the attendees was the illustrious writer Francisco de Arenal and his distinguished wife, Mrs. . . . F . . . F . . . David, the name written in that space is not mine!’”

Soon scenes from her past play out as she discusses them in the letters. She explains to Father Cravet (Fidel Vicioso) how Paco, a journalist, made enemies of such men as Don Modesto (Vicioso) and Angela’s father. Paco and Angela have a son, Salvador (Jacob Joseph Medina at five, Zack Maluccio at twenty-one), who believes he is “meant to save,” but that doesn’t prevent Paco from leaving them and beginning a second life in Cuba and then New York (following the Ten Years’ War between Cuba and Spain). Angela’s friend Moncita (Bri Beach), shares unsubstantiated gossip about Paco’s time in New York and his desperate attempts to gain respect, but he appears to have been a ne’er-do-well cad. In the middle of a hilarious monologue, Moncita explains, “Well, it’s none of my business and I don’t meddle in other people’s affairs,” before continuing with more news about other people’s affairs.

No longer a mother or a wife, Angela seeks to reestablish her dignity and identity, but it seems that the world has already passed judgment on her.

Scenes from Angela’s (Jay Romero, back right) past play out before her eyes (photo by Clinton Brandhagen)

Directed and translated by Saltveit, La Viuda is a bumpy ride, feeling long even at a mere seventy-five minutes, but it has many poignant moments. Furthering the idea of Angela searching for her identity, she is sternly portrayed by a man, Romero, in a black dress, as if mourning a life lost. Romero acts out punctuation while flitting around Evancho’s set, which also features a couch, an end table, a period chair, doors at the back right and left, curtained windows, a Hans Memling–like portrait of the young Salvador, an empty birdcage, and an old gramophone. Angela is not the most generous of people; not only will she not allow the clerk to sit at her desk, she is extremely careful when considering offering him a piece of candy.

The cast includes several Middlebury students and recent grads as well as nine-year-old Medina, who studies acting at the Triple Promise Academy for the Performing Arts in Bay Ridge. Santiago, class of 2026, has the most unusual perspective; he is onstage the entire time, taking Angela’s dictation while barely speaking as the action plays out behind him. Every so often he shakes a ratchet noisemaker, which gets annoying quickly.

Summer Lee Jack’s costumes range from persnickety to playful; both the younger and older Salvadors wear the same sailor outfit, and near the end several characters are identified by hand-drawn boards around their neck. One of the best bits involves widow’s wigs arriving in a most unexpected way.

Nine-time Obie winner Fornés, who died in 2018 at the age of eighty-eight, went on to become a well-known experimental playwright, with such credits as Tango Palace, Mud, Fefu and Her Friends, Drowning, and Evelyn Brown (A Diary). She wrote La Viuda while in a relationship with Susan Sontag, who was suffering from writer’s block at the time. At an early rehearsal of a scene from La Viuda at the Actors Studio, where Fornés was a member, she jumped up and tried to direct one of the actors but was told by the actual director that she should not do that; the experience led her to direct the inaugural production of more than fifty of her works.

Fornés, an important influence on such playwrights as Nilo Cruz, Paula Vogel, Lanford Wilson, Sam Shepard, Edward Albee, Tony Kushner, Eduardo Machado, and others, deserves to be more well known; DTP has done us all a noteworthy service by presenting this first-ever English version of the show that started it all.

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

OPEN CALL 2024: NEW ART FOR NEW YORK

Asia Stewart, work-in-progress showing of Fabric Softener, presented by Amanda + James, Coffey Street Studio, Red Hook, Brooklyn, June 11, 2022 (photo by Elyse Mertz / courtesy the artist)

OPEN CALL
The Shed
545 West 30th St. at Eleventh Ave.
Thursday – Saturday through August 17, free with advance RSVP
646-455-3494
theshed.org

The Shed’s free summer performance series, Open Call, kicked off in June with Yaa Samar! Dance Theatre’s Gathering: New York City and has included such other presentations as Cain Coleman’s New Information, Kyle Dacuyan’s Dad Rock, and Garrett Zuercher’s Inside/Look. It continues July 25–27 with Asia Stewart’s Fabric Softener, a ritualistic response to Toni Morrison’s 1977 novel, Song of Solomon, that introduces the audience to the Laundress (Stewart), the Celebrant (Dominica Greene), and the Witness (Candice Hoyes), joined by the Narrator (Shala Miller) and violinist and composer Yaz Lancaster.

The next weekend, NIC Kay’s must have character features a mascot and a drag performer (Kay and Gabriele Christian) wandering through the Shed and the surrounding area from noon to 8:00 on August 1 and 1:00 to 3:00 on August 2, followed by the public program “Building Characters Through Theater and Photography” on August 3 at 1:00. On August 9 and 10 at 7:30 in the Griffin Theater, Nile Harris investigates jazz cornetist Buddy Bolden, mental illness, containment, and black box theaters in a workshop production of minor b, starring Harris, Jim Fletcher, Tony Jenkins, Ley(sis), and Jonah Rollins. Open Call concludes August 15–17 with Kayla Hamilton’s immersive dance performance How to Bend Down/How to Pick It Up, which honors lineages of Black disabled imagination.

Although many of the performances are sold out, these are free events, so there are always no-shows; in-person waitlists will be available fifteen minutes before curtain.

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

FREE UPTOWN SHAKESPEARE IN THE PARK: A MIDSUMMER NIGHT’S DREAM

A MIDSUMMER NIGHT’S DREAM
Classical Theatre of Harlem
Richard Rodgers Amphitheater, Marcus Garvey Park
18 Mt. Morris Park W.
Tuesday – Sunday through July 28, free (advance RSVP recommended), 8:30
www.cthnyc.org

The Classical Theatre of Harlem (CTH) celebrates its twenty-fifth anniversary with a rip-roaring adaptation of William Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, at the Richard Rodgers Amphitheater in Marcus Garvey Park through July 28.

The action shifts between a glitzy two-level club during the Harlem Renaissance and a fairy woodland that feels right at home in the park, amid the setting sun, the wind blowing through the trees, the sounds of the birds and insects, and, the evening I went, a few minutes of light rain that felt like fairy dust.

In the club setting, Theseus (Victor Williams), the duke of Athens, is preparing to wed Hippolyta (Jesmille Darbouze), the queen of the Amazons. He is approached by a nobleman, Egeus (Allen Gilmore), who has promised his daughter, Hermia (Ra’Mya Latiah Aikens), to Demetrius (Brandon Carter), but Hermia is in love with Lysander (Hiram Delgado); at the same time, Helena (Noah Michal) pines for Demetrius, who spurns her. Egeus invokes an ancient law in which Hermia either marries Demetrius or is put to death; Theseus attempts to circumvent that potential fate, with no success.

“Relent, sweet Hermia: and, Lysander, yield / Thy crazed title to my certain right,” Demetrius declares, but Lysander, taking the argument lightly, responds, “You have her father’s love, Demetrius; / Let me have Hermia’s: why not marry him?”

Ultimately, Theseus, against his personal preference, rules in favor of Egeus, giving Hermia three options: accept Demetrius’s hand, be exiled as a nun, or suffer execution. “Then I will die if these are my choices, / But I will never consent to marry a man I love not,” she concludes.

Hermia and Lysander decide to run away together; they share their plan with Helena, who betrays them, believing, “My love for Demetrius is so strong it makes me weak! / And in the woods my true love I will seek!”

In those very woods, a troupe of amateur actors known as the rude mechanicals are rehearsing a play they will be putting on for the duke and queen’s wedding, the tale of doomed lovers Pyramus and Thisbe from Ovid’s Metamorphoses. The cast features weaver Nick Bottom (Jaylen D. Eashmond) as Pyramus, bellows-mender Francis Flute (León Tak) as Thisbe, joiner Snug (Olivia London) as the lion, tinker Tom Snout (Carson Elrod) as the wall, and tailor Robin Starveling (Deidre Staples) as Moonshine, directed by carpenter Peter Quince (Allen Gilmore). All serve as comic relief, as their rehearsals do not go very smoothly.

Meanwhile, Oberon (Williams) and Titania (Darbouze), the king and the queen of the fairies, are looking forward to attending the wedding but they are in the middle of a fight over a young boy (Langston Cofield) they have taken in.

Oberon has his hobgoblin, the sprite Puck (Mykal Gilmore), fetch a purple flower whose juices, when dripped on a sleeping creature’s eyes, make them fall in love with the first living thing they see when they awaken. To prank his wife, Oberon does so with Titania and orders Puck to drizzle the juice on the eyes of Demetrius so he will love Helena, but Puck makes a mistake, and soon Lysander is mad for Helena, Titania is cuddling with a donkey-headed Bottom, and there is chaos everywhere.

A Midsummer Night’s Dream was previously performed by CTH at the Richard Rodgers Amphitheater in 2013; this new production sparkles under the direction of Carl Cofield. The club scenes include fanciful dancing expertly choreographed by Dell Howlett, using both levels of Christopher and Justin Swader’s glittering set, lit with excitement by Alan C. Edwards; a large ensemble, dressed in Mika Eubanks’s colorful period costumes, shakes and bakes to the Jazz Age score. (The hot sound and music are by Frederick Kennedy, with projections of the moon, forest, and other elements by Brittany Bland.)

Cofield focuses on the importance of eyes in Shakespeare’s romantic comedy. Early on, Hermia says, “I would my father looked but with my eyes,” to which Theseus replies, “Rather your eyes must see things as your father sees them!” Helena opines, “Love looks not with the eyes, but with the mind; / And therefore is winged Cupid painted blind.” In the play-within-the-play, Pyramus, upon encountering something that does not please him, cries, “What dreadful sorrow is here! / Eyes, do you see?” And Bottom, waiting for a cue, says, “The eye of man hath not heard, the ear of man hath not seen, man’s hand is not able to taste, his tongue to conceive, nor his heart to report, what my dream was.” When Oberon and Puck use the flower juice, there are giant projections of eyes.

The nightclub scenes burst with life, and everything involving the four lovers is spirited fun. Aikens, Delgado, Michal, and Carter are a formidable quartet, Gilmore is a delightful Puck (and revels master Philostrate), and Williams and Darbouze bring a regal posture to the proceedings. However, the rude mechanicals cannot maintain the pace, occasionally dragging down the momentum. Several scenes go on too long, and the acting is more scattershot, led by an over-the-top, repetitive performance by Eashmond, who alternates as Bottom with comedian Russell Peters. But there is more than enough merriment to make that a minor quibble.

This Midsummer Night’s Dream is just the right play to set your eyes upon to make an already lovely midsummer night that much more dreamy.

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

LEGENDS & LEGACIES: ELEVENTH ANNUAL STooPS BED-STUY ART CRAWL AND BLOCK PARTY

STooPS 2024 SUMMER FESTIVAL
Stuyvesant Ave. & Decatur St., Brooklyn
Saturday, July 27, free (advance registration recommended), 1:00 – 7:00
www.stoopsbedstuy.org
www.eventbrite.com

The eleventh annual STooPS Arts Crawl and Block Party takes place July 27 from 1:00 to 7:00, with live music and dance, spoken word, workshops, theater, and visual art on the stoops and shared spaces of Bedford–Stuyvesant. This year’s theme is “Legends & Legacies,” honoring the history of the community. Among the legacies participants are textile artist Aaliyah Maya, singer-songwriters Amma Whatt and YahZarah, poets Carmin Wong, Kai Diata Giovanni, and Keys Will, storyteller Christine Sloan Stoddard, musicians BSTFRND, DJ Toni B, and Zardon Za’, dancer-choreographer Kendra J. Bostock, healer Renee Kimberly Smith, and artists Ladie Ovila Lemon (Mūt’ Sun) and Shanna Sabio. Representing the legends are Black Girl Magic Row; Monique Greenwood of Akwaaba Mansion; Sincerely, Tommy founders Kai Avent-deLeon, Mama Jelani deLeon, and Ms. Doreen deLeon; Chief Baba Neil Clarke; Ms. Cathy Suarez of the Decatur St. Block Association; and organizer and educator Lumumba Akinwole-Bandele of the East.

“STooPS is a living legacy — the bridge that connects the artists, movements, organizations, and neighbors who transformed Bed-Stuy into a Black Cultural Hub with the new artists, residents, and visitors in order to forge the future of this neighborhood and Black culture,” STooPS founding director Bostock said in a statement. “For our 2024 annual summer festival we honor the national and hyperlocal hero/sheros and imagine and inspire their posterity with our theme, Bed-Stuy: Legends and Legacies.“

The festivities begin at 1:00 with a block party lasting all afternoon, including a Kiddie Korner; there will be art crawls at 1:30 and 4:30, led by playwright and poet Wong. All events are free but advance registration is recommended.

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