SILENCE! THE MUSICAL is one of three dozen shows participating in the 20at20 off-Broadway promotion
Multiple venues
January 18 – February 6, $20
www.20at20.com
It’s time for off-Broadway’s annual 20at20 promotion, in which audiences can score $20 tickets to some three dozen productions twenty minutes before curtain by going up the box office and saying, “20at20.” Among this year’s participants are Black Angels Over Tuskegee at the Actors Temple, Dancing at Lughnassa at the Irish Rep, Fuerza Bruta at the Daryl Roth, Million Dollar Quartet and Rent at New World Stages, Russian Transport at the Acorn, Silence! The Musical at P.S. 122, Psycho Therapy at the Cherry Lane, Ionescopade at the York, Love, Loss and What I Wore at the Westside, The Devil’s Music: The Life and Blues of Bessie Smith at St. Luke’s, and Traces at Union Square.
TICKET GIVEAWAY: In case that deal isn’t good enough, we’ve got an even better one for you. We have vouchers for three of the shows participating in 20at20 that will score you a pair of free tickets in advance. To be eligible to win, just send your name, daytime phone number, and which show you’d like to see to contest@twi-ny.com by Friday, January 13, at 5:00 pm. All entrants must be twenty-one years of age or older; winners will be selected at random.
Nominated for fourteen Academy Awards and winner of six, including Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Screenplay, All About Eve is one of Hollywood’s all-time greatest movies, a searing depiction of naked ambition set on the Great White Way. Based on Mary Orr’s 1946 short story “The Wisdom of Eve,” writer-director Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s flawless drama stars Anne Baxter as Eve Harrington, who is not exactly the mousey wallflower she at first appears to be. She quickly worms her way into an inner circle of Broadway vets populated by superstar Margo Channing (Bette Davis), her younger lover, Bill Sampson (Gary Merrill), playwright and director Lloyd Richards (Hugh Marlowe), and Richards’s wife, Karen (Celeste Holm), who takes Eve under her wing. Joining in on all the fun is powerful theater critic Addison DeWitt (Oscar winner George Sanders), who marvels at all the manipulation and backstage drama, much of which he wickedly orchestrates himself. “There never was, and there never will be, another like you,” DeWitt tells Eve in one of the film’s most poignant moments. All About Eve is filled with classic quotes, including the iconic “Fasten your seatbelts, it’s going to be a bumpy night,” boldly proclaimed by Davis. In a movie about acting and the theater, Mankiewicz never shows anyone onstage; instead, he focuses on the characters and the intrigue with a sly flair that is deliciously entertaining. All About Eve is screening January 11-13 at 1:00 as part of MoMA’s ongoing “An Auteurist History of Film” series, which continues January 18-20 with “Rossellini and God,” featuring Roberto Rossellini’s Francesco, Giullare di Dio (The Little Flowers of St. Francis) and Il Miracolo (The Miracle) and January 25-27 with Luis Buñuel’s Los olvidados (The Young and the Damned).
During the Korean War, the north and south did battle over a series of hills, with the key locations changing hands of over and over, sometimes multiple times the same day. Director Jang Hun tells the fictionalized story of one such hill, Aero.K, in the tense military thriller The Front Line. Shin Ha-Kyun (Thirst, Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance) stars as Lt. Kang Eun-pyo, an investigator who has been sent to the eastern front to uncover a possible spy. Upon joining Alligator Company, Eun-pyo is surprised to find his old college friend, Kim Su-hyeok (Ko Soo), a former scared grunt who had been captured by the North Koreans and has now blossomed into a strong leader — and quickly becomes the leading candidate to be the potential traitor. The hill has changed hands so often that each side has been secretly communicating with the other by leaving such materials as photos, letters, and alcohol in a hidden spot, developing a relationship that reveals their humanity but also could compromise them on the field. And as a possible armistice approaches, the brass ramps up the fighting in a series of last-ditch efforts to take the hill and expand the potential demarcation line in their favor. Park Sang-yeon’s script is filled with clichéd characters and familiar plot lines, leaning toward the melodramatic, but Jang still makes it work, building the violent film around the strong main characters and several powerful, unexpected twists. South Korea’s official entry for the Academy Awards, The Front Line is a gritty epic that reveals man’s inhumanity to man and the ultimate futility of war. The film opens at the AMC 25 on January 20, but you can get a free sneak peek at it tonight at Tribeca Cinemas, where its east coast premiere kicks off the latest installment of Korean Movie Night, “Jang Hun Plus One!” which examines the career of the director, who cut his teeth working with Kim Ki-duk. The series continues January 24 with 2008’s Rough Cut, February 15 with 2010’s Secret Reunion,, and February 28 with the North American premiere of Park Shin-woo’s White Night.
For The Interrupters, director, producer, and editor Steve James (Hoop Dreams, At the Death House Door) teamed up with journalist Alex Kotlowitz (There Are No Children Here) to hit the dangerous inner-city streets of Chicago with the men and women of CeaseFire, a grass-roots organization of former gang members who are now trying to stop the violence. Inspired by Kotlowitz’s New York Times Magazine article, the two men concentrate on three primary stories. Ameena Matthews, the Muslim daughter of notorious gang leader Jeff Fort, is working with a deeply troubled young woman who’d rather fight than flee, even if it means being sent back to prison. Cobe Williams has his hands full with the angry, recently released Flamo, who thinks the whole world is against him. And Eddie Bocanegra is attempting to come to grips with a cold-blooded revenge murder he committed when he was a teenager by visiting schools and talking about turning his life around. One of the most poignant moments of the film occurs when Williams brings Lil Mikey back to the barbershop he and several of his cohorts robbed at gunpoint as he again faces some of his victims. Matthews, Williams, and Bocanegra are paid employees of CeaseFire, which was founded by Dr. Gary Slutkin, an epidemiologist who believes that violence is a disease that can be treated in similar ways, and is run by Tio Hardman, who handles his extremely tough task with intelligence and dignity as he deals with what he calls “the madness.” But in a society in which “words’ll get you killed,” as Matthews says early on, these tireless violence interrupters put their own lives on the line every day, battling a sickness that seems to have no end in sight. The award-winning film, a hit at numerous film festivals, felt a bit long at its original 144 minutes, but James edited it down to a more streamlined 124 minutes for its recent theatrical release. The Interrupters is screening January 12 at 8:00 at the IFC Center as part of the Stranger than Fiction series and will be followed by a Q&A with the director.