Christmas songs by Jews take center stage at NYFOS concert (photo by Cherylynn Tsushima)
Who: Lauren Worsham, Donna Breitzer, Rebecca Jo Loeb, Alex Mansoori, William Socolof, Cantor Joshua Breitzer, Steven Blier, Alan R. Kay What:Holiday concert Where:Merkin Concert Hall, Kaufman Music Center, 129 West 67th St. When: Wednesday, December 14, $45, 7:00 Why: Everyone knows that the Jewish Irving Berlin wrote “White Christmas,” but there are lots of other seasonal favorites and lesser-known holiday gems that were also penned by Jewish composers. On December 14 at 7:00 in Merkin Hall’s Upper Lobby at the Kaufman Music Center, New York Festival of Song will present its thirteenth iteration of “A Goyishe Christmas to You!,” featuring Christmas songs — with a twist — written by Jews. Soprano Lauren Worsham, mezzo-sopranos Donna Breitzer and Rebecca Jo Loeb, tenor Alex Mansoori, bass-baritone William Socolof, and Cantor Joshua Breitzer, with clarinetist Alan R. Kay and pianist and host Steven Blier, will perform such holiday tunes as Roy Zimmerman’s “Don’t Let Gramma Cook Christmas Dinner,” Johnny Marks’s “Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree” and “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer” (in Yiddish arrangements), David Friedman’s “My Simple Christmas Wish,” Mel Tormé’s “The Christmas Song” (with new lyrics by Adam Gopnik), Frank Loesser’s “Baby, It’s Cold Outside” and “What Are You Doing New Year’s Eve?” and David Javerbaum and Adam Schlesinger’s “Can I Interest You in Hanukkah?” It might be worth it just for Joan Javits and Phil and Tony Springer’s “Santa Zaydee.” The concert will be followed by a wine reception with the artists.
Jim Parsons stars as a parishioner directing his church’s next play in A Man of No Importance (photo by Julieta Cervantes)
A MAN OF NO IMPORTANCE
Classic Stage Company, Lynn F. Angelson Theater
136 East 13th St. between Third & Fourth Aves.
Tuesday – Sunday through December 18 www.classicstage.org
Tony winner John Doyle says farewell to Classic Stage after six years as artistic director with the humbly titled A Man of No Importance. At a talkback following the performance I saw, six of the actors couldn’t stop gushing about Doyle’s unique style and, of course, his importance.
At St. Imelda’s, a small parish church in Dublin in 1964, fortysomething Alfie Byrne (Jim Parsons) has decided that instead of staging Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest again, he and the amateur church theater company will put on Wilde’s controversial 1891 play, Salome, which troubles Father Kenny (Nathaniel Stampley, but I saw Benjamin Howes).
Talking about the choice of play, Father Kenny tells Alfie: “I went to the archbishop myself.” “‘Don’t put him out,’ I said. ‘That little theater is a holy place to Alfie Byrne. He loves Saint Imelda’s the same way some men love women.” Alfie, who is a bus conductor, replies, “I’m sure he had a fine smirk on him when he heard that one.” Father Kenny answers, “The truth be told: You brought this on yourself, Alfie, no one else did. You should have told me this Salome was a dirty play.” Alfie retorts, “It’s not. It’s art, Father, art!”
Father Kenny’s analogy will resonate later when Alfie brings up “the love that dare not speak its name” with an apparition of Oscar Wilde himself.
Characters hang out in the back as the action happens out in front at Classic Stage (photo by Julieta Cervantes)
In a rousing first musical number, we meet the rest of the cast on the bus driven by Robbie Fay (A. J. Shively), including Mr. Carney the butcher (Thom Sesma), mother-of-nine Mrs. Curtain (Kara Mikula) former all-Ireland gymnast Ernie Lally (Joel Waggoner), Peter Pan portrayer Miss Oona Crowe (Alma Cuervo), onetime Saint Joan star Mrs. Grace (usually played by Mary Beth Peil but I saw Beth Kirkpatrick), acting newbie and temporary church janitor Peter Linehan (Da’Von T. Moody), Sodality stalwart Mrs. Patrick (Jessica Tyler Wright), and stage manager Baldy O’Shea (William Youmans).
Everything stops when a fresh face boards the bus, the young, shy, and beautiful Adele Rice (Shereen Ahmed), a country lass arriving from Roscommon; she especially captures the attention of Alfie, who instantly decides she must play Salome, a casting choice that takes a lot of convincing, as Adele has never acted before and appears to be escaping a past she prefers not to discuss.
Alfie lives with his sister, the matronly Lily (Mare Winningham), who is being courted by Mr. Carney. But she refuses to settle down with a man until Alfie weds. When Alfie tells her about Adele, Lily erupts with happiness, singing, “The girls at Sodality / Call me a martyr / But that’ll be all in the past / Now heaven has lifted / The burden of life: / And has brought you a sweetie at last! / Oh . . . / You had better propose to her fast!” Little does Lily know but Alfie has his heart set on someone very different.
As opening night approaches, the revelation of deep-held secrets threatens the production and various characters’ personal lives.
Several actors also play instruments in A Man of No Importance (photo by Julieta Cervantes)
A Man of No Importance features a terrific book by Terrence McNally, who wrote several plays about theater making, including It’s Only a Play,And Away We Go, and Golden Age. McNally captures just the right impression of amateur theatrics, focusing on people for whom theater might not be central to their lives but absolutely necessary.
Composer Stephen Flaherty and lyricist Lynn Ahrens, who have previously collaborated on such musicals as Once on This Island,Anastasia, and Ragtime, contribute lovely songs that celebrate theater (“Going Up” “First Rehearsal”), examine everyday Irish life (“The Streets of Dublin,” “Princess”), and delve into the power, and intolerance, of religion (“Books,” “Our Father,” “Confession”). The unerlying theme is professed by Alfie in “Love Who You Love.”
The score, orchestrated by Bruce Coughlin, is performed by conductor Caleb Hoyer on keyboards, Michael Blanco on bass, Justin Rothberg on guitars and mandolins, and Tereasa Payne on flutes, Irish flutes, recorders, and pennywhistles, playing at the back of the stage balcony; they are joined by many of the actors on acoustic guitar, accordion, violin, drum head (which also double as plates of invisible food), and other instruments on Doyle’s thrust set, where the cast constantly rearranges chairs and other furniture as the story moves from the church and the bus to a bar and a kitchen. At times it is like Doyle is navigating everyone in an adult version of musical chairs.
Parsons is an exceptionally warm and amiable actor, whether he is playing a man throwing a snarky gay party in The Boys in the Band, a gentle soul living in his own alternate reality in Harvey, or the Supreme Being himself in An Act of God. His natural demeanor is so appealing in A Man of No Importance — which debuted at Lincoln Center in 2002 with Roger Rees as Alfie, based on the 1994 film starring Albert Finney — that you want to be his friend, even giving him a break when he occasionally loses his Irish accent. Throughout the show, several actors go into the audience, taking a seat, walking up the aisle, or hanging out in a landing; I was actually disappointed when Alfie did not come up to my row, but I did get a close-up look at Moody and his guitar.
Although all casts attempt to achieve this, this one feels like an inclusive family, with Oscar/Tony nominee and Emmy winner Winningham and Tony nominee Shively standing out; at the talkback, a half dozen of the other actors spoke about how well they were getting along and that Parsons might be the star but he insists on being treated just like everyone else. Saying goodbye to CSC, Doyle makes the audience feel that they’re all part of something important as well.
Paolo di Paolo’s photograph of Pier Paolo Pasolini at Monte dei Cocci in 1960 is one of many highlighted in Bruce Weber documentary
THE TREASURE OF HIS YOUTH: THE PHOTOGRAPHS OF PAOLO DI PAOLO (Bruce Weber, 2022)
Film Forum
209 West Houston St.
Opens Friday, December 9
212-727-8110 www.filmforum.org
“The mystery of Paolo di Paolo to me is that he was able to give up photography, something he once had such passion for,” documentarian Bruce Weber says at the beginning of the fabulous The Treasure of His Youth: The Photographs of Paolo di Paolo, a warm and inviting film about one of the greatest photographers you’ve never heard of.
In 1954, Italian philosopher Paolo di Paolo saw a Leica III camera in a shop window and, at the spur of the moment, decided to buy it. That led to fourteen extraordinary years during which the self-taught artist took pictures for Il Mondo and Il Tempo, documenting, primarily in black-and-white, postwar Italy as well as the country’s burgeoning film industry. He was not about glitz and glamour; he captured such figures as Luchino Visconti, Anna Magnani, Ezra Pound, Simone Signoret, Marcello Mastroianni, Charlotte Rampling, Alberto Moravia, Sofia Loren, Giorgio Di Chirico, and others in private moments and glorying in bursts of freedom. He went on a road trip with Pier Paolo Pasolini for a magazine story in which the director would write the words and di Paolo would supply the images. His photos of the society debut of eighteen-year-old Princess Pallavincini are poignant and beautiful, nothing like standard publicity shots.
Paolo di Paolo’s relationship with the camera is revealed in lovely documentary (photo courtesy Little Bear Films)
Then, in 1968, just as suddenly as he picked up the camera, he put it away, frustrated by the growing paparazzi culture and television journalism. A few years ago, Weber and his wife went into a small gallery in Rome where Weber, who has had a “love affair” with Rome since he was ten, discovered magnificent photos of many of his favorite Italian film stars. The gallery owner, Giuseppe Casetti, told him that the pictures were by an aristocratic gentleman he had bumped into at flea markets and who one day came into the bookstore where he was working and gave him one for free, knowing he was a collector. Casetti wanted to know who had taken the photo; “I was once a photographer,” di Paolo told him unassumingly.
That set Weber off on a search to find out everything he could about di Paolo, who is now ninety-seven. Even his daughter, Silvia di Paolo, had no knowledge of her father’s past as a photographer until she found nearly a quarter of a million negatives in the basement of the family home and began organizing them about twenty years ago. Paolo had never spoken of this part of his life; he wrote books on philosophy, was the official historian of the Carabinieri, and restored antique sports cars, but his artistic career was an enigma even though it was when he met his wife, his former assistant.
The father of the bride watches the young couple as they head down a country road (photo by Paolo di Paolo)
Weber follows di Paolo as he meets with photographer Tony Vaccaro, film producer Marina Cigona, and his longtime friend (but not related) Antonio do Paola, visits his childhood home in Larino, is interviewed by the young son of Vogue art director Luca Stoppini, and attends his first-ever retrospective exhibition (“Il Mondo Perduto” at the Maxxi Museum in Rome). And he picks up the camera again, taking photos at a Valentino fashion show.
Cinematographer Theodore Stanley evokes di Paolo’s unpretentious style as he photographs the aristocratic gentleman walking up a narrow cobblestoned street, his cane in his right hand, an umbrella in his left over his head, and driving one of his sports cars. Editor and cowriter Antonio Sánchez intercuts hundreds and hundreds of di Paolo’s photos, several of which are discussed in the film: a spectacular shot of Pasolini at Monte dei Cocci, the director in the foreground, the famous cross atop a hill in the background; Visconti in a chair, fanning himself; a scene in which a father, hands in his pocket, watches his daughter and new son-in-law walking away on an empty country road. There are also clips from such classic films as Rocco and His Brothers,Accatone,Rome Open City,Marriage Italian Style, and 8½. It’s all accompanied by John Leftwich’s epic score.
As Cigona tells di Paolo about having ended his flourishing photography career, “People said, ‘Why did you do that? You were quite famous.’” It was never about the fame for di Paolo, but now the secret is out.
“For me, every object is a miracle,” Pasolini says in an archival interview. In The Treasure of His Youth, Weber (Chop Suey,Let’s Get Lost) treats every moment with di Paolo and his photographs as a miracle. So will you.
Carroll Baker will be at the Actors Studio to discuss the making of Baby Doll
Who: Carroll Baker, Katherine Wallach, Foster Hirsch What: Film screening and discussion Where:The Actors Studio, 432 West Forty-Fourth St. When: Thursday, December 8, free with RSVP, 7:00 Why: The Actors Studio continues celebrating its seventy-fifth anniversary with a fabulous special event, a free screening of Elia Kazan’s 1956 drama Baby Doll, followed by a discussion with the one and only Carroll Baker, who portrayed the title character. Adapted by Tennessee Williams from his one-act play 27 Wagons Full of Cotton, the film is set in the Mississippi Delta, where Baby Doll Meighan is about to turn twenty and finally have relations with her significantly older husband, Archie Lee (Karl Malden), much to the chagrin of Archie’s chief rival, Silva Vacarro (Eli Wallach). The steamy movie, which popularized the babydoll nightgown, received four Oscar nominations, including Baker for Best Actress, Mildred Dunnock for Best Supporting Actress, Williams for Best Adapted Screenplay, and Boris Kaufman for Best Black-and-White Cinematography.
The ninety-one-year-old Baker, who also appeared in such works as The Carpetbaggers,The Greatest Story Ever Told,Andy Warhol’s Bad,Star 80, and Ironweed, will be at the Actors Studio on December 8 for the screening and to talk about Baby Doll with Katherine Wallach, the daughter of Eli Wallach and Anne Jackson, moderated by Brooklyn College film professor Foster Hirsch. Admission is free with advance RSVP.
Stephen Petronio’s New Prayer for Now is part of special program at Danspace (film still courtesy of the Joyce Theater)
Who:Stephen Petronio Company What:Bloodlines/Bloodlines(future) Where:Danspace Project, St. Mark’s Church in-the-Bowery, 131 East Tenth St. at Second Ave. When: December 8-10, $20, 7:30 Why: The indefatigable Stephen Petronio doesn’t know how to stop, which is a boon for dance lovers. The Newark-born choreographer presented innovative virtual work during the pandemic lockdown, followed by the exciting “Petronio’s Punk Picks and Other Delights” at La MaMa last November and a season at the Joyce this past May. Petronio, who celebrates postmodern dance history in his “Bloodlines” project, restaging classic works by Merce Cunningham, Trisha Brown, Lucinda Childs, Anna Halprin, Yvonne Rainer, and others, while collaborating with the next generation of creators, including Johnnie Cruise Mercer, Davalois Fearon, and UFlyMothership (dancer, singer, and songwriter Tendayi Kuumba and sound designer, director, and music producer Greg Purnell), is now returning to Danspace Project, where he presented his first evening-length work forty years ago.
Bloodlines/Bloodlines(future) consists of that 1982 piece, Steve Paxton’s improvisational Jag Vill Gärna Telefonera (I Would Like to Make a Phone Call), which Paxton, interpreting sports photographs, originally performed with Robert Rauschenberg in 1964 (see 2018 SPC MoMA rehearsal clip above); Petronio’s initially virtual New New Prayer for Now, set to original music by Monstah Black and renditions of “Balm in Gilead” and “Bridge Over Troubled Water” recorded with the Young People’s Chorus of New York City (YPC); UFlyMothership’s The Adventures of Mr. Left Brain and Ms. Right, which pits technology against nature; Fearon’s Finding Herstory, a solo set to a compilation of Kumina, Doundounba, Congolese, Ska, Reggae, and Dancehall and music composed by Fearon and clarinetist and sax player Michael McGinnis; and the conclusion of Mercer’s six-year Process memoir 7 (Vol 8): ‘back to love.’
“It’s a thrill to come back to Danspace, the first venue to ever produce my work,” Petronio said in a statement. “And to do so in conversation with a work from history that empowers me, alongside these voices of the future that inspire me, makes this evening a profound one for me.” It should be a profound, and extremely entertaining, evening for the audience as well.
Luiza Prado de O. Martins will perform The Sermon of the Weeds at the 8th Floor on December 8 (photo by MeetFactory)
Who:Luiza Prado de O. Martins What: Live performance installation activation Where:The 8th Floor, Shelley & Donald Rubin Foundation, 17 West 17th St. When: Thursday, December 8, free with RSVP, 6:00 Why: Continuing at the 8th Floor at the Shelley & Donald Rubin Foundation through January 21, the powerful exhibition “El Corazón Aúlla (Heart Howls): Latin American Feminist Performance in Revolt” features photography, painting, video, sculpture, and installation focusing on gender-based violence, with works by more than a dozen female and nonbinary artists from Peru, Costa Rica, Guatemala, Mexico, El Salvador, Chile, Brazil, and Argentina. Jazmín Ra’s Falo X Falo — El Estado de Chile nos viola y nos mata (“The State of Chile rapes and kills us”), Flavia Marcus Bien’s From Night to Earth, and Elina Chauvet’s My Hair for Your Name explore misogyny, racism, and LGBTQ hate through documentation and performance, revealing serious issues and attempting to take the power back. Curators Alexis Heller and Tatiana Muñoz-Brenes explain, “These performances, their aesthetic decisions, and their particular social contexts answer questions that other artistic media cannot answer, or that could not establish an alliance with the viewer in the search for social justice. . . . Gender violence, reaching its highest peaks in feminicide and state violence, is a topic that should be howled when shouting is not enough, and that should go through political corporality and affections when common sense fails to bring about change.”
On December 8 at 6:00, Brazil-born, Berlin-based artist and activist Luiza Prado de O. Martins will activate The Sermon of the Weeds, a ritualistic circle of dirt on a white plinth, with a Jesus infinity sign on top of the small mound; the materials consist of paper, soil, Caesalpinia pulcherrima (peacock flower), Ruta graveolens (rue), Artemisia vulgaris (mugwort), Mentha pulegium (pennyroyal), and Cimifuga racemose (Black cohosh). The performance is a response to the current attacks on women’s reproductive rights in America and Brazil; Prado de O. Martins will dress as a priest, deliver a liturgical mass, and offer communion to the audience, specially made wafers (with natural ingredients used in traditional forms of birth control) and libations that equate humans and plants. (The menu includes parsley pesto; crisps; carrot, mint, and pistachio salad; seeded crackers; aged sheep’s cheese with grapes and pomegranate; fresh soft sheep’s cheese with balsamic and juniper; guava and cinnamon compote squares; pennyroyal liqueur; and artemisia iced tea.) The performance will be followed by a discussion with Prado de O. Martins and Heller. On December 10, Heller will give a curatorial tour of the exhibition, which also features works by Nayla Altamirano, Denise E. Reyes Amaya, Elina Chauvet, Cristina Flores, Regina José Galindo, Fernanda Laguna and Cecilia Palmeiro, Rossella Matamoros-Jiménez, Bárbara Milano, Wynnie Mynerva, and Berna Reale.
Ball (Ben Edelman) and Ida’s (Liba Vaynberg) relationship kicks off in an elevator in The Gett (photo by Bronwen Sharp)
THE GETT
Rattlestick Playwrights Theater
224 Waverly Pl.
Wednesday – Monday through December 11, $45 www.rattlestick.org
When was the last time you saw a new show that was accompanied by a sixty-three-page dramaturgy packet? You’ll find one for The Gett, an offbeat, extremely clever — almost too much so for its own good — and ultimately satisfying play in which a young woman imagines her relationship with men through the lens of the creation of the world.
The ninety-minute work, written by and starring the charming Liba Vaynberg and continuing at the Rattlestick through December 11, is divided into seven sections that essentially follow the biblical seven-day creation story. Vaynberg, in a modest wedding dress, takes the stage, holding up a sheet of parchment, explaining what a gett is. “The gett is technically just an old religious document of divorce,” she says. “An old text on a piece of paper / That needs a rewrite — / Revision / Re-creation.”
Vaynberg is Ida — pronounced EE-dah, not eye-dah like my own grandmother, who had unique, freethinking views about a woman’s sexuality. Ida tells us, “Six thousand years ago I fell in love with a man. / I mean, sometimes it feels like a week ago. / Depends on when you ask me. And how.” She also sets up one of the play’s key themes when she says, “None of this is real. Or true. / It’s just what I believe.” The Gett is about faith — in G-d and religion, in family, in love, and, perhaps most important, in oneself.
On her way to a Christmas party at her friend Lilah’s apartment on the twenty-third floor, Ida, a poet who works in a library, gets stuck in an elevator with Baal (Ben Edelman), a tall, lanky man who is also going to the fête, bringing Chinese food. Vaynberg has painstakingly made nearly every single detail of the play relevant, every name, every prop, every number, nearly all of which are pointed out in the dramaturgy packet.
Ida means “witness” in Hebrew and has a numerological value of two; a gett would make a couple into a pair of ones. Baal means “husband,” “owner,” “false, violent god,” or “slavemaster” in Hebrew, is the name of the Canaanite god of fertility, and evokes the Baal Shem Tov, the eighteenth-century Ukrainian rabbi, mystic, and healer who founded Hasidic Judaism and whose name means “Master of the Good Name”; just as human beings cannot know or pronounce the full name of G-d, Baal, who is a magician and inventor, says to Ida, “I have a weird name no one can pronounce.” The floor number conjures Psalm 23, which includes the lines “The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want. . . . He leads me in paths of righteousness for his name’s sake.” Lilah, derived from Delilah, the Philistine beauty who betrayed Samson, has been interpreted to be the angel of conception and the opposite of Lilith, Adam’s first wife (and Baal’s second wife in the play). And Baal and Ida meet on Christmas Day, celebrated as the day Jesus Christ was born.
Ida’s mother (Jennifer Westfeldt) chats away on the phone throughout new play (photo by Bronwen Sharp)
As Ida meets with a divorce attorney and starts dating other men (all unnamed, all played by Luis Vega with different accents), Baal occasionally watches from the corners, an all-seeing figure hovering over her life. During one of her dates, Baal appears in her mind, magically pulling a condom for her out of thin air, then making it disappear. (Alexander Boyce serves as magic consultant.) Baal later shows up for real, asking Ida to give him a gett.
Meanwhile, Ida’s mother (Jennifer Westfeldt) incessantly calls her daughter, leaving long, gossipy messages when Ida doesn’t pick up, going on and on about Ida’s future, how friends’ kids are doing, and how her father has taken up kabbalah, the esoteric discipline involving mysticism. In a script note, Vaynberg explains about Mama, “No Jewish woman is complete without her.” We never see the father, as Judaism is a matriarchal religion, passed through the mother. “It’s never too early to procreate. No one thinks produce is going bad in the fridge,” Mama says. “I can say these things; I’m your mother.” Ida is petrified when her mother tells her to go to a sex store and find out where her G-spot is, then discusses some of the sexual role-playing she and Ida’s father engage in, things no child should know about their parents. But Jewish mothers have no boundaries.
Vaynberg (Scheiss Book,The Oxford Comma) has no boundaries as well, and that’s one of the elements that makes The Gett so successful. She is immediately likable as Ida; it’s impossible not to root for her even when she goes off track. Director Daniella Topol (Novenas for a Lost Hospital,Ironbound) smooths out some of the rough edges, but the narrative is still too choppy. The set, anchored by a screen of what looks like vertical filmstrips that open up to reveal other spaces (an elevator, a living room, a lawyer’s office), is by Misha Kachman, with costumes by Johanna Pan, lighting by Paul Whitaker, and extensive sound effects by Megumi Katayama.
Edelman (The Chosen,Admissions) is a fine foil as Baal, Vega (The Underlying Chris,Change Agent) effectively portrays a series of non-Jews, and Tony nominee Westfeldt (Wonderful Town,Kissing Jessica Stein) has a field day as Ida’s mother, who I can practically still hear chatting away on the phone.
Like Ida’s mother’s phone messages, Vaynberg can get caught up in trivialities, but the majority of the story is delightfully appealing and relatable whether you’re Jewish or not, exploring universal truths about family, faith, and love. You might not believe in religion, and rituals might not be your thing, but you will leave the theater believing in Vaynberg.
