twi-ny recommended events

A CHRISTMAS CAROL

Jefferson Mays portrays more than fifty characters in A Christmas Carol (photo by Chris Whitaker)

A CHRISTMAS CAROL
Twenty-four-hour stream through January 3, $50 ($30 with code SCROOGE through 12/12)
Daily lottery: $15 (10 random winners)
www.achristmascarollive.com

Jefferson Mays’s mostly one-man version of Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol is the best filmed theatrical production made during the pandemic that I have seen. It is also the best one I’ve heard. Tony winner Mays may be the star of the holiday tale, spectacularly portraying more than fifty characters in ninety minutes, but Joshua D. Reid nearly steals the show with his stunning sound design, which works hand in hand with Ben Stanton’s pinpoint-precision lighting; headphones and as large a screen as possible are a must to fully appreciate this outstanding presentation. A big monitor and great speakers will also increase the scare level, because first and foremost, this telling is a ghost story, with genuine frights, one of which made my heart drop into my stomach.

Originally produced at the Geffen Playhouse in LA in 2018, the play, adapted by Mays and his wife, Susan Lyon, with director Michael Arden, has been reimagined by Arden and set and costume designer Dane Laffrey for online viewing. It was recorded in October at the historic United Palace theater on Broadway at 175th St., built in 1930 as a lush vaudeville and movie house that served as a church for the Rev. Ike and his ministry from 1969 to 2017. United Palace calls itself the Home of Spiritual Artistry, and that’s exactly what you’ll find in A Christmas Carol.

“Oh! But he was a tight-fisted hand at the grindstone, was Scrooge!” Mays announces early as the narrator. “A squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching, covetous, old sinner! Secret, and self-contained, and solitary as an oyster.” The word “solitary” hits us differently during the pandemic lockdown, as we watch a single actor onstage, performing in an empty theater for an audience of one, or maybe a few more, sheltering at home.

He continues, “Nobody ever stopped him in the street to say, `My dear Scrooge, how are you?’ No beggars implored him to bestow a trifle, no children asked him what it was o’clock, no man or woman ever once in all his life inquired the way to such and such a place, of Scrooge. Even blind men’s dogs, when they saw him coming on, would tug their owners into doorways. . . . But what did Scrooge care! It was the very thing he liked. To edge his way along the crowded paths of life, warning all human sympathy to keep its distance.” At that instant, Arden cuts to a far shot of Mays, looking lonely and far away, socially distanced from the rest of humanity.

A Christmas Carol has been reimagined for online viewing during the pandemic (photo by Chris Whitaker)

Cinematographer Maceo Bishop’s camera follows Mays across the space, zooms in for extreme close-ups, and occasionally pulls back to remind us that Mays is on a stage; this Christmas Carol is a hybrid piece of film/theater, a new kind of work that is both and neither, something that is likely to last beyond Covid-19, when venues are open again for audiences to sit together in community while people around the world are craving access to the same show. At one point, when Mays is shifting between Ebenezer Scrooge and one of the ghosts, Mays not only changes his voice for each character, enhanced by Reid’s bold sound manipulation, but he merely needs to shift his shoulders from left to right to move between the roles, his face bathed in green as the ghost and in white light as the grinchy banker. It’s a terrifying scene that could not be captured in the theater for all to see, while on a movie screen it would lose its intimacy. There are also video projections, smoke and fog, and lighting effects so palpable they have an intense physicality to them.

Mays knows his way around multiple parts; his breakthrough came in 2003 in Doug Wright’s Pulitzer Prize-winning I Am My Own Wife, in which he portrayed the real-life Charlotte von Mahlsdorf and thirty-nine others, earning a Tony, and he played nine members of the D’Ysquith family in the Tony-winning musical A Gentleman’s Guide to Love and Murder. In A Christmas Carol, he plays more than fifty characters, from Jacob Marley, Bob Cratchit, Fezziwig, and Tiny Tim to Fred, Scrooge, and the Ghosts of Christmas Past, Present, and Future. He does so in the same Victorian outfit, a white shirt under a dark suit and long coat, with a top hat. His hair, styled by Cookie Jordan, fluffs up over each ear, evoking an unbalanced Princess Leia.

Mays inhabits the roles from the very start with an easygoing grace and familiarity; when he was a child, his parents would read the story to the family every year. Two-time Tony nominee Arden (Spring Awakening, Once on This Island) began his career playing Tiny Tim in a Texas community theater production of A Christmas Carol when he was ten. The care and understanding they have for the material shines through; the only weakness is Sufjan Stevens’s treacly caroling, which feels like it was meant for a different holiday show.

A Christmas Carol streams through January 3 and is a benefit for more than fifty local theater companies and venues around the country that have been impacted by the Covid-19 crisis. When two gentlemen knock at the door seeking a charity donation, Scrooge is none too happy, leading to the following exchange:

“Many thousands are in want of common necessaries; hundreds of thousands are in want of common comforts, sir.”

“Are there no prisons?” asked Scrooge.

“Plenty of prisons,” said the gentleman.

“And the Union workhouses?” demanded Scrooge. “Are they still in operation?”

“They are. Still,” returned the gentleman, “I wish I could say they were not.”

He politely gets to the point.

“What shall I put you down for?”

“Nothing!” Scrooge replied.

“You wish to be anonymous?”

“I wish to be left alone,” said Scrooge. “Since you ask me what I wish, gentlemen, that is my answer. I don’t make merry myself at Christmas and I can’t afford to make idle people merry.”

This Christmas Carol should make many people merry during what will be a very challenging holiday season, with the coronavirus raging inside and outside prisons, millions out of work, so many charities and businesses in need of funds, and the desperate need to not be alone overwhelming our daily existence. Mays, Arden, et al. don’t just transport us to another plane for ninety thrilling minutes — they have given us a present that will stay with us for a long time.

VIRTUAL KYOGEN PERFORMANCE DOUBLE FEATURE WITH MANSAI NOMURA

MANSAI NOMURA’S KYOGEN: KAGAMI-KAJA (A MIRROR SERVANT) + SHIMIZU (SPRING WATER)
Japan Society
Launch with Watch Party: Wednesday, December 9, free with RSVP (suggested price $5-$20), 8:30 (available on demand through December 31)
Live Talk + Q&A with Mansai Nomura on YouTube: Saturday, December 12, 9:00
www.japansociety.org

A Holder of Important Intangible Cultural Property, kyogen actor Mansai Nomura returns to Japan Society — virtually — in an online double feature launching with a livestreamed watch party complete with real-time commentary on December 9 at 8:30. Nomura, the star of the cult movie duology Onmyoji, was last at Japan Society in 2015 with the Mansaku-no-Kai Kyogen Company, founded by his grandfather in 1957 and then run by his father, Mansaku Nomura, staging the solo piece Nasu no Yoichi, based on a chapter from The Tale of the Heike, as well as Akutaro (Akutaro Reforms) and Bonsan (The Dwarf Tree Thief). (Nomura was previously seen in New York City in March 2013 in Sanbaso, Divine Dance, a collaboration with Hiroshi Sugimoto that was copresented by Japan Society at the Guggenheim.)

Kagami-kaja (“A Mirror Servant”) is part of kyogen double feature from Japan Society (photo © Shinji Masakawa from Setagaya Public Theatre)

This time Nomura, the artistic director of Setagaya Public Theatre, will be performing in two works. The new Kagami-kaja (“A Mirror Servant”) was written for Nomura by comedian, novelist, rapper, and avid gardener Seiko Ito; Nomura conceived of and directs and stars in the story about a servant who gets trapped in his reflection. The evening also includes the traditional piece Shimizu (“Spring Water”), a complex tale involving a trickster servant and a tea ceremony. Nomura will introduce each show, and he will also take part in a live talk and Q&A on December 12 at 9:00 that will delve into the history of the seven-hundred-year-old art form known as kyogen. Admission to both events is free, although there is a suggested donation of $5 to $20 based on what you can afford during these challenging times, during which Japan Society has continued to deliver innovative, cutting-edge programs online. If you miss the livestream of the double feature, it will be available for on-demand viewing through December 31; the discussion will take place on YouTube.

PJ HARVEY: A DOG CALLED MONEY

PJ Harvey traveled to Kosovo, Kabul, and Washington, DC, to inspire 2016 album The Hope Six Demolition Project

A DOG CALLED MONEY (Seamus Murphy, 2019)
Film Forum online
Opens virtually Wednesday, December 9, $12 for 48-hour rental
filmforum.org

Irish photojournalist Seamus Murphy lays bare English musician PJ Harvey’s creative process in the irresistible documentary A Dog Called Money. Polly Jean Harvey initially hired Murphy to take photos for her 2011 album, Let England Shake, after having seen Murphy’s 2008 exhibit and book, A Darkness Visible: Afghanistan. Murphy ended up making twelve short films with her, one for each song on the record, and in 2012 he asked Harvey if she wanted to accompany him on his trips to Kabul, Kosovo, and Washington, DC, where they would work separately, he on a book, she on a record. But the journeys led to a creative cornucopia that also resulted in their collaborating on the book The Hollow of the Hand, featuring his photographs and her poetry, as well as the 2016 album The Hope Six Demolition Project and the documentary, which opens virtually December 9 at Film Forum.

Murphy follows Harvey, dressed all in black, as she goes through old photos and other detritus in a looted, destroyed home, sits on the rocky shore of a lake writing in her journal (with voice-over narration of her thoughts), hangs out with Corny’s crew in Anacostia, wanders into a theater in ruins (“I’ve heard twenty years ago, you could pay to get into the cinema with bullets,” she says), has tea with a group of children, and visits with local musicians in Kabul’s “Tin Pan Alley.” Murphy cuts between these scenes and Harvey and her band recording new songs in a specially constructed studio in the basement of the historic arts center Somerset House in London. Harvey, who burst onto the alternative music scene in the 1990s with such seminal records as Dry, Rid of Me, and To Bring You My Love, turns the sessions into an art installation by allowing people to watch from behind a one-way mirror; they can see her, but she can’t see them. It’s a genuine treat to observe Harvey’s process as she works with such musicians as John Parish, Terry Edwards, Kenrick Rowe, Enrico Gabrielli, Mike Smith, Alessandro Stefana, James Johnston, Alaine Johannes, Adam “Cecil” Bartlett, Jean-Marc Butty, and Mick Harvey (no relation) on melody, vocalization, and instrumentation, the songs taking shape right before our eyes and ears.

Murphy draws direct parallels between what Harvey witnesses and the songs she is writing. She meets a woman walking with her hands behind her back, holding a chain with two keys, who says, “I would kill them with my own hands if I knew who was responsible”); in “Chain of Keys,” Harvey sings, “The woman’s old / The woman’s old and dressed in black / She keeps her hands / She keeps her hands behind her back / Imagine what / Imagine what her eyes have seen / We ask if she / We ask but she won’t let us in.” After playing with the Kabul musicians, she transforms their sounds into the powerful “Homo Sappy Blues.” She uses some of Corny’s crew’s exact words and actions in her lyrics for “A Dog Called Money.” She also captures the overall feeling of her experience in such tunes as “The Ministry of Defence” (“Those are the children’s cries from the dark / These are the words written under the arch / Scratched in the wall in biro pen / This is how the world will end”) and the stunning “I’ll Be Waiting” (“They swept across the land / They did not leave a thing / They did not leave a person / A stone or a tree / They did not leave anything / They did not leave anything / All that’s left is sand / All that’s left is sand”).

At first what seems like it could be cultural appropriation develops into something else, a genuine attempt to understand what is happening in these countries and around the world — as well as in America with the inclusion of DC — and sharing that through music. “Everyone driving in one direction / Everyone driving in every direction / Where to go? / Why? / What to say when I get there?” Harvey narrates near the start of the film, which opens with an extended close-up of a smiling boy with a dirty face, his nose pressed against the window of a car, the sound of traffic all around him. For ninety minutes, we are all that boy, and he is us. And we have a book, an album, and now a documentary to remember that.

A TOAST TO DOWNTOWN

Who: Paul Pfeiffer, Eiko Otake, Amina Henry, Morgan Bassichis, Mona Chalabi, Ivy Mix, Mariana Valencia, Jessica Lappin, Maggie Boepple
What: LMCC benefit fundraiser
Where: Lower Manhattan Cultural Council online
When: Wednesday, December 9, free with RSVP (donations accepted), 7:00
Why: Since 1973, the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council has “served, connected, and made space for artists and communities in NYC through programs that deepen artists’ creative practice and afford them opportunities to share their process and work with local communities.” Rarely has that been more important than during the pandemic lockdown. On December 9 at 7:00, LMCC’s annual fundraiser goes virtual with “A Toast to Downtown,” celebrating the great work the organization does not only in Lower Manhattan but on Governors Island and other locations. This year’s civic leadership honorees are Downtown Alliance president Jessica Lappin and former LMCC president Maggie Boepple; in addition, Amina Henry (The Animals, Bully) will receive the Sarah Verdone Writing Award, Eiko Otake will be presented with the Sam Miller Award for Performing Arts, and Paul Pfeiffer will receive the Michael Richards Award for Visual Arts.

The evening will include video from Pfeiffer, who will show excerpts from a new work as well as from 2001’s Orpheus Descending, which was installed at the World Trade Center and follows the life cycle of a flock of chickens; a new video from Eiko, made for this gala and recently shot on location at LMCC’s Arts Center at Governors Island; and appearances by LMCC artists and alumni Morgan Bassichis, Mona Chalabi, Ivy Mix, and Mariana Valencia. It’s free to RSVP, but $20 gives you a chance to win a limited edition “100 New Yorkers” print by Chalabi based on her 2020 River to River project, $50 helps fund artist residencies, $100 supports grants to neighborhood arts communities, and $250 gives artists the opportunity to share their work and their creative process.

FOLKSBIENE CHANUKAH SPECTACULAR

Who: Carol Burnett, Emanuel Azenberg, Mayim Bialik, Billy Crystal, Tovah Feldshuh, Beanie Feldstein, Joel Grey, Jackie Hoffman, Carol Kane, Barry Manilow, Mandy Patinkin, Itzhak Perlman, Eleanor Reissa, Neil Sedaka, Steven Skybell, Dr. Ruth Westheimer, Jerry Zaks, Geni Brenda, Mendy Cahan, Yefim Chorny, Josh Dolgin, Suzanna Ghergus, Miwazow Kogure, Shura Lipovsky, Freydi Mrocki, Polina Shepherd, Merlin Shepherd, Motl Didner, Zalmen Mlotek, Frank London, Tatiana Wechsler, Elmore James, more
What: Global online Chanukah celebration
Where: National Yiddish Theatre Folksbiene
When: Tuesday, December 8, free with RSVP, 7:00 (available for ninety-six hours)
Why: National Yiddish Theatre Folksbiene is doing more than its part in keeping alive Yiddish theater and the Yiddish language itself, with regular presentations at the Museum of Jewish Heritage. But with the pandemic lockdown, it has adapted to online shows and discussions, and on December 8 it will welcome in the Festival of Lights with a Chanukah celebration with guests from around the world. Debuting on December 8 at 7:00 and available on demand for ninety-six hours, “Folksbiene Chanukah Spectacular” features an all-star lineup, beginning with an audio greeting from Carol Burnett and including appearances by such favorites as Mayim Bialik, Billy Crystal, Tovah Feldshuh, Beanie Feldstein, Joel Grey, Jackie Hoffman, Carol Kane, Barry Manilow, Mandy Patinkin, Itzhak Perlman, Neil Sedaka, Dr. Ruth Westheimer, and many others.

Although it’s free to watch, Chanukah gelt will be gladly accepted, as this is a fundraiser for the company, which in recent years has staged such wonderful Yiddish productions as Fiddler on the Roof, The Sorceress, and The Golden Bride, under the leadership of conductor and artistic director Zalmen Mlotek, who said in a statement with executive director Dominick Balletta, “We’re excited to present this exceptional Yiddish celebration, bringing together Yiddish ambassadors from across the globe, from across the United States to as far away as Australia. This will be a theatrical experience like no other — presented virtually so that families and communities across the world can enjoy it together.” Directed and produced by Adam B. Shapiro, the evening will include music and dance, comedy sketches, and tributes to the golden age of Yiddish theater, along with a grand finale led by members of the Children’s Choir from Tzipporei Shalom of Congregation Beth Shalom in New Jersey. There’s also a special preshow Zoom event with Skybell, Mlotek, and others if you donate at a certain level, in addition to an appetizer delivery from the Lox Cafe.

A CELEBRATION OF LIGHT

Eleanor Reissa teams up with Zalmen Mlotek for intimate holiday concert filmed in her home

Who: Zalmen Mlotek, Eleanor Reissa
What: Virtual Hanukkah concert
Where: On Stage at Kingsborough online
When: December 6-20, suggested admission $10
Why: Hanukkah takes place December 10-18 in this year, but you can get a head start by checking out On Stage at Kingsborough’s special holiday concert, “A Celebration of Light,” streaming December 6-20. Suggested admission is $10, although you can give less or more, depending on what you can afford, to watch the inimitable Zalmen Mlotek, conductor, musical arranger, pianist, accompanist, composer, and artistic director of the National Yiddish Theatre, and Eleanor Reissa, Tony-nominated director, singer, writer, and actor. Mlotek (Fiddler on the Roof in Yiddish, The Sorceress) and Reissa (Those Were the Days, God of Vengeance) performed the intimate concert in Reissa’s home, where they celebrated the Festival of Lights in addition to the Yiddish language itself, sharing songs, stories, and more. You can get a taste of the wonderful Reissa here.

UNBOUND: BLACK FUTURES

Who: Kimberly Drew, Jenna Wortham, Raquel Willis, Naima Green
What: Livestream Unbound discussion
Where: BAM / Greenlight Bookstore
When: Monday, December 7, $15 ($45-$50 with book), 7:00
Why: BAM’s ongoing literary program, “Unbound,” copresented with Greenlight Bookstore, goes virtual with the launch of Black Futures (Penguin Random House, $40). Edited by Kimberly Drew and Jenna Wortham, the book features contributions from Alicia Garza, Alexandra Bell, Hank Willis Thomas, LaToya Ruby Frazier, Zadie Smith, Dawoud Bey, Jackie Sibblies Drury, Kara Walker, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Amy Sherald with Kehinde Wiley, and dozens of other creators, divided into such chapters as “Power,” “Joy,” “Justice,” “Ownership,” and “Legacy.” In their introduction, Drew and Wortham explain, “‘The Black Futures Project’ started a few years ago as a Direct Message exchange on Twitter and has evolved into a shared desire to archive a moment. In developing Black Futures, we sought to answer the question: What does it mean to be Black and alive right now?” The book explores that idea through photography, essays, recipes, screenshots, poetry, memes, social media posts, paintings, song lyrics, and other prismatic text and imagery. You can hear an excerpt from the book here.

On December 7 at 7:00, writer, curator, influencer, and activist Drew and culture writer and Still Processing podcast host Wortham will be joined by transgender artist and activist Raquel Willis (whose “Welcome to the Trans Visibility Era” is included in Black Futures) and artist Naima Green (who contributed “Documenting the Nameplate” with Azikiwe Mohammed) to talk about the book, which is nonlinear and is meant to “provoke you, entice you, enrage you, spark joy, and call you to action.” Tickets are $15, or $45-$50 with a copy of the book, depending on whether you can pick it up in person or need it shipped; a portion of the ticket revenue will be split between BAM and the Campaign Against Hunger, a Brooklyn-based emergency food and community support organization that advances equity for the underserved, helping “build self-determination, engaging in grassroots activism, and investing in civic life,” which is needed now more than ever during the Covid-19 crisis.