Dionysus (Jason C. Brown) preaches to his minions in Classical Theatre of Harlem adaptation of The Bacchae (photo © 2019 Richard Termine)
UPTOWN SHAKESPEARE IN THE PARK
Marcus Garvey Park, Richard Rodgers Amphitheater
Tuesday – Sunday through July 28, free, 8:30
www.cthnyc.org
Jesus Christ Superstar meets The Rocky Horror Picture Show in the Classical Theatre of Harlem’s funky “Uptown Shakespeare in the Park!” world premiere of Bryan Doerries’s new adaptation of Euripides’s The Bacchae. The free show, continuing at the Richard Rodgers Amphitheater in Marcus Garvey Park through July 28, has the ebullient energy of NBC’s live television versions of musicals (The Sound of Music, Peter Pan, the aforementioned Jesus Christ Superstar) rather than that of a fully formed stage production as it reinterprets the classical Greek tragedy for the twenty-first century while kicking off the company’s twentieth anniversary. “Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, get ready to make some noise for the man you been waiting for. The man that can make all your dreams come true. The preachya that can reach ya, in all the right places. Give it up for Preachya D!!!” a voiceover announces, and Preachya D, better known as Dionysus (Jason C. Brown), enters to much fanfare and proclaims, “I came here as a preacha, as a teacha / I can only hope I can reach you before you run out of time / So betta listen to this rhyme / And then get in line / I hope you ready to learn.”
Dionysus (Jason C. Brown) listens to King Pentheus (RJ Foster) share his desires in new Euripides adaptation (photo © 2019 Richard Termine)
Dionysus is surrounded by his worshipful followers, a three-woman chorus (Gabrielle Djenné, Rebecca Ana Peña, and Lori Vega), eight dancers (Daniela Funicello, Ashley LaRosa, Brynlie Helmich, Sai Rodboon, Hannah Gross, Madelyn LaLonde, Harmony Jackson, and Kat Files), and a guitar-shredding musician (Alicyn Yaffee). King Pentheus (RJ Foster) doesn’t believe Dionysus is the son of Zeus and is jealous of his minions, known as Bacchettes, while his grandfather, former king Cadmus (Charles Bernard Murray), is ready to go dancing with the Bacchettes, hidden in the mountains, alongside wise old Tiresias (Brian D. Coats). Caught somewhere in the middle is Agaue (Andrea Patterson), Pentheus’s mother and Cadmus’s daughter. After a messenger (Brian Demar Jones) advises Pentheus of the wild rituals going on atop the hill, the king asks Dionysus to bring him there, but Pentheus, of course, is about to get more than he bargained for.
Euripides’s The Bacchae kicks off Classical Theatre of Harlem’s twentieth anniversary season (photo © 2019 Richard Termine)
Choppily directed by Classical Theatre of Harlem associate artistic director Carl Cofield (One Night in Miami, The Dutchman) The Bacchae takes place on rafters and scaffolding designed by Christopher and Justin Swader, with shadowy, abstract projections by Katherine Freer on more than a dozen vertical screens. Outfitted in Lex Liang’s sexy costumes, the cast communicates the basic narrative through Doerries’s (Antigone in Ferguson, Theater of War) retelling, which includes a lot of description of offstage activities and festivities to move the plot along. The eight woman dancers, members of Elisa Monte Dance, climb all over the stage and into the space on the ground in front of the audience, their ecstatic movements choreographed by Tiffany Rea-Fisher to original music by Fred Kennedy, while Yaffee nearly steals the show as she tears it up with her loud and aggressive guitar playing. The play deals with issues of sexuality, gender, power, and vengeance, but it gets too caught up in itself; the audience is encouraged to take nonflash photos, which is always distracting, and when Preachya D beckons people to stand and dance in their seats, nary a soul got up the night I went, although a handful of people did walk out later. The Bacchae has some cool individual elements, but the shepherds have lost control of their flock as a whole.
Summer Night, actor Joseph Cross’s directorial debut, offers a twist on the standard ensemble coming-of-age flick: Its protagonists are not a bunch of high school teens looking to get stoned and laid before leaving for college (or not) but a group of older twenty-somethings facing more serious choices about their future. The film, which opens this weekend at Cinema Village, still has to fight genre clichés and mundane digressions as it tells the stories of close-knit friends gathering at a music bar appropriately called the Alamo in their small-town American community on the last night of summer. Jameson (Ellar Coltrane) is the film’s centerpiece, an all-around-good dude with a sound perspective on life who surprises everyone that night by arriving at the show with the impossibly hot, black-leather-clad Harmony (Victoria Justice), who’s not the kind of woman he usually dates. The less-flashy Corin (Elena Kampouris), who is working the door at the Alamo, is more his speed, but as we will learn, most of the characters are deeper than the usual genre stereotypes.
The immigration and refugee crisis is at the heart of husband-and-wife filmmaking team Tenzing Sonam and Ritu Sarin’s The Sweet Requiem, opening July 12 at IFC. Unfortunately, the film gets bogged down in its agenda-driven narrative. Writer-director Sonam and producer-director Sarin, who were both born in India — Sonam’s parents were Tibetan refugees — have been outspoken regarding the treatment of Tibetans by the Chinese government, as depicted in such earlier works as 2007’s fictional 
Even at a mere ninety-seven minutes, Mikhail Kalatozov’s The Cranes Are Flying, having a weeklong revival July 12-18 at Film Forum in a 2K restoration, is a sweeping Russian antiwar epic, an intimate and moving black-and-white tale of romance and betrayal during WWII. Veronika (Tatyana Samojlova) and Boris (Aleksey Batalov) are madly in love, swirling dizzyingly through the streets and up and down a winding staircase. But when Russia enters the war, Boris signs up and heads to the front, while Veronika is pursued by Boris’s cousin, Mark (Aleksandr Shvorin). Pining for word from Boris, Veronika works as a nurse at a hospital run by Boris’s father, Fyodor Ivanovich (Vasili Merkuryev), as the family, including Boris’s sister, Irina (Svetlana Kharitonova), looks askance at her relationship with Mark. The personal and political intrigue comes to a harrowing conclusion in a grand finale that for all its scale and scope gets to the very heart and soul of how the war affected the Soviet people on an individual, human level, in the family lives of women and children, lovers and cousins, husbands and wives.
The time is ripe for a 4K restoration of the absurdist 1982 documentary The Atomic Cafe as President Trump deals with the nuclear capabilities and arsenals of Russia, Iran, and North Korea. Kevin Rafferty, Jayne Loader, and Pierce Rafferty were searching archives for propaganda films when they discovered a treasure trove of military and government shorts about the atomic and hydrogen bombs and how the American people should face any oncoming threats. The three filmmakers, who will be at Metrograph on July 13 at 6:30 to introduce a special screening of the 2018 restoration, weaved sensational footage together into an hour and a half of clips that range from the hysterically funny to the dangerously outrageous. Young students are taught to “duck and cover.” Enola Gay pilot Paul Tibbets Jr. describes how easy it was to fly over Hiroshima and drop the bomb but then admits his shock over the eventual destruction it wrought. Presidents Harry S Truman and Dwight D. Eisenhower discuss the impact of the bombs. A radio duo makes jokes about the decimation. Scenes of the horrific damage to Japanese victims are shown in silence. Vice Admiral W. H. P. Blandy defends the Bikini Atoll test, where island residents are assured everything will be fine — as are soldiers who will be in the vicinity of various tests.
