twi-ny recommended events

BEATLES REUNION TOUR 2019

Cutting-edge technology will allow Fab Four to come together for world tour

The impossible is happening: The Beatles are getting back together. In a surprise announcement at the Liverpool Street Station in London, surviving members Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr said that the Fab Four would be reuniting for the whirlwind “Fool on the Hill” tour, using cutting-edge holographic technology to make it appear that John Lennon, who was shot and killed in December 1980 in New York City at the age of forty, and George Harrison, who died from lung cancer in 2001 at the age of fifty-eight, are live onstage. Concerts featuring such late icons as Prince, Elvis Presley, and Michael Jackson have had mixed results, but Dennis O’Dell, cofounder of Holo Again Imaging, explained in a statement that the next barrier has been crossed. “The simulation now is so seamless, you’ll fully believe that John, Paul, George, and Ringo are back together, playing their hits like they did at Shea Stadium, on Ed Sullivan, and at the Cavern Club.”

Beatles reunion tour includes monthlong Broadway residency

It’s a family affair this time around, with Ringo’s son, Zak Starkey, playing drums, George’s son, Dhani Harrison, on guitar, and John’s sons, Sean Ono Lennon and Julian Lennon, supplying backing vocals, along with Paul’s son, James McCartney. Paul’s daughter, Stella McCartney, will design the costumes, while John’s widow, Yoko Ono, will design the set. “We couldn’t be more excited,” Paul said after emerging with Ringo from a train styled like the one the Beatles rode in A Hard Day’s Night. “Ringo and I have performed a lot together over the years, but for the four of us to reunite like this, it’s really a dream come true.” Ringo added, “We’re looking forward to spreading peace and love around the world. This music is boundless. I can’t wait.”

The tour opens July 1 at Wembley Stadium and will conclude in December with a monthlong residency on Broadway, where tickets will be available by lottery only and will range in price from $200 to $5,000. “I’m thrilled that we are able to work this out,” Paul said as he put his arm around Ringo. “A splendid time is guaranteed for all!” More information can be found on the official tour website here.

ALBERTINE PRIZE 2019

The nominees and winner of the 2019 Albertine Prize will be announced on April 3 at the Payne Whitney mansion

Albertine
972 Fifth Ave. at 79th St.
Wednesday, April 3, free with advance RSVP, 6:30
www.albertine.com

On April 3, the Cultural Services of the French Embassy will be presenting the third annual Albertine Prize, a reader’s choice award given to a French book translated into English. The evening will feature live readings by professional actors from the five nominated works throughout the first three floors of the Payne Whitney mansion on Fifth Ave., concluding with a cocktail reception in the Venetian Room. Admission is free with advance RSVP. The 2017 winner was Nelly Alard and Adriana Hunter’s Couple Mechanics, followed by Anne Garréta’s Not One Day in 2018. We know the nominees, but if we told you, we’d have to, well, you know….

THIRD RAIL PROJECTS: OASIS

Madison Krekel is one of five performers in Third Rail Projects’ site-specific Oasis at the Winter Garden

Brookfield Place
230 Vesey St.
April 1-5, 8-12, free, 12:00 & 1:00
Friday, April 12, free, 7:30
thirdrailprojects.com
bfplny.com/stories/oasis

Brooklyn-based immersive theater experts Third Rail Projects returns to the Winter Garden at Brookfield Place for its latest presentation, Oasis. On weekdays from April 1 to 12, the company behind such productions as Then She Fell, Ghost Light, and The Grand Paradise will stage free, specially commissioned pop-up performances in the expansive, palm-tree-lined space as part of Arts Brookfield’s thirtieth anniversary. Designed by architect César Pelli, the Winter Garden, in what was then known as the World Financial Center, opened in 1988 and was rebuilt following the terrorist attacks on 9/11. Oasis is set in the 1980s, as four overworked men and women dream of a better life, imagining the Winter Garden as a respite from all the madness. Conceived, directed, and choreographed by Jennine Willett, designed by Dan Daly, and performed by Julia Kelly, Madison Krekel, Edward Rice, Jessy Smith, and Ryan Wuestewald, the play will consist of ten ten-minute lunchtime vignettes taking place at noon and 1:00; on April 12 at 7:30, the episodes will be brought together as a full-length experience. Admission is free, and no advance RSVP is necessary.

LIFE SUCKS.

Seven characters examine love and loss in Life Sucks. at the Wild Project (photo by Russ Rowland)

The Wild Project
195 East Third St. between Aves. A & B
Through April 20, $20-$79
thewildproject.com
www.wheelhousetheater.org

In 2018, Wheelhouse Theater Company staged one of the best plays of the year, a no-holds-barred version of Kurt Vonnegut’s Happy Birthday, Wanda June. The New York City troupe has now delivered one of the best plays of 2019, Aaron Posner’s outrageously funny, irreverent reimagining of Anton Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya titled Life Sucks., which opened last week at the Wild Project, where it continues through April 20. A follow-up to Stupid Fucking Bird, Posner’s “sort of” adaptation of Chekhov’s The Seagull (next Posner will take on Three Sisters, to be called No Sisters), Life Sucks. — the period in the title is intentional, making it a simple and direct statement of fact — is set in the present, with seven characters gathered at a country estate run by the bitter, sardonic, tightly wound Vanya (Jeff Biehl) and his niece, Sonia (Kimberly Chatterjee), a wholly competent and caring young woman with severe self-esteem issues. The pedantic and egotistical elderly Professor (Austin Pendleton) and his much younger wife, the beautiful Ella (Nadia Bowers), have arrived unannounced to relax and share some important news. Also on hand are Babs (Barbara Kingsley), a nonjudgmental, smart, and funny artist; Dr. Aster (Michael Schantz), a tall, sexy, but odd workaholic whom women are drawn to; and the honest-to-a-fault Pickles (Stacey Linnartz), an average Jane and loyal lesbian who takes things rather literally.

The ubiquitous Austin Pendleton plays the Professor in Aaron Posner’s reimagining of Uncle Vanya (photo by Russ Rowland)

As in Stupid Fucking Bird, the characters interact with the audience throughout. The play opens with the seven men and women lined up at the front of the stage, making announcements about cell phones, exits, and photography and pointing out, “We’re the actors. And you, of course, are the audience.” “Our play transpires in four succinct acts . . . just like Chekhov’s original, superior play,” the Professor explains. “Most of it is going to be about love and longing. Yep. That’s right, campers. LOVE. And LONGING,” Vanya promises. “It’s also about the audacious, ludicrous, and protean nature of the obstreperous and ever-feckless human heart,” the Professor adds. And Dr. Aster expounds, “It’s also about how disastrously, irretrievably fucked up the world is, and the insanity of the choices we humans have made for the last four hundred years.” In addition, the genius work deals with the very nature of theater itself.

Pickles (Stacey Linnartz) bares her soul in Aaron Posner’s brilliant Life Sucks. (photo by Russ Rowland)

Over the course of two hours and fifteen minutes, various characters admit their unrequited love for others — most crucially, Vanya desperately desires Ella, which increases his hatred of the Professor — and they all share their likes and dislikes and pour out personal monologues that reveal their deepest inner thoughts directly to the audience, sometimes even requesting a response. “How many of you would like to sleep with me if you could?” Ella asks, then waits for an answer. When Vanya wants to speak with the audience, he says to Babs and Sonia, “Can I have the room?” Director and Wheelhouse founder Jeff Wise (DANNYKRISDONNAVERONICA, Happy Birthday, Wanda June) controls the glorious chaos as the barriers between what is real and what isn’t break down in hysterical ways, but it’s key to understand that the characters are always the characters, never the actors portraying them. Brittany Vasta’s set is a cozy living room with a piano, a trio of wall hangings, and a back wall constructed partially from wooden crates that carry theater supplies, with such words as “Uncle Vanya” stenciled on them. The cast is splendid, but it’s Biehl who rules the day, filling the Wild Project with riotous doom and gloom as Vanya, his disappointment with life hovering over the space like a dark cloud.

Chekhov’s play, itself a revised version of his earlier The Wood Demon, lends itself to reinterpretation, from Louis Malle’s film Vanya on 42nd Street and Markus Wessendorf’s Uncle Vanya and Zombies to Sally Burgess’s opera Sonya’s Story, Richard Nelson’s Apple Family–like version for the Hunter Theater Project, and New Saloon’s experimental Minor Character: Six Translations of Uncle Vanya at the Same Time. With Life Sucks., Posner, a longtime director who has also written reverent adaptations of Chaim Potok’s The Chosen and My Name Is Asher Lev, has created a Vanya for the twenty-first century, a brilliant skewering of contemporary values and, in the end, a triumphant celebration of that little thing called life.

BATSHEVA DANCE COMPANY: VENEZUELA

Batsheva’s Venezuela offers chills and thrills at BAM (photo by Stephanie Berger)

BAM Howard Gilman Opera House
Peter Jay Sharp Building
230 Lafayette Ave.
March 27-30, 7:30
718-636-4100
www.bam.org
batsheva.co.il/en

Batsheva’s Venezuela is yet another exhilarating must-see work from one of the world’s most adventurous and exciting companies. Running March 27–30 at the Howard Gilman Opera House, the evening-length piece, which doesn’t overtly reference the titular, troubled South American nation in its narrative, consists of two forty-minute sections. In the first part, the Israeli troupe moves as a group, breaks into energetic solos and daring duets, skips around with delight, and lines up at the front of the stage, each dancer stepping forward one at a time as two men rap Biggie’s NSFW “Dead Wrong” (“The weak or the strong / who got it goin’ on / You’re dead wrong”). The women ride the men like donkeys. In a blur, the cast, all dressed in black (the costumes are by dancer Eri Nakamura), briskly skip from one side to the other, some moving forward, some backward, chaos threatening but soon replaced by a childlike wonder. The music primarily consists of Gregorian chants until a growing drone overtakes everything and the lights go out.

Batsheva dancers repeat themselves in dazzling ways in Ohad Naharin’s Venezuela at BAM (photo by Stephanie Berger)

The lights come back on and there are different dancers now onstage, and for the next forty minutes they perform the exact same choreography, only to a different soundtrack (including songs by Rage Against the Machine, Olafur Arnalds, and Vox; the lush soundtrack design and edit is by Maxim Waratt) and with different lighting by Avi Yona Bueno (Bambi), offering an enchanting perspective on what choreographer Ohad Naharin showed us in the first half, his Gaga movement language telling a new story. Even the blank cloths that were dropped in the first section now become colorful symbols. The first Batsheva work to come to New York since former company dancer Gili Navot took over as artistic director from Naharin, who is now house choreographer, Venezuela is another triumph from a scintillating company that has been enriching dance and dazzling audiences for decades.

THE BRINK

Alison Klayman seeks to reveal the method behind the madness of Stephen Bannon in The Brink

THE BRINK (Alison Klayman, 2019)
IFC Center
323 Sixth Ave. at West Third St.
Opens Friday, March 29
212-924-7771
www.magpicturesinternational.com
www.ifccenter.com

Near the end of Alison Klayman’s illuminating documentary, The Brink, after a lively debate between Steve Bannon and conservative commentator David Frum, former Goldman Sachs president John Thornton tells Bannon backstage, “To people who don’t know you, you’re totally disarming because you’re sort of charming and kind of, you pick up irony and you’re, they’re kind of shocked that you’re such a quote unquote nice guy.” But what about the people who do know him? In the film, which opens today at IFC, Klayman doesn’t humanize the man considered an evil genius as much as demystify the onetime Trump campaign head and Breitbart News founding member, following him from the fall of 2017, as he is ousted from the White House shortly after the Charlottesville incident, through the midterm elections of the following year. She is embedded as part of his otherwise all-male entourage as he travels around the country and the world, building support for his far-right beliefs, pushing his agenda of “economic nationalism” and raising money for his 501 (c) 4, Citizens of the American Republic.

Klayman (Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry, Take Your Pills) is given nearly full access; Bannon only occasionally asks her to leave the room as he meets with such far-right populists as French National Rally Party leaders Jérôme Rivière and Louis Aliot, Belgian People’s Party politician Mischaël Modrikamen and Vlaams Belang Party leader Filip Dewinter, Sweden Democrats member Kent Ekeroth, former UK Independence Party leader Nigel Farage, Italian Minister of Interior Matteo Salvini, Brothers of Italy leader Giorgia Meloni, and other anti-refugee extremists. He sits down with Blackwater founder Erik Prince, visits with Chinese billionaire Miles Kwok, and plans courses of action with Republican strategists, pollsters, and congressional candidates. He particularly enjoys engaging with members of the media who might not necessarily agree with him; he speaks with Devil’s Bargain author and Bloomberg journalist Joshua Green, Fire and Fury writer Michael Wolff, MSNBC’s Ari Melber, and reporters from Politico, the Washington Post, the New York Times, and Der Spiegel.

Stephen K. Bannon goes on the road to push his far-right ideology in The Brink

One of the best moments of the film occurs when Guardian journalist Paul Lewis challenges Bannon on issues of globalism and anti-Semitism. Bannon refuses to back down without evincing upset or anger; he relishes controversy, defending himself with a sly smile. He travels to small-town America, showing his documentary Trump @ War at local gatherings, speaking directly to the “deplorables,” exhibiting care and understanding, precisely the kind of thing that Hillary Clinton didn’t do, contributing to her loss of the presidency. The question of Bannon’s sincerity and true purpose hovers in every interaction. Bannon describes his Trump film to Klayman as propaganda, but Klayman then shows us a woman who’s just seen the film praising it because it’s not propaganda. Klayman also captures Bannon raving about the German efficiency that went into building concentration camps, comparing himself to Leni Riefenstahl, supporting Roy Moore’s Senate candidacy, and continually posing for pictures with couples, putting the woman in the center and saying, “a rose between two thorns.”

The Brink was made because producer Marie Therese Guirgis (On Her Shoulders, The Loneliest Planet), the younger sister of writer-director Stephen Adly Guirgis, used to work with Bannon at an independent film distribution company, and she became disturbed by his far-right activity. As he gained power, the left-wing Guirgis would email him, calling him out accusingly, but he would always reply in a civil tone. On her fourth request to make a film about him, he finally relented, agreeing to give Guirgis and Klayman complete control over the project. The two progressive women are not shy about where they stand on the issues and about Bannon’s beliefs; Klayman, who did not have a crew for the shoot — she did the cinematography and the sound and served as coeditor and producer — includes news footage that is not particularly favorable to Bannon, and she does not attempt to humanize him so much as depict him as a driven, determined man who is a master manipulator. The title of the film also reveals their thoughts about Bannon, coming from an Abraham Lincoln quote about being “on the brink of destruction.” When Bannon, who prefers wearing at least two shirts all the time, lets his guard down, as he does on several occasions, he turns into a nasty, self-obsessed figure who makes rash, mean-spirited decisions and is not as pleasant as he likes himself to appear. Of course, it’s impossible to know when Bannon is playing Klayman, using the documentary to further his own ideology. But in taming the beast, Klayman also reveals Bannon’s fascinating methods, something that liberals around the world should study and learn from. Klayman will be at IFC for Q&As with investigative journalist Azmat Khan on March 29 at 7:15 and March 30 at 2:45, with Alissa Wilkinson of VOX on March 30 at 5:00, and on April 1 at 7:15.

TICKET GIVEAWAY: MIRACLE IN RWANDA

miracle in rwanda

MIRACLE IN RWANDA
The Lion Theatre, Theatre Row
410 West 42nd St. between Ninth & Tenth Aves.
April 4 – May 11, $39-$90
212-560-2183
miracleinrwanda.nyc
bfany.org

“This is my story, told as I remember it . . . and I remember it as though it happened yesterday,” Immaculée Ilibagiza writes in Left to Tell: Discovering God Amidst the Rwandan Holocaust, about her experience trying to stay alive during the 1994 Rwandan genocide of the Tutsi people by the Hutu government. Leslie Lewis and Edward Vilga have adapted her harrowing tale into a one-woman show, Miracle in Rwanda, which begins previews April 4 at the Lion Theatre at Theatre Row. Rwandan actress, poet, and activist Malaika Uwamahoro (Measure Back, Our Lady of Kibeho), a Fordham grad, portrays Ilibagiza and two dozen other characters in the play, including a pastor, a machete-wielding murderer, refugees, friends, family members, soldiers, and more. The role was originally played by cocreator Lewis on its world tour.

TICKET GIVEAWAY: Directed by George Drance, Miracle in Rwanda runs April 4 through May 11 (with an April 9 opening) at the Lion Theatre at Theatre Row, and twi-ny has three pairs of tickets to give away for free. Just send your name, phone number, and favorite one-woman show to contest@twi-ny.com by Wednesday, April 3, at 5:00 pm to be eligible. All entrants must be twenty-one years of age or older; three winners will be selected at random.