twi-ny recommended events

FIRST SATURDAY: BEST OF THE BOROUGH

Carrie Mae Weems, “Untitled (Man Smoking / Malcolm X),” from the Kitchen Table series, gelatin silver photograph, 1990 (© Carrie Mae Weems / photo by Sarah DeSantis, Brooklyn Museum)

Brooklyn Museum
200 Eastern Parkway at Washington St.
Saturday, December 1, free, 5:00 – 11:00
212-864-5400
www.brooklynmuseum.org

The Brooklyn Museum celebrates the world’s preeminent borough again in its monthly free First Saturday program in December with the second part of “Best of the Borough.” There will be live music by Deva Mahal, Roze Royze of Set It Off, the Soul Summit Music Festival, and Jimi Tents; a curator tour of Egyptian art with senior curator Ed Bleiberg; Cave Canem pop-up poetry readings by Hafizah Geter, Cynthia Manick, and Nicholas Nichols; the artist talk “Something to Say” with Kameelah Janan Rasheed and Brooklyn Hi-Art! Machine; a screening of Brooklyn Film Festival “Best Brooklyn Project” winner Catch One Bedroom (Darien Sills-Evans, 2018), followed by a Q&A with members of the cast and crew; a tour of the museum’s history during the Black Power era with archivist Molly Seegers; a screening of Digging for Black Pride (Philip Burton Jr., 1971) sponsored by the Weeksville Heritage Center and followed by a discussion with Zenzele Cooper and Obden Mondesir; pop-up gallery talks with teen apprentices on “Half the Picture: A Feminist Look at the Collection”; a hands-on art workshop with figure drawing of live models inspired by Kehinde Wiley; and two Day With(out) Art screenings of Alternate Endings, Activist Risings, featuring short films from ACT UP NY, Positive Women’s Network, Sero Project, the SPOT, Tacoma Action Collective, and VOCAL NY, presented by Visual AIDS. In addition, the galleries will be open late so you can check out “Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power,” “Kwang Young Chun: Aggregations,” “Syria, Then and Now: Stories from Refugees a Century Apart,” “Half the Picture: A Feminist Look at the Collection,” “Rob Wynne: FLOAT,” “Infinite Blue,” “A Woman’s Afterlife: Gender Transformation in Ancient Egypt,” and more.

ALIEN AND SIGOURNEY WEAVER IN CONVERSATION LIVE

Sigourney Weaver will be at Symphony Space for fortieth anniversary screening of Alien

ALIEN (Ridley Scott, 1979)
Symphony Space, Peter Jay Sharp Theatre
2537 Broadway at 95th St.
Thursday, November 29, $29-$40, 7:00
www.symphonyspace.org

I recently went on an Aliens binge, watching Alien, Aliens, Alien³, Alien Resurrection, and Alien: Covenant. Afterward, I was exhausted and exhilarated, frustrated and flummoxed. On November 29, Symphony Space will be celebrating the fortieth anniversary of Ridley Scott’s 1979 franchise starter, in which warrant officer Ripley (Sigourney Weaver), captain Dallas (Tom Skerritt), navigator Lambert (Veronica Cartwright), engineering technician Brett (Harry Dean Stanton), executive officer Kane (John Hurt), science officer Ash (Ian Holm), and chief engineer Parker (Yaphet Kotto) are aboard the cargo ship Nostromo, with a special little guest who undergoes a special kind of gestation. The genre-redefining film made a star out of Weaver, who will be at Symphony Space to participate in a conversation with Rolling Stone critic Peter Travers after a screening of the movie, whose marketing campaign coined the phrase “In space no one can hear you scream.”

BOB DYLAN AND HIS BAND

Beacon Theatre
Broadway at 74th St.
November 24 – December 1, $139 – $300
www.bobdylan.com
www.beacontheatre.com

In 1978, I saw my first Bob Dylan show, at Madison Square Garden. At one point my friend said to me, “What the hell is he doing? I just want to hear ‘Tangled up in Blue.’ ” I turned to him and said, “Um, that last song was ‘Tangled up in Blue.’ ” For more than forty years, the so-called Voice of a Generation has been fiddling with his vast catalog, reimagining classic songs and focusing on new material during his Never Ending Tour, which thunders into the Beacon for seven shows November 24 to December 1. He has previously played the venue twenty-one times, beginning in October 1989, including memorable performances with Patti Smith in December 1995. All these decades later, if you’re expecting the seventy-seven-year-old troubadour to change his stripes, well, that just isn’t going to happen. So it was with great anticipation that I entered the Beacon on November 26, and Dylan did not disappoint. Exclusively playing a baby grand piano — occasionally sitting, more often standing or just leaning against a high piano bench — along with some fine harmonica, Dylan did not alter his basic setlist one iota from any other show on this leg of the tour (although occasionally he switches an encore). Dylan was joined by Donnie Herron on pedal steel, lap steel, electric mandolin, banjo, and violin, Charlie Sexton on lead guitar, Tony Garnier on electric and stand-up bass, and George Receli on drums, each wearing silver sequined jackets, black boots, and black pants. (Rhythm guitarist Stu Kimball dropped out earlier this month.) Dylan was dressed in black-and-white boots, a black shirt with a bolo tie, and a loose cross between a kimono and a cowboy jacket ennobled with glinting swirls of blue and white embroidery. No hat perched atop his huge shock of curly (evenly brown) hair, and no pencil-thin mustache ornamented his occasional sardonic grins. The hundred-minute show was a mix of folk, pop, rock, blues, jazz, and even a little jumpin’ jive, a cacophony of sound centered around Dylan’s still-remarkable vocal phrasings.

For the last several years, one thing that hasn’t changed is Dylan’s opening song, the Oscar-winning “Things Have Changed,” written for Curtis Hanson’s 2000 film, Wonder Boys. “People are crazy and times are strange / I’m locked in tight, I’m out of range / I used to care, but things have changed,” Dylan sings, but don’t be fooled by his lack of patter with the audience (he did actually introduce the band during at least one of the shows); Dylan is fully engaged in the music as he proceeds through his carefully selected setlist. Five of the next six tunes dated no later than 1971, but in each case, the audience did not applaud with recognition until they caught familiar words in the chorus, since the arrangements were so displaced from the original versions, and even some of the lyrics were altered, making it hard to sing along; but that’s exactly what makes these Dylan concerts so exciting. (I use binoculars not only to see his facial expressions, which include a smiling grimace, but also to read his lips to figure out what he is warbling.)

Bob Dylan continues to reinvent himself at the Beacon

He also employs a sly sense of humor; he reimagines “Simple Twist of Fate,” only to let the missing melody line later appear in “Make You Feel My Love.” Be prepared for a host of songs from 2001’s Love and Theft, 2006’s Modern Times, and 2012’s Tempest but nothing from his American songbook or Christmas albums, and there’s not a dud in the bunch. On a sizzling “Scarlet Town,” Dylan headed to center stage and grabbed the microphone stand, adopting a few rock-star poses as he belted out the bluesy 2012 tune with a Middle Eastern lilt, declaring, “If love is a sin then beauty is a crime / All things are beautiful in their time / The black and the white, the yellow and the brown / It’s all right there for ya in Scarlet Town.” His regal reinvention of “When I Paint My Masterpiece” made it vital once more.

The only uncomfortable moment came during the first encore, an update of “All Along the Watchtower” in which he suddenly stopped the song and seemed to be angry, either at a technical issue or a person in the front snapping his picture — who just happened to be Ringo Starr, who posted the awful photo to social media; Dylan returned to the song but it never regained its steam. (Paul McCartney took in an earlier Beacon show.) The key to experiencing a Dylan concert is to just let Bob be Bob. There’s still no other musician who can so adroitly capture the heart and soul of life and love and the state of the nation in such unique ways. He doesn’t just sing but virtually spits and swallows words, a bittersweet outpouring that can rattle your core with a beautiful glory. Go to the Beacon with no expectations other than to be uniquely entertained, challenged, and confused, and keep those cell phones off and don’t try to sneak pictures or text friends. More than at most shows, you need to pay attention to every rapt minute, and if Dylan hasn’t earned that respect from you, then just stay home and binge Netflix.

MAIRA KALMAN: BOLD AND THE BRAVE BOOK SIGNING AND EXHIBITION

Maira Kalman, “Sometimes the women were jailed for months,” gouache on paper, 2018 (courtesy Julie Saul Gallery)

Who: Maira Kalman
What: Book signing and exhibition
Where: Julie Saul Gallery, 535 West 22nd St. between Tenth & Eleventh Aves., sixth floor, 212-627-2410
When: Saturday, December 1, free, 3:00 -6:00
Why: Artist Maira Kalman will be at Chelsea’s Julie Saul Gallery on Saturday for the opening of her latest exhibit, “Bold & Brave,” in the project gallery, consisting of twenty-nine gouache paintings made in association with the book Bold & Brave: Ten Heroes Who Won Women the Right to Vote (Knopf, November 13, $18.99), written by Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand and illustrated by Kalman. Kalman will be signing books from 3:00 to 6:00. (She will also be signing copies of Sara Berman’s Closet, which she wrote with her son, Alex Kalman.) Among the heroes depicted in the book are Susan B. Anthony, Harriet Tubman, Alice Paul, Inez Milholland, Ida B. Wells, Mary Church Terrell, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Sojourner Truth, Jovita Idar, and Lucy Burns. “They fought so women could be heard,” writes Gillibrand, who also pays tribute to her grandmother Dorothea “Polly” Noonan, who was recently portrayed by Edie Falco in the New Group world premiere of The True. Also on view at the gallery is Sarah Anne Johnson’s “The Cave.”

MAKING WAVES — NEW ROMANIAN CINEMA: AFERIM!

Father (Teodor Corban) and son (Mihai Comānoiu) hunt for a runaway slave in wickedly funny Aferim!

AFERIM! (Radu Jude, 2015)
BAMcinématek, BAM Rose Cinemas
30 Lafayette Ave. between Ashland Pl. & St. Felix St.
Sunday, December 2, 6:30
Series runs November 26 – December 2
718-636-4100
www.bam.org
bigworldpictures.org

BAM’s weeklong “Making Waves: New Romanian Cinema” series began November 26 with Adina Pintilie’s Golden Bear winner Touch Me Not and concludes December 2 with Radu Jude’s Silver Bear winner Aferim! Romania’s 2015 submission for the Academy Awards is a savagely funny blacker-than-black comic Western about bigotry, infidelity, and frontier justice in 1835 Wallachia. Lawkeeper Costandin (Teodor Corban) and his son, Ionitā (Mihai Comānoiu), are galloping through the local countryside, searching for runaway Gypsy slave Carfin (Cuzin Toma), who Boyar Iordache Cindescu (Alexandru Dabija) has accused of having an affair with his wife, Sultana (Mihaela Sîrbu). The surly Costandin leads the hunt, verbally cutting down everyone he meets, from random old women to abbots to fellow lawmen, with wicked barbs, calling them filthy whores, crows, and other foul names while spouting ridiculous theories about honor and religion; he even batters his son, saying he’s “a waste of bread” and that “if you slap him, he’ll die of grief.” It’s a cruel, cholera-filled time in which even the monks beat the poor and where Costandin regales a priest with the telling riddle, “Lifeless out of life, life out of lifeless,” which the priest thinks refers to the coming doomsday.

Cowritten by Jude and novelist Florin Lăzărescu (Our Special Envoy, Numbness), who previously collaborated on the short film The Tube with a Hat, and shot in gloriously stark black-and-white by Marius Panduru (12:08 East of Bucharest; Police, Adjective), the Romanian / Bulgarian / Czech coproduction is an absurdist combination of Monty Python and the Holy Grail, Andrei Tarkovsky’s Andrei Rublev, Hal Ashby’s The Last Detail, and John Ford’s The Searchers, skewering everything in its path, either overtly or under its wide-reaching breath. Even Dana Pāpāruz’s costumes are a genuine riot, especially the boyar’s majestically ridiculous hat. But Aferim! is more than just a clever parody of period films and nineteenth-century Eastern European culture and social mores; it is also a brilliant exploration of the nature of racism, discrimination, misogyny, and the aristocracy that directly relates to what’s going on around the world today as well as how Romania has dealt with its own sorry past of enslaving the Romani people. Jude was inspired by real events and historical documents, setting the film immediately after the 1834 Russian occupation, which adds to its razor-sharp observations.

“Aferim! is an attempt to gaze into the past, to take a journey inside the mentalities of the beginning of the nineteenth century — all epistemological imperfections inherent to such an enterprise included,” Jude says in his director’s statement. “It is obvious that such an effort would be pointless should we not believe that this hazy past holds the explanation for certain present issues.” Aferim! is screening December 2 at 6:30, followed by a Q&A with producer Ada Solomon. The series also includes such other recent Romanian films as Monica Lãzurean-Gorgan and Andrei Gorgan’s Free Dacians, Mona Nicoară and Dana Bunescu’s The Distance Between Me and Me, and Ivana Mladenovic’s Soldiers: A Story from Ferentari in addition to Jude’s “I Do Not Care if We Go Down in History as Barbarians,” The Dead Nation, The Happiest Girl in the World, Scarred Hearts, and Everybody in Our Family.

AILEY ASCENDING 60th ANNIVERSARY

Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater will be celebrating its sixtieth anniversary at City Center, which is celebrating its seventy-fifth anniversary

New York City Center
130 West 56th St. between Sixth & Seventh Aves.
November 28 – December 30, $29-$159
212-581-1212
www.alvinailey.org
www.nycitycenter.org

On March 30, 1958, a troupe of black dancers performed as the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater for the first time, at the 92nd Street YM-YWHA Dance Center, traveling around in station wagons. Now AAADT’s sixtieth anniversary tour pulls up to City Center for the company’s annual monthlong residence, this year running November 28 to December 30. The season, known as “Ailey Ascending,” features new and old works, looking back at the troupe’s glorious history and exciting future. Under the leadership of artistic director Robert Battle, thirty-two dancers, including longtime favorites Hope Boykin, Clifton Brown, Vernard J. Gilmore, Daniel Harder, Rachael McLaren, Akua Noni Parker, Jamar Roberts, and the incomparable Glen Allen Sims and Linda Celeste Sims, will be presenting the world premiere of Ronald K. Brown’s The Call, which Brown refers to as a “love letter to Mr. Ailey,” with music by Johann Sebastian Bach (performed by Chris Thile, Edgar Meyere, and Yo-Yo Ma), Mary Lou Williams, and Asase Yaa; Rennie Harris’s Lazarus, the first two-part AAADT ballet, by AAADT’s first artist-in-residence, dealing with racism and Ailey’s legacy from 1958 to today, set to music by Nina Simone, Terrence Trent D’Arby, Michael Kiwanuka, Odetta, and Darrin Ross, along with the voice of Alvin Ailey; and EN by Jessica Lang (who just announced that Jessica Lang Dance is in its final season, closing on April 30, 2019), her hundredth ballet, with original music by Jakub Ciupinski. There will also be the company premiere of Wayne McGregor’s Kairos, set to Antonio Vivaldi’s “The Four Seasons” reimagined by Max Richter and with set design by Idris Khan. New productions consist of Battle’s Juba and former artistic director Judith Jamison’s Divining and Forgotten Time.

Among the special programs are “All Ailey” (Memoria, Masekela Langage, Revelations; Night Creature, Cry, Masekela Langage, Revelations), “All Battle” (Juba, Ella, No Longer Silent, In/Side, Mass), “All New” (Kairos, Lazarus), “3 Visionaries” (Mass, Ella, Divining, Forgotten Time, Cry, Revelations), and “Timeless Ailey,” comprising excerpts from many well-known and rarely performed Ailey works, including Opus McShann, For “Bird” with Love, Mary Lou’s Mass, The Lark Ascending, Phases, Hidden Rites, and Pas de Duke. The opening-night gala will be chaired by Angela Bassett and Cicely Tyson and features special appearances by Ledisi, Norm Lewis, and Brandie Sutton, a new piece by Battle set to Nina Simone’s “Black Is the Color,” and the premiere of the multimedia Becoming Ailey, which will also kick off every performance except the December 11 celebration of New York City Center’s seventy-fifth anniversary. Also on the schedule are Jamar Roberts’s Members Don’t Get Weary (music by John Coltrane), Jawole Willa Jo Zollar’s Shelter (music by Junior “Gabu” Wedderburn), Talley Beatty’s Stack-Up (music by Earth, Wind & Fire, Grover Washington Jr., Fearless Four, and Alphonze Mouzon), and Twyla Tharp’s The Golden Section (music by David Byrne).

THE WAVERLY GALLERY

A family faces a matriarch experiencing dementia in Kenneth Lonergan’s The Waverly Gallery (photo by Brigitte Lacombe)

Golden Theatre
252 West 45th St. between Broadway & Eighth Ave.
Tuesday – Sunday through January 27, $49 – $149
thewaverlygalleryonbroadway.com

Elaine May gives a career-topping performance as an octogenarian suffering from dementia in the Broadway debut of Kenneth Lonergan’s Pulitzer Prize finalist, the sensitive, bittersweet memory play The Waverly Gallery. Running through January 27 at the Golden Theatre — the same venue where May and her longtime comedy partner, Mike Nichols, staged An Evening with Mike Nichols and Elaine May in October 1960 — The Waverly Gallery takes place between 1989 and 1991 in a small, inconsequential Greenwich Village art gallery operated by eighty-five-year-old Gladys Green (May) and the Upper West Side apartment where Green’s daughter, Ellen Fine (Joan Allen), lives with her second husband, Howard Fine (David Cromer), and their dog. Ellen’s son, Daniel Reed (Lucas Hedges), often comes over for dinner, along with Gladys. “I want to tell you what happened to my grandmother, Gladys Green, near the end of her life,” Daniel tells the audience early on in the first of a series of direct addresses looking back at the past. “I lived in her building — where I still live — in Greenwich Village, during the last couple of years when she was there. . . . For twenty-eight years she ran a tiny gallery on Waverly Place, around the corner from where we lived. And without being too depressing about it, she didn’t always have the best stuff in there. But some of it was pretty good. . . . It’s not that I didn’t like her. I did. It’s just that once you went in there, it was kind of tough getting out again. So I was pretty stingy with the visits.”

Art gallery owner Gladys (Elaine May) speaks with her daughter, Ellen (Joan Allen), as painter Don (Michael Cera) looks on in Broadway debut of Kenneth Lonergan play (photo by Brigitte Lacombe)

One day a somewhat egotistical artist from Massachusetts, Don Bowman (Michael Cera), walks into the gallery, which is connected to a hotel undergoing renovations, with his portfolio, and Gladys decides not only to give him a show but also to let him sleep in the back room, as he claims to have no money. Ellen, who becomes easily exasperated with her mother, and Howard, who practically yells at Gladys when he talks to her, thinking she is deafer than she is, are suspicious of Don’s motives as he insinuates himself into Gladys’s life. But when the hotel owner tells the family that he is taking back the gallery to turn it into a breakfast café, Ellen, Howard, and Daniel have to figure out a way to tell Gladys, whose Alzheimer’s is getting worse.

The play opens with Gladys saying, “I never knew anything was the matter.” Although she was specifically referring to Ellen’s first marriage falling apart, she could just as well be talking about her own life. Her memory lapses, hearing problems, and inability to truly understand what is going on around her are harrowing to watch, yet Lonergan, the writer-director of such award-winning films as You Can Count on Me and Manchester by the Sea and such hit plays as This Is Our Youth and Lobby Hero, injects plenty of humor into the strife. “We’re liberal Upper West Side atheistic Jewish intellectuals — and we really like German choral music,” Daniel tells Don. A dinner scene in which Ellen and Howard futz with Gladys’s hearing aid has a slapstick touch. And Gladys’s forgetfulness can be charming and funny — until it’s not. The eighty-six-year-old May, a National Medal of Arts winner who wrote, directed, and starred in A New Leaf and worked with the likes of Nichols, Warren Beatty, and Neil Simon in such films as The Birdcage, The Heartbreak Kid, and, yes, Ishtar, imbues Gladys with such honesty and sincerity that it’s heart-wrenching watching her decline.

Lucas Hedges, Elaine May, Joan Allen, David Cromer, and Michael Cera star in The Waverly Gallery (photo by Brigitte Lacombe)

In her first Broadway show, Drama Desk- and Obie-winning director Lila Neugebauer, who is building an impressive résumé with such works as Edward Albee’s At Home at the Zoo, Annie Baker’s The Antipodes, Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’s Everybody, and Sarah DeLappe’s The Wolves, superbly balances the humor and heartbreak, never letting melodrama take over and instead including numerous moments in which the audience feels appropriately uncomfortable going from laughing to tearing up as David Zinn’s sets alternate between New York City apartments to the quaint belowground art gallery. Grammy winner and Oscar nominee May, Tony winner and Emmy and Oscar nominee Allen (Burn This, The Contender), Tony-winning actor and director Cromer (The Band’s Visit, Tribes), Oscar nominee Hedges (Manchester by the Sea, Yen), and Tony nominee Cera (Arrested Development, Juno), in his third consecutive Lonergan play on Broadway, form a stellar ensemble, capturing the essence of an extended family facing a tragic situation. (The 1999 original cast featured a widely hailed Eileen Heckart as Gladys, Maureen Anderman as Ellen, Mark Blum as Howard, Josh Hamilton as Daniel, and Anthony Arkin as Don; Anderman is now May’s understudy on Broadway.) “Honey? Do you think the Village has changed much in the last five years?” Gladys asks Daniel, who responds, “Yes! It’s been changing for a lot longer than that!” But what hasn’t changed nearly enough is the brutal impact of Alzheimer’s disease on sufferers and their families, so aptly on display in this perceptive and humane production.