twi-ny recommended events

BONUS TICKET ALERT: BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN AND THE E STREET BAND AT METLIFE STADIUM

Gothenburg might have welcomed Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band back home last month, but they’ll actually be back in Jersey this week (photo by Natalie Greppi)

Who: Bruce Springsteen & the E Street Band
What: Stadium leg of the River Tour
Where: MetLife Stadium, East Rutherford, New Jersey
When: New tickets on sale August 22 at 12 noon for shows Tuesday, August 23, Thursday, August 25, and Tuesday, August 30, $68-$150, 7:30
Why: After Bruce Springsteen & the E Street Band’s U.S. arena tour celebrating the thirty-fifth anniversary of The River, during which the 1980 double LP was played in its entirety every night, and a European leg in which the setlists changed, with chunks of the album featured along with an evolving roster of deep cuts (“New York City Serenade,” “Roll of the Dice,” “Reason to Believe,” “Streets of Fire”), classic covers (“Who’ll Stop the Rain,” “You Never Can Tell,” “Summertime Blues,” “Lucille”), and rarities (“None But the Brave,” “Frankie,” “Iceman,” “The Promise”), the group returns to the States for a brief stadium jaunt beginning August 23, 25, and 30 at MetLife Stadium. Yesterday it was announced, “Now that the exact location for the stage on the field is set and production has been finalized, additional tickets have become available.” That usually means pretty good seats, as these kinds of changes don’t impact the faraway locations that are practically in another area code. Bruce and the band are in top form, and Springsteen might be ultra-juiced because his autobiography, Born to Run, and companion CD, Chapter & Verse, are being released on September 27, four days after his sixty-seventh birthday.

“DNA, natural ability, study of craft, development of and devotion to an aesthetic philosophy, naked desire for . . . fame? . . . love? . . . admiration? . . . attention? . . . women? . . . sex? . . . and oh, yeah . . . a buck. Then . . . if you want to take it all the way out to the end of the night, a furious fire in the hole that just . . . don’t . . . quit . . . burning,” Springsteen writes in the book’s foreword. “These are some of the elements that will come in handy should you come face-to-face with eighty thousand (or eighty) screaming rock ’n’ roll fans who are waiting for you to do your magic trick. Waiting for you to pull something out of your hat, out of thin air, out of this world, something that before the faithful were gathered here today was just a song-fueled rumor. I am here to provide proof of life to that ever elusive, never completely believable ‘us.’ That is my magic trick. And like all good magic tricks, it begins with a setup. So . . .” Might any of the extreme rarities on the new album, which include tunes from Bruce’s earliest bands, the Castiles and Steel Mill, work their way into the show? We wouldn’t complain if he played the amazing “He’s Guilty” on August 25….

TICKET ALERT: NEW YORK COMEDY FESTIVAL

Bill Maher is likely to have his hands full with political jokes at New York Comedy Festival gig a few days before Election Day

Who: Bill Maher, Patton Oswalt, Tig Notaro, Marc Maron, Bridgett Everett, Trevor Noah, Tracy Morgan, Chris D’Elia, Tim Minchin, Eric Andre, Cameron Esposito, Dane Cook, Hari Kondabolu, T. J. Miller
What: The thirteenth annual New York Comedy Festival
Where: The Theater at Madison Square Garden, Beacon Theatre, Carnegie Hall, the Town Hall, Carolines on Broadway, NYU Skirball Center
When: November 1-6
Why: You won’t be laughing if you don’t score tickets to some of the hottest shows at this year’s New York Comedy Festival, taking place at multiple venues the first week of November. Below are five of our suggestions for can’t-miss hilarity.

Patton Oswalt, Beacon Theatre, Thursday, November 3, $50-$85, 7:00
Marc Maron, Carnegie Hall, Friday, November 4, $36-$62, 8:00
Tig Notaro, Carnegie Hall, Saturday, November 5, $35-$59, 7:00
Trevor Noah, Beacon Theatre, Saturday, November 5, $40-$75, 7:00
Bill Maher, the Theater at Madison Square Garden, Saturday, November 5, $31-$146, 8:00

TOM FRIEDMAN: LOOKING UP

Tom Friedman’s “Looking Up” gazes up at the sky in the middle of busy Park Ave. (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

SCULPTURE ON PARK AVE.
Park Ave. & 53rd St.
Extended through September 5
www.luhringaugustine.com
looking up slideshow

These are some tough times, but Tom Friedman insists things are looking up with his large-scale sculpture, “Looking Up,” which is standing tall on the Park Ave. mall at Fifty-Third St. Rising 33.3 feet high, “Looking Up” depicts an elongated figure bending his head back almost impossibly to get a look at the sky, which everyone in New York gazes up at a little differently since 9/11. The work is made using styrofoam, stainless steel, crushed aluminum foil roasting pans, and lost wax casting to achieve its retro feel; the Giacometti-like man hovers near Lever House, where Friedman’s site-specific “Aluminum Foil” exhibition was on view in 2007; one of the pieces from that show, “Aluminum Foil Buddha,” is back in Lever House, meditating in a glass case, creating quite a dichotomy with his rather larger compatriot outside. Friedman previously staged a memorable show in 2001 at the New Museum of Contemporary Art using such found objects as toothpicks, aspirin, pencil shavings, sugar cubes, and soap. “He’s actually an analog artist in a digital world,” curator Robert Hobbs says in a video about the piece before noting the Zen-like quality of his work. Make sure to get up close and personal with “Looking Up” (a joint project of Luhring Augustine, Stephen Friedman Gallery, the Fund for Park Avenue, and NYC Parks’ Art in the Parks program) to check out the strange but cool detail of the roasting pans, consider the balance between humor and earnestness, and wonder what the giant might be looking at; just beware of the busy Park Ave. traffic.

HARLEM WEEK 2016: SUMMER IN THE CITY / HARLEM DAY

Free outdoor screening of WHEN WE WERE KINGS is part of Harlem Week festival

West 135th St. between Malcolm X Blvd. & Frederick Douglass Blvd.
Saturday, August 20, and Sunday, August 21, free, 12 noon – 10:00 pm
Festival continues through August 27
harlemweek.com

The annual Harlem Week festival continues August 20 with “Summer in the City” and August 21 with “Harlem Day,” two afternoons of a wide range of free special events along West 135th St. Saturday’s festivities include the Higher Education Fair & Expo, New Yorkers Are “Dancing in the Street” (with Alvin Ailey instructor Robin Dunn teaching a hip-hop ballet and African dance class, with WBLS DJs), the Fabulous Fashion Flava Show, the first day of the NYC Children’s Festival (with a parade, sports clinics, health testing, arts & crafts, and more), Harlem Honeys & Bears swimming activities for seniors in the Hansborough Recreation Center, an International Vendors Village, the Uptown Saturday Concert paying tribute to Nina Simone, and the Imagenation Outdoor Film Festival screening in St. Nicholas Park of Leon Gast’s Oscar-winning 1996 documentary When We Were Kings, about Muhammad Ali and George Foreman’s Rumble in the Jungle. Sunday’s Harlem Day celebration features the “Harlem and Havana Classics” Upper Manhattan Auto Show, tennis clinics, the “Village within Our Village” health village, the second day of the NYC Children’s Festival (with a Back to School theme), an “International Roots of Jazz” program, the Upper Manhattan Small Business Expo & Fair, live music, dance, and spoken-word performances, a kids fashion show, and musical tributes to Prince and Earth, Wind & Fire leader Maurice White.

RETURN OF THE DOUBLE FEATURE!

return of the double feature

Film Forum
209 West Houston St.
Friday, August 19, through Tuesday, September 13, $14
212-727-8110
filmforum.org

Once upon a time, in a land far, far away, you could pay one single admission and see two professional baseball games, called a double header. “Let’s play two!” Mr. Cub, Ernie Banks, famously said in July 1969. And you could stay and watch both games for one regular price, without having to clear out after the first contest. Also in that magical land of long ago, you see two movies for the price of one, known as a double feature. As Richard O’Brien sings in The Rocky Horror Picture Show, “I wanna go — oh oh oh oh / to the late night, double feature, picture show.” Film Forum, which often hosts double features, is now honoring the two-pack with “Return of the Double Feature,” twenty-six pairings of fifty-two classic movies, brought together by director, star, theme, writer, or other reason. Master programmer Bruce Goldstein gets things going with the Alfred Hitchcock / Jimmy Stewart duo of Vertigo and Rear Window, followed by Jean-Luc Godard’s Contempt and Breathless, Stanley Kubrick’s Paths of Glory and The Killing, and F. W. Murnau’s Sunrise and Nosferatu. After that, the double bills become more conceptual, such as Akira Kurosawa’s Yojimbo with Sergio Corbucci’s Django, Nicholas Ray’s In a Lonely Place with Fritz Lang’s The Big Heat, and, perhaps best of all, Hitchcock’s Psycho with Roman Polanski’s Repulsion.

psycho repulsion

You can catch Ruth Gordon in Harold and Maude and Where’s Poppa?, Orson Welles in Carol Reed’s The Third Man and his own The Lady from Shanghai, and Gene Tierney in Otto Preminger’s Laura and John Stahl’s Leave Her to Heaven. There are double features by Robert Altman, Charlie Chaplin, Terrence Malick, Alain Resnais, and Luis Buñuel; based on novels by James M. Cain and Raymond Chandler; and starring Marlon Brando, Humphrey Bogart, Toshiro Mifune, and Cary Grant. Among the other dynamic duos are Vittorio De Sica’s The Bicycle Thief with Tim Burton’s Pee Wee’s Big Adventure, Burton’s Ed Wood with Wood’s Plan 9 from Outer Space, and Hitchcock’s Dial M for Murder with André de Toth’s House of Wax, both shown in 3-D. Instead of bingeing on Netflix, you might as well just settle in for the long haul at Film Forum and take in as much of this superb master class in cinema as you can, presented two flicks at a time, just like in the good old days.

THE GARDINER MEMORIAL BASKETBALL CLASSIC 2016

gardiner basketball classic

THE GARDINER MEMORIAL BASKETBALL CLASSIC 2016
St. James Park
Jerome Ave., East 193rd St. & Creston Ave.
Saturday, August 20, and Sunday, August 21, free, 12 noon
thegardinerfoundation.org

In a twi-ny talk last summer, Dexter Gardiner, who founded the Gardiner Memorial Basketball Classic shortly after a series of terrible losses — his twin brother, brother-in-law, niece, and two nephews were killed in a traffic accident on their way to a charity tournament honoring Dexter’s sister and mother, who had passed away earlier that year — told us, “We just started it out of tragedy, and we wanted to help other families that were suffering loss. We never dreamed that it would get this far, but here we are . . . and we’re excited about it. Each year it continues to grow.” The eleventh annual Gardiner Memorial Basketball Classic is bigger than ever, set for August 20 & 21 in St. James Park in the Bronx, featuring such match-ups as Philly vs. Lawyertime, Mississippi vs. Tha Transitions, Wrecking Crew vs. Team Flirt, and Gunhill vs. Body Snatchers. (And don’t miss Sunday’s girls game between the Nassau County All-Stars and a city team of teens.) There will also be live entertainment, special speakers, and scholarship presentations. Lawyertime is one of the event sponsors; the firm also joined up with Councilman Fernando Cabrera for a free Gardiner Foundation basketball clinic in the Bronx park on June 25. The two-day tournament is really all about the kids, who can pick up such free items as shirts, sneakers, school supplies, and even a laptop in addition to food and drink.

TICKET ALERT: BROADWAY WEEK SUMMER 2016

THE COLOR PURPLE is one of nineteen shows participating in this summer’s two-for one Broadway Week deal (photo by Matthew Murphy, 2015)

Multiple venues on Broadway
September 5-18, buy one ticket, get one free
Tickets on sale August 18 at 10:30 am
www.nycgo.com/broadwayweek

Tickets go on sale August 18 at 10:30 am for the summer edition of Broadway Week, which runs September 5-18 and offers theater lovers a chance to see new and long-running shows for half-price. Nineteen shows are participating, but tickets will go fast, so don’t hesitate or you’ll lose out on your chance to get two-for-one seats for such musicals as Aladdin, The Lion King, Beautiful, Cats, Chicago, Paramour, Jersey Boys, Kinky Boots, On Your Feet, The Phantom of the Opera, School of Rock, Wicked, and the new Holiday Inn. We highly recommend An American in Paris, The Color Purple, Fiddler on the Roof, Matilda, and Something Rotten! In addition, squeezing in among all those musicals is one play, the outstanding Tony-winning drama The Humans.