twi-ny recommended events

SEASON FINALE VIEWING PARTY: BASKETS

Nothing can stop Chip Baskets (Zach Galifianakis) from becoming the clown he is meant to be (photo by Ben Cohen/FX)

Who: Louie Anderson and Martha Kelly
What: Viewing party for season finale of Baskets on FX
Where: Carolines on Broadway, 1626 Broadway between 49th & 50th Sts., 212-757-4100
When: Thursday, March 24, $35 (plus two-beverage minimum), 10:00
Why: If you’re like us, you keep watching Baskets on FX because you never know what Zach Galifianakis, who stars as wannabe clown Chip Baskets, is going to do next, and in addition, the show continues to get better every week, if not less bizarre. The first season comes to a close on Thursday, March 24, at 10:00, and you can watch it at Carolines on Broadway with costars comedian Louise Anderson, who plays Christine, Chip’s mother, and Martha Kelly, who is Chip’s insurance claims adjustor/assistant, Martha. Headliner Anderson and opener Kelly are performing at Carolines March 24-26. On Thursday night, Anderson and Kelly will host the viewing party immediately following their 7:30 show, and they will be live tweeting as well at #BasketsFXFinale. The show, which follows Chip’s destiny to become a world famous clown, was cocreated by Galifianakis with Louis C.K. and Jonathan Krisel and has been renewed for a second season.

DISASTER!

The audience and the cast have a swinging good time in DISASTER! (Jeremy Daniel Photography)

Nederlander Theatre
208 West 41st St. between Seventh & Eighth Aves.
Tuesday – Sunday through July 3, $65-$179
877-250-2929
www.disastermusical.com

There has been many a disaster on Broadway; Disaster! is definitely not one of them. The delightful musical comedy, which began life as a one-night charity benefit in 2011 and then had off-Broadway runs at the Triad Theater in 2012 and St. Luke’s in 2013-14, has made a simply fabulous transition to the Great White Way, where it runs through July 3 at the Nederlander Theatre. The show has kept growing since initially conceived by Seth Rudetsky and Drew Geraci, with bigger and bigger stars and significant changes to the script and music; the Broadway version is by cowriter, music supervisor, song arranger, and costar Rudetsky and his best friend, cowriter and director Jack Plotnick, a longtime character actor in film and television. It’s 1979, and Tony Delvecchio (Roger Bart channeling Jack Black) is celebrating the opening of Barracuda, his floating casino and discotheque moored in New York Harbor. A chintzy showman and businessman, Tony has cut just about every corner possible, worrying journalist Marianne (Kerry Butler) and Professor Ted Schneider (Rudetsky), who is concerned that the ship could not survive a natural disaster, which is likely to occur shortly. Among those on deck are Sister Mary Downy (Jennifer Simard), who is protesting against the casino and its debauchery; Shirley (Faith Prince) and Maury (Kevin Chamberlin), an older couple with a fierce love of life; Levora (Lacretta Nicole), a down-on-her-luck former disco diva who goes everywhere with her beloved dog in her handbag; Chad (Adam Pascal), whom Marianne left at the altar and his now working as a waiter on the ship, and his goofy buddy, Scott (Max Crumm); and elegant but not-too-bright lounge singer Jackie (Rachel York) and her young twins, Ben and Lisa (both played in hilarious fashion by Baylee Littrell). The show pays tribute to the great, and not-so-great, disaster movies of the 1970s, ingeniously coupled with beloved, and not-so-beloved, pop songs from that era.

Jackie (Rachel York) prays for a morning after as Ted (Rudetsky) and Ben (Baylee Littrell) look on (Jeremy Daniel Photography)

The main target is The Poseidon Adventure, but there are also references galore to the Airport films, The Towering Inferno, Earthquake, Rollercoaster, Tidal Wave, Piranha, and even Airplane! Simard’s nun character, speaking in a killer deadpan voice, is pulled directly from Jim Abrahams and David and Jerry Zucker’s classic 1980 spoof, while Prince excels in her homage to Shelley Winters in Poseidon. Meanwhile, the melodrama involving Marianne and Chad feels like a terrifically nerdy subplot from The Love Boat. The score features more than three dozen period favorites, delivered with extremely firm tongues-in-cheek, including Mary MacGregor’s “Torn Between Two Lovers,” Helen Reddy’s “I Am Woman,” Queen’s “You’re My Best Friend,” England Dan and John Ford Coley’s “I’d Really Love to See You Tonight,” Orleans’s “Still the One,” Carly Simon’s “Mockingbird,” and Donna Summer’s “Hot Stuff,” many of which become riotous set pieces, especially as things start looking more and more bleak and Tobin Obst’s (Newsies, Jekyll & Hyde) set begins falling apart with deliciously low-budget panache. The cast, superbly dressed by William Ivey Long (Chicago, On the Twentieth Century), does an amazing job keeping a straight face while the audience explodes in pure glee over each new reference or song snippet, which Rudetsky and Plotnick nail again and again. Littrell, the son of former Backstreet Boy Brian Littrell, nearly steals the show playing the twin siblings, going back and forth between Ben and Lisa in side-splitting, nearly impossible ways. The fun choreography is by JoAnn M. Hunter (School of Rock, Broadway Bound), who has a blast with the fab soundtrack. No mere jukebox musical, Disaster! is hot stuff indeed, a love letter to a simpler time and place; about the only thing missing is Sensurround.

UNZIPPED

Isaac Mizrahi contemplates his future in fab documentary, UNZIPPED

UNZIPPED (Douglas Keeve, 1995)
Film Forum
209 West Houston St.
Tuesday, March 22, 8:15 (Q&A with Isaac Mizrahi)
Saturday, March 26, 5:30 (Q&A with Douglas Keeve and executive producer Nina Santisi)
Sunday, April 10, 8:00 (Q&A with Isaac Mizrahi)
212-727-8110
filmforum.org
www.miramax.com

About halfway through Unzipped, Douglas Keeve’s thrilling 1995 documentary, which follows fashion designer extraordinaire Isaac Mizrahi as he puts together his fall 1994 collection following a critical disaster, Mizrahi says, “Everything’s frustrating; every single thing is frustrating. Except designing clothes. That’s not frustrating. That’s really liberating and beautiful. I don’t know, being overweight and not being able to lose weight, you know, that’s a problem. Anything you’re really working hard at and that’s not working, that’s a problem. But frankly, designing clothes is never a problem.” Of course, the statement doesn’t exactly ring true as Mizrahi, usually with his trademark bandanna wound around his wild, curly hair, encounters his fair share of difficulties as he meets with Candy Pratts and André Leon Talley from Vogue and Polly Mellen from Allure, expresses his hopes and fears with Mark Morris, Sandra Bernhard, Eartha Kitt, and his mother, and works with such supermodels as Kate Moss, Naomi Campbell, Cindy Crawford, Shalom Harlow, Linda Evangelista, Carla Bruni, Christy Turlington, and Amber Valletta. Along the way he makes endless pop-culture references, singing the theme song from The Mary Tyler Moore Show, citing scenes from The Red Shoes, Marnie, Valley of the Dolls, and Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? and using Nanook of the North and The Call of the Wild as creative inspiration.

Mizrahi is a ball of neuroses throughout as he consults Ouija boards and Tarot cards to peek into his future and plays classical piano (Bach’s “The Well-Tempered Clavier,” Debussy’s “Clair de Lune”) to calm himself down. “I’m not that stressed out,” he says. “I hate when people tell me I’m stressed out.” In his first film, director Keeve (Seamless, Hotel Gramercy Park), who was dating Mizrahi at the time, and Oscar-winning cinematographer Ellen Kuras (Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, The Betrayal) switch from grainy black-and-white to color to sharp b&w as Mizrahi’s big show approaches, in which the major point of conflict is the designer’s desperate desire to use a scrim that will allow the high-powered audience to see the backlit silhouettes of the models as they change backstage, something not all the women, or his colleagues at Mizrahi & Co., are in favor of. The film opens with Mizrahi devastated by the reviews of his previous show and closes with him quietly examining the reviews for his fall collection; in between is a delightful look inside the crazy world of fashion. And then Mizrahi will have to do it all over again for the next season. Winner of the Audience Award at the 1995 Sundance Film Festival, Unzipped is screening at Film Forum on March 22 at 8:15 and April 10 at 8:00 with Mizrahi present for Q&As and on March 26 at 5:30 with Keeve and executive producer Nina Santisi, in celebration of “Isaac Mizrahi: An Unruly History,” the first museum exhibition on Mizrahi and his career, which just opened at the Jewish Museum and continues through August 7.

BETTY TOMPKINS: WORDS ON WOMEN

Betty Tompkins, “A Woman’s Greatest Weapon Is Her Tongue,” acrylic on canvas, 2015

Who: American artist Betty Tompkins
What: Performance piece in conjunction with Women’s History Month and the exhibition “WOMEN Words, Phrases, and Stories: 1,000 Paintings by Betty Tompkins”
Where: The FLAG Art Foundation, 545 West 25th St. between Tenth & Eleventh Aves., tenth floor, 212-206-0220
When: Wednesday, March 23, free with RSVP, 6:00
Why: Washington, DC, native Betty Tompkins is best known for her controversial, large-scale photorealistic paintings, drawings, photographs, and video of intimate sexual acts. On March 23 at 6:00, she will be at the FLAG Art Foundation in Chelsea for the performance “Words on WOMEN,” held in conjunction with her exhibition there, which continues through May 14. The exhibition consists of one thousand small-scale, hand-painted acrylic on canvas works that feature words and phrases used to describe women, including “Total Babe,” “Epic Bitch,” “Girly Girl,” “Arm Candy,” “Put a Bag over Her Head,” and “Will She Ever Shut Up?” (In her request for words and phrases from others, Tompkins explained, “They can be affectionate [honey], pejorative [bitch], slang, descriptive, etc.”) On March 23, Tompkins will be at the Chelsea gallery with fifty friends and colleagues, each of whom will select twenty words from the paintings to “speak, yell, sing, and perform however they wish.” The performance, which should be empowering as well as scary and funny, will begin at 6:45. Tompkins will be back at FLAG on April 6 for an artist talk with curator and writer Alison Gingeras.

RED SPEEDO

Ray (Alex Breaux) and his coach (Peter Jay Fernandez) discuss strategy in RED SPEEDO (photo by Joan Marcus)

New York Theatre Workshop
79 East Fourth St. between Second & Third Aves.
Tuesday – Sunday through April 3, $69
www.nytw.org

Upon entering the theater at NYTW to see Lucas Hnath’s Red Speedo, you are met with the familiar smell of chlorine; at the foot of the stage is a horizontal tank filled with water, the glow from its soft, calming waves glistening on the back wall of Riccardo Hernandez’s spare but comfy locker-room set. Over the speaker system, the soft, calming waves of Roy Orbison’s glorious voice, singing his posthumous 1989 hit single, “You Got It,” repeat on a loop (that might leave you not wanting to ever hear the song again, no matter how much you think you love it). Soon Peter (Lucas Caleb Rooney), a bearded lawyer, is threatening a swimming coach (Peter Jay Fernandez) that if he doesn’t flush the cooler-full of performance-enhancing drugs he found in his refrigerator — which swimmer Ray (Alex Breaux), Peter’s younger brother, says belongs to one of his teammates, Tad — Peter will take Ray to another swim club, even with the Olympic trials scheduled for the next day. Tall and impossibly sinewy and wearing nothing but a red Speedo, Ray, who is expected to compete for a medal in the Olympics, is standing between the two men as they talk at each other in an almost Mamet-like barrage of unfinished thoughts and sentences. “It is my responsibility to inform the officials, the powers that be, that one of my swimmers has been taking performance-enhancing drugs,” the coach says. “It’s an ethical responsibility.” But Peter, a middling lawyer who sees representing Ray as his way to financial success, starting with an endorsement deal with Speedo, threatens, “Yes, you should do what you need to do. I’m just trying to remind you of what you need.” When Ray informs Peter whom the drugs really belong to, it sets in motion a series of confrontations in which ethics and morality face off against fame and fortune and everyone, including Ray’s former girlfriend, Lydia (Zoë Winters), has to make life-changing decisions that affect more than just themselves.

Ray (Alex Breaux) does what he does best in RED SPEEDO at New York Theatre Workshop (photo by Joan Marcus)

Red Speedo plays out like an individual medley race; its pacing and story aligns with the competition in which the swimmer goes from the butterfly to the backstroke to the breaststroke to freestyle. The start of each new act is signaled by the same kind of air-horn blast that kicks off races — while also making sure the audience has not dozed off. The action might take place in the world of sports, but the story, at its core, is about addiction. People can be addicted to winning just as they are addicted to drugs, alcohol, sex, gambling, porn, and even shopping. The day I saw the show, there was an added buzz in the theater, as news was breaking that tennis champion Maria Sharapova had admitted to using PEDs and was facing a major ban, making the show’s central topic even more relevant. It’s almost impossible to take your eyes off of Breaux (The Real Thing, Bushwick), who’s onstage virtually the entire show, always in his absurdly tight red Speedo, displaying a stupendously large black serpent tattoo running down his back and leg; he injects amiability and even a little sympathy into a not-very-bright character who seems harmless enough but is imbued with a raging selfishness. Breaux, who played football at Harvard and is a Juilliard graduate, works well with Rooney (Love and Information, The Orphans’ Home Cycle), who lends older brother Peter a worried desperation, as if Ray’s potential success is his only way out of his mundane, average existence.

Breaux does not have that same connection with Winters (Love and Information, 4000 Miles); there is no, er, chemistry between the two — who both appeared in the 1994 Shakespeare in the Park production of Much Ado About Nothing — and it is hard to believe that the street-smart Lydia, who used to deal in elicit pharmaceuticals, could really fall in love with the dimwitted athlete who might be a wiz underwater but is a rather dull tool on firm ground. Fernandez (All the Way, Father Comes Home from the Wars) is effective as the conflicted coach who is determined to do the right thing but is caught up in something that is new for him. Hnath (The Christians, A Public Reading of an Unproduced Screenplay About the Death of Walt Disney) and director Lileana Blain-Cruz (Hollow Roots, A Guide to Kinship and Maybe Magic) leave some gaping plot holes, primarily never satisfactorily addressing how the guilty swimmer has not gotten caught despite being tested regularly, and they sometimes settle for the lowest common denominator instead of challenging the audience more. Perhaps Red Speedo, which has plenty of merit, would have been better if it were built with more, shorter races rather than with several longer ones, with a more concrete focus instead of trying to rush too many elements into an already overlong eighty minutes. And then, when it’s all done, Orbison comes back, promising, “Anything you want, you got it. / Anything you need, you got it. / Anything at all, you got it. / Baby!”

A SPACE PROGRAM

Lt. Sam Ratanarat is one of two astronauts going to Mars in A SPACE PROGRAM (photo by Josh White)

A SPACE PROGRAM (Van Neistat, 2015)
Metrograph
7 Ludlow St. between Canal & Hester Sts.
Opens Friday, March 18
212-660-0312
metrograph.com
zeitgeistfilms.com

In the late spring of 2012, I wandered through the vast Wade Thompson Drill Hall at the Park Avenue Armory, accumulating experiences so I could become officially indoctrinated into artist Tom Sachs’s massive DIY installation, “Space Program Mars.” I was unable to attend the actual lift-off and exploration of the Red Planet that concluded the month-long show, but Sachs and his longtime collaborator, Van Neistat, have captured that special event in the new film A Space Program. With his crack team of artisans, New York City native Sachs, whose inaugural “Space Program” in 2007 at the Gagosian Gallery in Los Angeles went to the moon, has built nearly all the functional (if not precisely space-worthy) elements needed to send two women to Mars. But Sachs’s method is as much about process than anything else, insisting that the labor reveals itself, that his decidedly low-tech practice be evident everywhere. “Our space program is handmade, guided by the philosophy of bricolage,” deadpan narrator Pat Manocchia explains early on. Sachs’s method relies on bricolage, which he defines as “repair or creation with available resources.” The first part of A Space Program reveals how it all was built, using found materials, items bought in a regular hardware store, metal, and lots and lots of plywood. Then the team — consisting of Echo Mike (Evan Murphy), Charlie Bravo (Chris Beeston), Poppa Mike (Pat McCarthy), November Delta (Nick Doyle), Kilo Hotel (Dr. Kevin Hand), Juliet Lima (Jeff Lurie), Juliet Victor (Jared Vandeusen), Gulf Mike (Gordon Milsaps), Bravo Poppa (Bill Powers), and Sierra Victor (Sarah Vasil), each of whom has a very specific job to do — comes together to send Lt. Sam Ratanarat and Cmdr. Mary Eannarino into space in the life-size Lunar Excursion Module. The attention to detail borders on the obsessive as well as the whimsical, but Sachs has made sure to include every possible element, from a working toilet to a shelf of booze. In his first feature film, Neistat, who has made many shorts with his brother, Casey, and Sachs — Sachs also appeared on several episodes of the brothers’ wildly inventive HBO show, The Neistat Brothers, including those involving the cult-favorite miniature boat races — follows all the action centered around Sachs’s fully operational (yet forever grounded) Mission Control setup, where multiple monitors track the women’s progress, and emotions heat up when problems arise.

It all plays out like a real mission with real consequences, and that’s exactly how Sachs and Neistat see it, and want you to see it. But as much as it’s about the space program — as you watch the film, you’ll find it hard not to think about how much the government has cut funding for NASA, even though that’s not the point Sachs is trying to make — it’s also about the creation of art, about the handicraft of making things. Sachs previously worked as a welder and an assistant to Frank Gehry, so he demands that his art be functional as well as artistic. In the past, his work has concentrated on branding, merging high-tech and low-tech ideals and culture in such pieces as “Chanel Guillotine,” “Prada Toilet,” and “Hermés Value Meal” (okay, those might not have been fully functional) as well as his “Bronze Collection” series, consisting of large-scale bronze sculptures of Hello Kitty, My Melody, and Miffy, painted white to look as if they’re made purely of lightweight foamcore. With A Space Program, Sachs, who cowrote the film with Neistat, who serves as director, cinematographer, and coeditor (with Ian Holden), took all of those methods and put them to fascinating use, immersing the viewer firmly into NASA’s world of space exploration, with all the same fears and hopes as if you’re observing an actual mission, complete with the requisite potential danger. On the film’s official site, there’s a twelve-point list titled “How to Watch This Film.” Number 1 says, “This movie proves that you don’t need an education to understand — or to make — art,” number 3 explains, “This movie is NOT A DOCUMENTARY. It’s an INDUSTRIAL film like the safety videos they make you watch in high school shop class so you don’t cut your fingers off. Some say it’s a comedy,” and number 10 points out, “This movie is a love letter to the analog era.” It’s also a love letter to the power of the imagination and just what you can accomplish when you put your mind — and your bare hands — to it. A Space Program launches March 18 at the brand-new Metrograph movie theater on Ludlow St., where Sachs and Neistat will be on hand for opening-night screenings at 7:00, 9:00, and 11:00. Starting next week, you can catch Sachs’s “Tea Ceremony,” which developed out of “Space Program,” March 23 through July 24 at the Noguchi Museum, the first solo show there by an artist other than Isamu Noguchi, while “Tom Sachs: Boombox Retrospective, 1999-2016” comes to the Brooklyn Museum from April 21 through August 14.

CHANTAL AKERMAN: NEW YORK REMEMBERS

Chantal Akerman’s life and career will be celebrated at free event at Lincoln Center

Who: Jonas Mekas, Babette Mangolte, Andrew Bujalski, more to be announced
What: Tribute to Chantal Akerman
Where: Film Society of Lincoln Center, Walter Reade Theater, 165 West 65th St. between Eighth Ave. & Broadway
When: Saturday, March 19, free, 10:00 am
Why: The Film Society of Lincoln Center and City College of New York are teaming up for a memorial tribute on March 19 for Belgian-born, Paris-based pioneer, writer, director, teacher, and artist Chantal Akerman, who died on October 5 of last year at the age of sixty-five, apparently by suicide. For “Chantal Akerman: New York Remembers,” friends and colleagues will gather at the Walter Reade Theater for a free tribute to the longtime New Yorker; admission is first come, first served. The scheduled guests so far include Anthology Film Archives cofounder Jonas Mekas, longtime Akerman cinematographer Babette Mangolte, and mumblecore master Andrew Bujalski, with more to be announced. Whether making short films, a Hollywood movie, documentaries, or cutting-edge experimental works, Akerman always did things her way; among her major triumphs were I, You, He, She; News from Home; and the one and only Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles. The presentation will feature film clips, personal memories, music, and more, followed by a reception in the Furman Gallery. In 2013, Bujalski (Funny Ha Ha, Mutual Appreciation), in an interview with Vulture’s Jennifer Vineyard, cited Akerman as one of his influences: “I studied film as an undergrad at Harvard, and she was my thesis adviser. She gave me two pieces of advice, which I haven’t taken yet. She told me girls wouldn’t like me until I stopped dressing like a fourteen-year-old, and that I should stop being pretentious and just make comedies. I think of Computer Chess as a comedy, but it probably behooves me to go out and make a real one sometime.” More guests are expected to be announced for this two-and-a-half-hour special event. (In addition, BAMcinématek will be hosting a career retrospective of Akerman’s work in the series “Chantal Akerman: Images between the Images,” running April 1 through May 1, while Film Forum will be presenting Marianne Lambert’s I Don’t Belong Anywhere: The Cinema of Chantal Akerman for free March 30 through April 1, followed by Jeanne Dielman April 1-7 for $14.)