twi-ny recommended events

INSPIRATIONAL BROADWAY

A bevy of Broadway favorites will gather at B. B. King’s to benefit BIV on February 15

Who: Michael McElroy & the Broadway Inspirational Voices with special guests Billy Porter, Joshua Henry, Marcus Paul James, Adam Pascal, Telly Leung, Jarrod Spector, La Chanze, Lindsay Mendez, Chad Kimball, and Norm Lewis
What: All-star benefit for Broadway Inspirational Voices
Where: B. B. King Blues Club & Grill, 237 West 42nd St. between Broadway & Eighth Ave., 212-997-4144
When: Monday, February 15, $30-$175, 7:30
Why: Founded in 1994, Broadway Inspirational Voices is a nonprofit dedicated to “providing hope to inspire and transform youth in need through music and the arts.” On Presidents Day, B. B. King Blues Club & Grill will host a benefit for the organization’s outreach programs; the evening will be led by BIV founder Michael McElroy (Big River) and members of the BIV choir ensemble, joined by a sensational group of special guests comprising Tony winners, nominees, and other Broadway favorites. The diverse cast features Billy Porter (Kinky Boots), Joshua Henry (The Scottsboro Boys), Marcus Paul James (Motown the Musical), Adam Pascal (Rent), Telly Leung (Allegiance), Jarrod Spector (Beautiful), La Chanze (The Color Purple), Lindsay Mendez (Wicked), Chad Kimball (Memphis), and Norm Lewis (Porgy & Bess), performing Broadway, Gospel, pop, and rock songs under the musical direction of James Sampliner (Honeymoon in Vegas).

A WAR

Tobias Lindholm puts the audience right in the middle of battle in A WAR

A WAR (KRIGEN) (Tobias Lindholm, 2015)
Landmark Sunshine Cinema
143 East Houston St. between First & Second Aves.
Opens Friday, February 12
212-330-8182
www.magpictures.com/awar
www.landmarktheatres.com

Danish writer-director Tobias Lindholm puts you right in the middle of the action in The War, his searing portrait of the modern state of battle as seen through the eyes of a dedicated family man who makes a decision in the heat of the moment that jeopardizes his future. The first part of the film takes place in Afghanistan, where the Danish army, which has not been involved in its own war in more than 150 years, is supporting the efforts of the United States and England. A small company, led by Claus Michael Pedersen (Pilou Asbæk), is protecting a desert area where the Taliban is believed to be infiltrating a nearby village. Lindholm and cinematographer Magnus Nordenhof Jønck, who have previously worked together on R and A Hijacking, make the audience feel like it’s right there as a soldier is blown up by an IED, the men encounter an Afghan family that might or might not be collaborating with the Taliban, and a terrorist uses children as a human shield. The story occasionally shifts back home, where Pedersen’s wife, Maria (Tuva Novotny), is caring for their three children by herself. The two worlds come crashing together after Pedersen makes a judgment call while trying to rescue Lutfi “Lasse” Hassan (Dulfi Al-Jabouri), who’s been shot by a sniper as their compound is under attack. It’s all far more subtle, and more believable, than, say, the opening of Steven Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan or Clint Eastwood’s American Sniper; it’s not so much about the horrors, violence, and heroism of war in general but its potential after-effects in an ever-more-complex politically correct climate.

Tobias Lindholm directs the action in powerful Oscar-nominated drama A WAR

Lindholm was determined to make the film as realistic as possible, and he succeeds marvelously. In crafting and casting A War, he met with refugees, Afghanistan veterans, and members of the Taliban to get things right. (Most of the cast are nonprofessional actors, including many actual Danish soldiers.) Asbæk, who has starred in Lindholm’s previous two films as well as the popular Danish television series Borgen (and will play Euron Greyjoy in the sixth season of Game of Thrones), is superb as the conflicted soldier and father who faces a crisis of conscience as he gets caught up in a tangled web that has major ramifications; at times his eyes seem almost vacant as he wonders just what it is all about. Nominated for an Oscar for Best Foreign Language film — Lindholm also cowrote Thomas Vinterberg’s The Hunt, which was up for the same award two years ago — A War features fine performances by Novotny (Nobel, Jalla! Jalla!), Dar Salim (A Hijacking, Submarino, another collaboration between Lindholm and Vinterberg) as Najib Bisma, Pedersen’s trusted right-hand man, and Søren Malling (A Hijacking, Borgen) as lawyer Martin R. Olsen. A War is a poignant, insightful look at one man’s experience of war — and how it relates to all of us. The film opens February 12 at the Landmark Sunshine; the 7:00 screenings on Friday and Saturday nights will be followed by a Q&A with Lindholm.

TICKET ALERT: BRYAN FERRY AT THE BEACON

Who: Bryan Ferry
What: Avonmore Tour
Where: Beacon Theatre, 2124 Broadway between West 74th & 75th Sts.
When: Wednesday, July 27, and Friday, July 29, $59.50 – $200
Why: Tickets go on sale Friday, February 12, at 12 noon to see one of the most stylish men in the history of rock and roll. The one and only Bryan Ferry is returning to New York City for two shows in July at the Beacon, extending his tour behind his latest album, November 2014’s Avonmore. Over the last few years, the former leader of Roxy Music has been reinventing himself as a Jazz Age crooner, singing standards as well as cool takes on old solo and Roxy classics. Avonmore goes back to the sound that made Ferry famous, from haunting ballads to his unique brand of highly literate dance pop, including such originals as “Soldier of Fortune,” “One Night Stand,” “Midnight Train,” and “A Special Kind of Guy” in addition to covers of “Send in the Clowns” and Robert Palmer’s “Johnny and Mary.” Judging by setlists from last fall, you’re in for quite a treat if you can grab tickets to these shows and catch this very special kind of guy.

THE GRAND PARADISE

A mother (Tori Sparks) reevaluates her life in THE GRAND PARADISE (photo by Darial Sneed)

Third Rail Projects
383 Troutman St. between Wyckoff & Irving Aves.
Tuesday – Sunday through September 4, $95-$150
718-374-5196
thegrandparadise.com

First and foremost, you need to understand that what happens at the Grand Paradise stays at the Grand Paradise. Over the course of your visit, you’re likely to be rubbed, grabbed, hugged, massaged, slow-danced, and led into private rooms, but it’s all in great fun. In 2013, Brooklyn dance-theater troupe Third Rail Projects introduced a set of characters, a traveling family, in the site-specific Roadside Attraction, which took place in and around a retrofitted 1970s camper. That nameless family has now made it to Florida, where they have gathered at the Grand Paradise, a New Age-y vacation resort that is the immersive offspring of Fantasy Island and The Love Boat (and partially inspired by Fleetwood Mac’s multiplatinum Rumours album). In a renovated one-story warehouse in Bushwick, sixty audience members join Mom (Tori Sparks), Dad (Tom Pearson), their younger daughter (Kate Ladenheim), their older daughter (Ashley Handel), and her boyfriend (Niko Tsocanos) for two hours of unpredictability with the singing Siren (Lily Ockwell), Midas (Roxanne Kidd), a cabana boy (Sebastiani Romagnolo), Venus (Emma Hoette), Jett (Rebekah Morin), the Libertine (Jeff Lyon), and the Lady (Lea Fulton) and the Gentleman (Brendan Duggan), among others, many of whom perform short dance pieces. At the beginning, you can wander through rooms at your own pace to familiarize yourself with the surroundings, but soon you will be guided by actors — and separated from whomever you came with — as the narrative starts to unfold, involving sexual freedom, the search for personal identity, the passage of time, fear of death, midlife crises, and the Fountain of Youth. Each of the five main characters (there are several casts for different performances) experiences a kind of reawakening — compelling, emotional stories we followed with great interest. But what they discover is not necessarily what they were initially after.

A possible Fountain of Youth beckons at the Grand Paradise (photo by Darial Sneed)

The Grand Paradise is directed, designed, written, and choreographed by Third Rail Projects artistic directors Zach Morris, Jennine Willett, and Pearson, the masterminds behind the popular immersive production Then She Fell, a multisensory takeoff of Alice in Wonderland that has been playing at the Kingsland Ward at St. Johns institutional facility in Williamsburg since 2012. Among the places you will encounter as you journey through the resort are a beach with a hunky lifeguard (Zach McNally), a disco, a motel room, and the Shipwreck Lounge, where you can buy a tropical drink. All through the night, Aqua Twin Girl (Elisa Davis) and Aqua Twin Boy (Joshua Reaver) swim in an aquarium while hustlers William (Robert Vail), Grace, (Katrina Reid), and Farrah (Lauren Muraski) and the activities director (Alberto Denis) keep you always occupied. (As opposed to immersive-theater standard-bearer Sleep No More, you are not left to your own devices quite as much in The Grand Paradise, although you certainly have more than an acceptable amount of free will.) Kudos go out to the cast, composer and sound designer Sean Hagerty, costumer Karen Young, and environment designer Elisabeth Svenningsen, who have gone full tilt in making sure your stay is a very pleasant one. The extremely specific rules include no cell phones or cameras, and you must check all coats and bags. Participants are told not to open any closed doors, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t be adventurous, peering through windows, peeking into drawers, opening shutters, and following a character when they beckon you into the private unknown. But alas, we’ve already said too much. Bon voyage!

CHARLOTTE RAMPLING: HEADING SOUTH

Charlotte Rampling stars in Laurent Cantet’s sexually charged postcolonial drama, HEADING SOUTH

WEEKEND CLASSICS: HEADING SOUTH (VERS LE SUD) (Laurent Cantet, 2005)
IFC Center
323 Sixth Ave. at West Third St.
February 12-15, 11:00 am
Series runs through March 6
212-924-7771
www.ifccenter.com

Winner of the Golden Lion at the 2005 Venice Film Festival, Laurent Cantet’s Heading South is a captivating, disturbing look at misguided passion in a postcolonial world. Based on three short stories by Dany Lafèrriere, the film is set in late 1970s Haiti, at a resort where wealthy white women come to be served — in all possible ways — by the local black men. Karen Young stars as Brenda, a troubled woman who returns to the beach resort for the first time in three years, seeking to find the sexual release with Legba (Ménothy Cesar) that changed her life. But she has a rival in Ellen (Charlotte Rampling), a longtime island regular who has taken Legba under her wing (and under her sheets). Sue (Louise Portal) tries to maintain the peace while dallying with her own boy toy, Neptune (Wilfried Paul). And observing it all from a cold distance is the resort manager, Albert (Lys Ambroise), a proud, distinguished gentleman who resents having to serve white people almost as much as he resents the black escorts who sell their bodies. As the three women convince themselves that they are truly in love, danger lurks from the nearby city, as Port-Au-Prince is about to explode. And yet no matter what happens, things are bound to continue as is, with young Eddy (Jackenson Pierre Olmo Diaz) ready to take over for the next generation. Heading South is a well-acted, well-written examination of sex and love, power and poverty, and race and politics, with trouble and turmoil seething beneath virtually every scene. It’s screening at eleven o’clock in the morning February 12-14 as part of the IFC Center’s eight-film Weekend Classics tribute to Rampling, being held on the occasion of the release of her latest movie, 45 Years, which has earned the British actress, model, and singer her first Oscar nomination; the series continues through March 6 with François Ozon’s Under the Sand, Michael Cacoyannis’s The Cherry Orchard, and Dick Richards’s Farewell, My Lovely.

TICKET ALERT: CAROL BURNETT AT THE BEACON

Comic legend Carol Burnett is coming to the Beacon for two audience-based shows in September

Who: Carol Burnett
What: Carol Burnett: An Evening of Laughter & Reflection
Where: Beacon Theatre, 2124 Broadway between West 74th & 75th Sts.
When: Friday, September 16, and Saturday, September 17, $59.50-$179.50, 8:00
Why: Tickets go on sale Thursday, February 11, at 10:00 am for two special appearances by legendary comedian extraordinaire Carol Burnett, who will be at the Beacon Theatre on September 16 & 17 for two evenings of conversation built around audience questions, based on the opening minutes of The Carol Burnett Show, so every night will be different. “I love the spontaneity of these evenings. I never know what anybody is going to say or do or ask, so it keeps me on my toes,” the eighty-two-year-old Burnett said in a statement announcing the event. In addition to starring in her hugely influential variety series, the Texas-born Burnett has also appeared in such films as A Wedding, The Four Seasons, and Annie, starred onstage in such shows as Once Upon a Mattress, Plaza Suite, and Love Letters, and written such books as One More Time and This Time Together: Laughter and Reflection. Be sure to keep a look-out for that famous earlobe tug.

PRODIGAL SON

Jim Quinn (Timothée Chalamet) shares his dreams with Louise Schmitt (Annika Boras) in John Patrick Shanley’s latest memory play (photo © 2016 by Joan Marcus)

Manhattan Theatre Club
New York City Center Stage 1
Through March 27, $90
212-581-1212
prodigalsonplay.com

John Patrick Shanley’s Prodigal Son is exactly the kind of play that makes us love the theater: a beautifully written, directed, and acted work about believable people we can respect, in realistic situations that entertain and educate us about ourselves and others. Prodigal Son, which Shanley both wrote and directs, is the culmination of his unofficial autobiographical trilogy, which began with 1991’s Beggars in the House of Plenty and continued with 2004’s Doubt: A Parable; all three have been first presented by Manhattan Theatre Club. In this world premiere, which opened last night at City Center, Timothée Chalamet stars as Jim Quinn, a bright but confused adolescent from the Bronx who is off to the Thomas More Preparatory School in New Hampshire after having problems at previous educational institutions. “Do you remember fifteen? For me, it was a special, beautiful room in hell,” he tells the audience at the start. The school’s founder and director, Carl Schmitt (Chris McGarry), a devout Catholic, decides to take a chance on the tough-talking, working-class Jim. “We don’t have another boy like him,” he explains to Alan Hoffman (Robert Sean Leonard), the head of the English department who becomes a mentor to Jim. A lonely kid obsessed with poetry, Nazis, and defending and supporting his older brother who is a soldier in Vietnam (the play takes place from 1965 to 1968), Jim gets into fights with fellow students, steals odd objects, drinks apricot brandy, and breaks other rules that should get him expelled, but Mr. Schmitt sticks with him. “He’s the most interesting mess we have this year,” he says to Mr. Hoffman. But as much trouble as he is, Jim is also an extremely clever young dreamer with fascinating insight into life. “It’s a prison to think things are impossible,” he says to his math-nerd roommate, Austin Lord Schmitt (David Potters), Mr. Schmitt’s nephew. Later, meeting with Louise Schmitt (Annika Boras), Mr. Schmitt’s wife and an English teacher at the school, Jim says, “People are born somebody. They don’t choose who they are. I was born me. I don’t get to be somebody else, even if I want to be someone else.” “Do you want to be somebody else?” Mrs. Schmitt asks. “What’s it matter? I can’t be,” he responds. “I’m Jim Quinn. I was born Jim Quinn and I’ll die Jim Quinn.” It all comes to a head as graduation nears and Jim’s immediate future is very much in doubt.

John Patrick Shanley goes back to prep school in PRODIGAL SON (photo © 2016 by Joan Marcus)

Prodigal Son is a deeply personal story, based on Shanley’s real experiences at the real Thomas More school, which was founded and run by the real Mr. Schmitt. (In fact, a special preview of the play was recently held for current and former students and faculty members.) It’s no surprise that the show is highly literate, with discussions of “The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam,” Plato and Socrates, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin and Sigmund Freud, and T. S. Eliot’s “The Wasteland” that avoid getting overly pedantic. The five characters are extremely well drawn, avoiding genre stereotypes while including several shocking plot twists. Chalamet (Homeland, Interstellar), a graduate of the LaGuardia High School of Performing Arts and who was born and raised in Hell’s Kitchen, is a whirlwind as Jim, gesticulating wildly — much of which was inspired by Shanley’s (Moonstruck, Outside Mullingar) own proclivities — and approaching the world with eyes wide open, hopeful for the possibilities it offers while worried he might never find his place in it. McGarry, who has previously appeared in Shanley’s Doubt, Defiance, Dirty Story, and Where’s My Money?, is steadfast as Mr. Schmitt, a God-fearing man whose convictions are severely tested by Jim. Boras (Chair, The Broken Heart) is radiant as Mrs. Schmitt, a bright and charming woman who is much more than a mere appendage of her husband; her involvement with Jim is critical to his potential success. Santo Loquasto’s engaging set includes a miniature version of the school in the back and bare trees on the sides that move as various rooms slide in and off the stage; the interstitial music is by Paul Simon, with lighting by Natasha Katz. But at the center of it all is the Tony-, Pulitzer-, and Oscar-winning Shanley himself, finally sharing a story he’s wanted to tell for decades. “I wish you could have been there,” Shanley writes in a program note. After experiencing Prodigal Son, you’ll feel like you were.