twi-ny recommended events

TICKET ALERT: FULL BUNNY CONTACT

Full Bunny Contact is back for another year of fiendish battles with humans

FULL BUNNY CONTACT
The Clemente Soto Vélez Cultural and Educational Center
107 Suffolk St. between Rivington & Delancey Sts.
April 1-5, $10-$60
www.fullbunnycontact.com

Easter has always been a rather violent holiday. Every spring, we bite the heads off of chocolate rabbits and devour their colored eggs like candy, at least in part to attempt to get even for the punishment inflicted on the human race by giant killer bunnies in the cult classic Night of the Lepus. For the second year, Full Bunny Contact, billed as an “extreme Egg Hunt and Insane Easter Carnival,” offers a unique way to celebrate Easter while taking on the Easter Bunny himself. From April 1 to 5, the Clemente Soto Vélez Cultural and Educational Center will be home to a bizarre group of activities that you can just marvel at or get in on the hot action. General admission is $10, with individual game tickets an additional charge; for $60, you get to go hog wild, with a free drink as a bonus. But how can you pass up such games as Ride the Rabid Rabbit, Shoot the Peep, Bunny Warrior Joust, Psychotic Bunny Fortune Teller, Take a Picture with the Insult Bunny, Egg Put, ESP-ster Island, and Bunny Ball? Winners receive prizes ranging from candy to cold, hard cash. There will also be food, live music, the April Fools Day Ball, the FBC Bunny Beauty Pageant, the FBC Temper Tantrum Contest (“I wanna Easter egg! I wanna Easter egg!”) and other forms of maniacal entertainment. In our 2014 interview with FBC founder Timothy Haskell, the impresario explained, “Holidays are fantastic. I think people love celebrating them, and I think Easter in this city has lost its youthfulness. I hope this event brings some of that back.” The 2015 edition is directed by John Harlacher, who previously collaborated with Haskell on his annual Nightmare haunted house, and produced by Daniel Demello and Nathaniel Nowak. Oh, did we forget to mention the main event? In the game that gives the entire evening its name, FBC, participants are locked in a steel cage with giant Easter bunnies (again, think Night of the Lepus) from whom they must take as many eggs as they can in one minute to win yet more valuable, invaluable, or pretty much worthless prizes.

WIM WENDERS: THE SALT OF THE EARTH

Sebastião Salgado is shown photographing the planet — and trying to save the world — in THE SALT OF THE EARTH

THE SALT OF THE EARTH (Wim Wenders & Juliano Ribero Salgado, 2014)
MoMA Film, Museum of Modern Art
11 West 53rd St. between Fifth & Sixth Aves.
Saturday, March 7, 7:45
Series runs March 2-17
Tickets: $12, in person only, may be applied to museum admission within thirty days, same-day screenings free with museum admission, available at Film and Media Desk beginning at 9:30 am
212-708-9400
www.sonyclassics.com
www.moma.org

Over the course of his storied five-decade career, German-born auteur and photographer Wim Wenders has alternated between making documentaries, primarily about other artists (Pina Bausch, Yasujirō Ozu, the Buena Vista Social Club) and fiction films, often unique takes on the road movie in which photographs play a key role (Paris, Texas; Alice in the Cities, Kings of the Road). In his latest work, Wenders has found one subject that combines his many interests, as he follows the remarkable adventures of Brazilian photographer and environmentalist Sebastião Salgado, who has traveled the world taking stunning pictures of the land and native peoples. In The Salt of the Earth, which was nominated for a Best Documentary Feature Oscar and won the Un Certain Regard special jury prize at the Cannes Film Festival and the César at France’s national film awards, Wenders teams up with Salgado’s son, filmmaker Juliano Ribero Salgado (Suzana; Nauru, an Island Adrift), as they accompany Salgado on his journeys and talk about his work, which consists predominantly of black-and-white photographs in such social justice series as “Workers” and “Migrations” and his most recent, the nature-themed“Genesis,” which was just shown at ICP. In the documentary, Salgado is shown rolling around on a shore to get a picture of a polar bear in the Arctic Circle, heading down into the mines of Brazil, meeting the Yali in Papua New Guinea, and sitting on a mountain, contemplating the future of the planet.

Sebastião Salgado talks about his life and work in Oscar-nominated documentary directed by his son and Wim Wenders

Salgado is not only photographing parts of the world devoid of technological modernity but is also involved, with his wife and curator, Lélia Wanick Salgado, in returning to nature, having planted more than two million trees to rebuild part of the Atlantic Forest on his family’s land in Brazil and starting Instituto Terra, a nonprofit community organization dedicated to restoring the ecosystem. “A photographer is literally somebody drawing with light, a man writing and rewriting the world with light and shadows,” Wenders narrates in the film. “Little did I know that I was going to discover much more than just a photographer.” Using a semitransparent mirror, Wenders also conducts interviews with Salgado, who is seen in front of a screen, looking at his photographs while discussing them. Other times the only thing on camera is Salgado’s bald head against a black background, as he peers into the camera to share his tale, including his relationship with his wife and children. “If you put many photographers in one place, they’ll all take very different pictures,” Salgado says. “Each one forms their way of seeing according to their history.” As The Salt of the Earth ably displays, Salgado has a fascinating history. The Salt of the Earth is being shown at MoMA on March 7 at 7:45 as part of a two-plus-week Wenders retrospective in advance of the film’s March 27 theatrical release; Wenders, who just received the Golden Bear for lifetime achievement at the Berlin Film Festival, and Juliano Ribero Salgado, whose next film will be a psychological thriller, will introduce the work and participate in a postscreening discussion. The series continues through March 17 with such other Wenders films as The American Friend, Wings of Desire, Until the End of the World, Tokyo-Ga, The Goalie’s Anxiety at the Penalty Kick, and other well-known gems and rare early shorts, with Wenders at the museum for Q&As and introductions at all screenings through March 7.

SEE IT BIG! HIGH AND WIDE: HIGH AND LOW

A group of men try to find kidnappers in Akira Kurosawa’s tense noir / police procedural

HIGH AND LOW (TENGOKU TO JIGOKU) (Akira Kurosawa, 1963)
Museum of the Moving Image
35th Ave. at 36th St., Astoria
Saturday, March 7, $12, 4:30
Series runs March 6-13
718-777-6800
www.movingimage.us
www.reverseshot.org

On the verge of being forced out of the company he has dedicated his life to, National Shoes executive Kingo Gondo’s (Toshirō Mifune) life is thrown into further disarray when kidnappers claim to have taken his son, Jun (Toshio Egi), and are demanding a huge ransom for his safe return. But when Gondo discovers that they have mistakenly grabbed Shinichi (Masahiko Shimazu), the son of his chauffeur, Aoki (Yutaka Sada), he at first refuses to pay. But at the insistence of his wife (Kyogo Kagawa), the begging of Aoki, and the advice of police inspector Taguchi (Kenjiro Ishiyama), he reconsiders his decision, setting in motion a riveting police procedural that is filled with tense emotion. Loosely based on Ed McBain’s 87th Precinct novel King’s Ransom, Akira Kurosawa’s High and Low, photographed by longtime Kurosawa cinematographer Asakazu Nakai, is divided into two primary sections: The first half takes place in Gondo’s luxury home, orchestrated like a stage play as the characters are developed and the plan takes hold. The second part of the film follows the police, under the leadership of Chief Detective Tokura (Tatsuya Nakadai), as they hit the streets of the seedier side of Yokohama in search of the kidnappers. Known in Japan as Tengoku to Jigoku, which translates as Heaven and Hell, High and Low is an expert noir, a subtle masterpiece that tackles numerous socioeconomic and cultural issues as Gondo weighs the fate of his business against the fate of a small child; it all manages to feel as fresh and relevant today as it probably did back in the ’60s.

Kingo Gondo (Toshirō Mifune) has some tough decisions to make in HIGH AND LOW

High and Low is screening March 7 at 4:30 as part of the Museum of the Moving Image series “See It Big! High and Wide,” which runs March 6-13 in conjunction with the Reverse Shot online symposium “Take Five: Reverse Shot in Space.” “High and Low is a particularly emphatic example of Kurosawa’s attention to spatial continuity over the course of an entire film,” Ben Parker writes on Reverse Shot. “The title announces one spatial organization, the vertical juxtaposition of prosperous legality — symbolized by the hilltop estate of shoe executive Kingo Gondo — and the miasmic squalor and slinking resentment of the urban lower depths. But the very look of the film tells a different story. High and Low was shot using the TohoScope process, drastically widening the frame for an aspect ratio of 2.35:1. However much the social and moral themes of the film are posed along the vertical axis . . . the images and compositions are constrained to the horizontal. Ultimately, Kurosawa is attempting to undo the vertical binary of postwar Japanese society. This ‘leveling,’ however, is not as simple as filming in wide screen. Rather, the visual theme of the film culminates in its hard-won conclusion. In the last scene, Kurosawa arrives at a very different leveling of social space than that imagined by the diseased resentment of his villain.” The eight-day festival also includes such films as Jacques Tati’s Playtime, Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s A Matter of Life and Death, George Stevens’s Shane, and Elem Klimo’s Come and See.

NEW YORK ART FAIR WEEK 2015: FREE FAIRS

Héctor Zamora’s O ABUSO DA HISTÓRIA will be shown at Moving Image art fair (courtesy Luciana Brito Galeria)

This year’s March edition of New York Art Fair Week — the city will be overrun with fairs again in May — features no fewer than a dozen shows, including Volta, Scope, Art on Paper, the Independent, Pulse, Spring/Break, and the granddaddy of them all, the Armory Show. If you want to see each one of them, it’s gonna cost a pretty penny, upwards of two hundred bucks total. But there are five fairs that offer free admission and a respite from the craziness that goes on at the ticketed shows.

Who: Nearly three dozen video artists, including Charlie Ahearn, Peggy Ahwesh, Oliver Bevan, Raphael Couto, Tuomas A. Laitinen, Pink Twins, and Héctor Zamora
What: Moving Image
Where: Waterfront Tunnel, 269 Eleventh Ave. between 27th & 28th Sts.
When: March 5-8, free
Why: Moving Image is a video art fan’s dream, lining the passageway in the Waterfront Tunnel in Chelsea with a multitude of innovative short works. On Saturday at noon, Sean Elwood will moderate the panel discussion and networking session “How Do Artists Secure Funding for Film and Video Artwork?” with Chris Doyle, Guy Richards Smit, Patrik Söderlund, and Eve Sussman, followed at 2:00 by “Moving Image: Instant Upload” with Alex McQuilkin, Alice Gray Stites, Amy Taubin, Rachael Rakes, and Zoë Salditch, moderated by Andrea Monti and Elle Burchill.

Sabrina Barrios will be among the artists exhibiting at the (un)Scene

Who: More than eighty visual, tech, and performance artists, including Carlos Betancourt, Sabrina Barrios, Will Kurtz, Chris Ofili, Matt Lombard, Eunjin Kim, Carolee Schneeman, Frederico Uribe, Monika Weiss, Matthew Silver, and Kelly McLaughlin
What: The (un)Scene Art Show
Where: 549 West 52nd St. between Tenth & Eleventh Aves.
When: March 4-8, free
Why: Renamed from last year’s (Un)Fair designation, the (un)Scene Art Show seeks to “celebrate passion rather than fashion.” This year’s edition features numerous “Happenings,” including such live performances as Moon Ribas’s Waiting for Earthquakes, Jade Fusco’s Talking Tapestry, TunanuT’s Group Love, Nicole Woolcott’s Paper Pieces, Kate Brehm’s The Proofs, and Danielle Russo Dance Company’s Since thou was precious in my sight. There will also be an art and dance party hosted by Brock Enright, such panel discussions as “The Radical Eye: Why Artists Must Curate” with Anne Harris, “The (un)TALK” with Raoul Middleman, and “The Art Pollution Crisis (Three-Step Detox Program)” with Alex Melamid, and other events.

Who: Artists who are not represented by a New York City gallery
What: Clio Art Fair: The Anti-Fair for Independent Artists
Where: 508 West 26th St. between Tenth & Eleventh Aves.
When: March 5-8, free
Why: The Clio Art Fair lets their artists run wild without worrying about art market constraints and rules; there was a charming freshness to last year’s inaugural edition that the others lack, caring about the art and the artists ahead of the sale and actually enjoying itself, which rubs off on visitors.

Takahiro Hirabayashi will be among the artists showing at New City (courtesy Gallery Kogure)

Who: Nearly three dozen artists from eight Japanese galleries
What: New City Art Fair
Where: hpgrp Gallery New York, 529 West 20th St. between Tenth & Eleventh Aves.
When: March 5-8, free
Why: Now in its fourth year, New City concentrates on Japanese contemporary art. Programs include studio visits with Spoon & Tamago and a presentation by Pola Museum Annex.

Who: Polly Apfelbaum, BTHY, Fransje Killaars, Pushpamala N., Dona Nelson, Diana Shpungin, and Sarah Tritz
What: Salon Zürcher
Where: Salon Zürcher New York, 33 Bleecker St. between Lafayette & Bowery
When: March 5-12, free
Why: In its third edition, Salon Zürcher will highlight work by seven women artists shown by seven international galleries, including India, the United States, France, and the Netherlands.

FASHIONS FOR MEN / ROCKET TO THE MOON

Peter Juhász (Joe Delafield) gets quite a surprise from his wife, Adele (Annie Purcell), in Mint revival of FASHIONS FOR MEN (photo by Richard Termine)

FASHIONS FOR MEN
Mint Theater
311 West 43rd St. between Eighth & Ninth Aves.
Tuesday – Sunday through April 12, $27.50-$65
866-811-4111
www.minttheater.org

A current pair of off-Broadway revivals, one a 1917 Hungarian comedy, the other a 1938 American drama, tackle remarkably similar topics, albeit in very different ways. Written by extremely successful playwrights, each follows an overly kind business owner dealing with relationship issues and financial problems, featuring a number of similar characters and situations, but whereas one ends up stumbling to the finish line, the other reaches it with head held high. The Mint Theater, which resuscitates forgotten, neglected works, breathes fashionable new life into Ferenc Molnár’s Fashions for Men, which could alternately be called The Haberdashery Around the Corner. Joe Delafield stars as Peter Juhász, the tall, proper owner of a reputable clothing shop catering to a wealthy, annoying clientele. He has such a gentle, forgiving nature that he can’t get angry when one of his employees, Oscar (John Tufts), steals his wife, Adele (Annie Purcell), and they take off with a hefty sum of cash Peter had set aside in an account for her. Peter doesn’t want to go back to his primary backer, the fabulously wealthy, playfully pompous Count (Kurt Rhoads), an older gentleman who has his eyes on Peter’s beautiful young employee Paula (Rachel Napoleon). Meanwhile, another of Peter’s salesmen, Philip (Jeremy Lawrence), watches all the shenanigans with knowing glances. The second act, which takes place in the Count’s extravagant estate, gets bogged down in repetitive slapstick as Peter is determined to protect Paula’s purity, but the first and third acts, set in Daniel Zimmerman’s wonderfully designed haberdashery, are a joy. The cast, dressed in appropriate finery by costumer Martha Hally, is uniformly excellent, with particularly keen turns by Rhoads and Delafield, who is so up-to-snuff playing the absurdly good Peter you’ll want to slap him around to get him to finally face reality and stand up for himself. Director Davis McCallum (London Wall, The Few) keeps it all flowing smoothly in a way that would make Ernst Lubitsch proud. Mint artistic director Jonathan Bank has tweaked Benjamin Glazer’s 1921 translation with the help of Agnes Niemitz and Gábor Lukin, Molnár’s great-grandson; the original English-language version opened on Broadway in December 1922. Molnár might not be a household name, but several of his works are, adapted into such films as Carousel, The Guardsman, The Swan, The Devil, and One, Two, Three.

Dr. Stark (Ned Eisenberg) has quite a surprise for his wife, Belle (Marilyn Matarrese), in Pecadillo revival of ROCKET TO THE MOON (photo by Carol Rosegg)

ROCKET TO THE MOON
Theatre at St. Clement’s
423 West 46th St. between Ninth & Tenth Aves.
Tuesday – Sunday through March 28, $75-$95
www.thepeccadillo.com

Another troupe that rediscovers classic works, the Peccadillo Theater Company, has brought back Clifford Odets’s Rocket to the Moon in a solid production that ultimately reveals the play’s severe flaws. One of America’s most important and influential writers, Odets penned such plays as Golden Boy, The Big Knife, Awake and Sing! and The Country Girl and such films as None but the Lonely Heart, Humoresque, and Sweet Smell of Success. In Rocket to the Moon, which debuted on Broadway in 1938 with Luther Adler, Morris Carnovsky, Leif Erickson, and Sanford Meisner, Odets tells the sad-sack story of Dr. Ben Stark (Ned Eisenberg), a mensch of a dentist with a shrewish, overbearing wife, Belle (Marilyn Matarrese), who is none too thrilled with the sexy new office girl, nineteen-year-old Cleo Singer (Katie McClellan). Belle is also not happy that her husband is letting his fellow dentist, dour tenant Phil Cooper (Larry Bull), fall well behind on his rent. Despite their financial problems, Belle does not want Ben to accept a generous offer from her dapper, estranged father, Mr. Prince (Jonathan Hadary), to set him up in a fancier office in a better location and with more modern technology. At the same time, Ben is none too thrilled that the fabulously wealthy, playfully pompous Mr. Prince has his eyes on Cleo, as does one of Ben’s patients, a hotshot swinger named Willy Wax (Lou Liberatore) who is zeroing in on her as his next conquest. Meanwhile, Ben’s podiatrist neighbor, Frenchy (Michael Keyloun), watches all the shenanigans, sharing his perverse opinion seemingly without a care in the world. The cast is uniformly excellent, with particularly fine turns by Bull, McClellan, and Odets veteran Eisenberg, who excels as the infuriatingly indecisive Ben — getting Ben to stand up for himself is like pulling teeth. Precisely directed by Dan Wackerman (Ten Chimneys, The Man Who Came to Dinner), Rocket to the Moon soars in the first act, but the second act gets bogged down in a dreary battle between Mr. Prince and Dr. Stark over Cleo that is dated, misogynistic, and just plain tiresome. Odets tries too hard to make grand statements about family and responsibility in an America that is still rattling from the Depression and soon to get involved in WWII; the play works best when it gets right down to business, delving into the very human need for intimacy, understanding, compassion, and, most of all, love. But that’s precisely what you’ll find, along with a wry sense of humor, at the Mint’s stellar revival of Fashions for Men.

FIRST SATURDAY: WOMEN CHANGEMAKERS

Curator tour of “Judith Scott: Bound Unbound” is part of free First Saturday program at Brooklyn Museum (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

Curator tour of “Judith Scott — Bound and Unbound” is part of free First Saturdays program at Brooklyn Museum (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

Brooklyn Museum
200 Eastern Parkway at Washington St.
Saturday, March 7, free, 5:00 – 11:00
212-864-5400
www.brooklynmuseum.org

The Brooklyn Museum celebrates women in the March edition of its free First Saturdays program. “Women Changemakers” will feature live performances by Alissia & the Funketeers, Princess Nokia, and the DJ duo JSMN and MeLo-X; a curator talk by Catherine Morris about the exhibition “Judith Scott — Bound and Unbound”; a Colored Girls Hustle mix tape workshop; a sketch class in which participants will draw from a live woman model; a book club talk with Dao X Tran, author of 101 Changemakers: Rebels and Radicals Who Changed U.S. History; screenings of Julianna Brannum’s LaDonna Harris: Indian 101 and Rahwa Asmerom’s Didn’t I Ask for Tea?; a healing space with tarot readings, herbalism, acupressure, and more led by Harriet’s Apothecary; and a discussion with Tavi Gevinson about her online Rookie magazine and the print companion Rookie Yearbook Three. In addition, you can check out such exhibitions as “Revolution! Works from the Black Arts Movement,” “Kehinde Wiley: A New Republic,” “The Dinner Party by Judy Chicago,” and “Chitra Ganesh: Eyes of Time.”

THE ADAM CAROLLA SHOW PODCAST AND FILM PREMIERE

Adam Carolla will be at Carolines this week for live podcasts and the NYC premiere of his new film, ROAD HARD

Who: Adam Carolla and special guests
What: Two-night stand in Times Square
Where: Carolines on Broadway, 1626 Broadway between 49th & 50th Sts., 212-757-4100
When: Live podcast March 4-5, $54.50 – $125.25, 7:00/7:30; film premiere March 5, $22, 9:00
Why: In his most recent book, President Me: The America That’s in My Head (It Books, May 2014, $26.99), podcast king and former Man Show cohost Adam Carolla writes, “Consider this book my official campaign platform. As you’ll see, I have an assload of opinions and a dump truck full of ideas on how to make this country better.” Carolla continues his presidential aspirations this week at Carolines, where on Wednesday and Thursday he’ll host live editions of his ferociously popular podcast, The Adam Carolla Show, joined by David Alan Grier on March 4 and Alec Baldwin on March 5. The March 5 podcast will be followed by the separately ticketed New York City premiere of his directorial feature debut, Road Hard, which Carolla wrote with Kevin Hench (The Hammer) and stars in alongside a bevy of actors and comedians, including Grier, Diane Farr, David Koechner, Illeana Douglas, Howie Mandel, Jay Mohr, Dana Gould, and Larry Miller.