Who: Billy Idol, with special guest Broncho
What: Kings & Queens of the Underground Live World Tour
Where: Beacon Theater, 2124 Broadway between 74th & 75th Sts., 212-465-6500
When: Wednesday, January 28, $44.50-$105, 8:00
Why: William Michael Albert Broad, better known as Billy Idol, comes to the Beacon on the heels of the release of his autobiography, Dancing with Myself (Touchstone, October 2014), and new album, Kings & Queens of the Underground (Kobalt, October 2014), featuring such songs as “Bitter Pill,” “Save Me Now,” and “Postcards from the Past”
twi-ny recommended events
DA
Ciarán O’Reilly and Paul O’Brien star as a son and father looking back at the past in DA (photo by Carol Rosegg)
Irish Repertory Theatre
DR2 Theatre
103 East 15th St. between Irving Pl. & Park Ave.
Tuesday – Sunday through April 5, $70
212-727-2737
www.irishrep.org
During renovation of its permanent home on West Twenty-Second St., the Irish Repertory Theatre has moved into the cozy DR2 Theatre in Union Square, presenting a cozy revival of Hugh Leonard’s cozy Tony-winning 1978 play, Da. It’s May 1968, and Charlie (Irish Rep producing director Ciarán O’Reilly) has returned to the cluttered family home in Dublin following the death of his father, who he called Da (Paul O’Brien). While cleaning up the house, he is visited by his childhood friend Oliver (the curiously coiffed John Keating), who starts dredging up memories for Charlie. As soon as Oliver leaves, Charlie, a playwright, is then visited by his late father, a gardener who seems not quite ready for the afterlife, instead hanging around, sitting in his chair, and preparing for tea. “I’ve a cupful,” Charlie says. “It’s empty,” Da responds. “It’s full,” the son declares, setting the stage for the two to confront disagreements they had as father and son. As the memories flood forth, Charlie watches his younger self (Adam Petherbridge) flirt with local girl Mary Tate (Nicola Murphy) and get a job with the strict, straightforward Drumm (Sean Gormley); his beloved mother, Maggie Tynan (Fiana Toibin), is back as well. “I’d forgotten what she looked like,” the older Charlie says wistfully. He watches scenes from his and his family’s life play out right in front of him but can’t do anything about it, wondering if he made the right choices. But at the center of it all is Charlie’s relationship with Da, who often embarrassed him, particularly when it came to girls, Hitler, and his mother. “Say nothing. Ignore him,” Charlie tells his younger self at the beginning of the second act as his father is relating an old story. But it’s too late to change things now.
Revival of Hugh Leonard’s Tony-winning play is at Irish Rep’s temporary home in Union Square (photo by Carol Rosegg)
Irish Rep artistic director Charlotte Moore guides the production with a gentle hand as the characters move between the past and the present on James Morgan’s comfy living room/kitchen set. It takes a while to warm to O’Brien and O’Reilly as father and son, because they appear to be too close in age, but once things get going, the characters all fall into step. O’Reilly is pensive and reflective as Charlie, who does not want to look back at what was and what could have been. O’Brien is somewhat rough at first but soon settles down in a role made famous by Barnard Hughes in the original Tony-winning Broadway production in 1978, which featured Brian Murray as Charlie, Sylvia O’Brien as Charlie’s mother, and Mia Dillon as Mary Tate. (Matt Clark’s 1988 film starred Hughes as Da, Martin Sheen as Charlie, and William Hickey as Drumm.) Da is a lovely little play, a tenderhearted story of the ties that bind family together — and that can lead to a painful loss of innocence.
CHOPIN: DANCES FOR PIANO
Jerome Robbins’s IN THE NIGHT is part of Chopin evening presented by the Mariinsky Ballet at BAM (photo by N. Razina)
THE MARIINSKY BALLET
BAM Howard Gilman Opera House
Peter Jay Sharp Building
230 Lafayette Ave.
January 24 (7:30) & 25 (3:00), $30-$175
718-636-4100
www.bam.org
www.mariinsky.ru/en
St. Petersburg’s legendary Mariinsky Theatre, now in its 232nd season, concludes its nearly two-week residency at BAM with the Mariinsky Ballet performing Chopin: Dances for Piano, a lovely evening of three diverse works that effortlessly blend together. The program, with Valery Gergiev serving as musical director, begins with Michel Fokine’s elegant 1908 piece Chopiniana, with revised choreography by Agrippina Vaganova, in which eighteen women dressed in white tutus with small wings attached at the back surround several principal dancers, including the sole male, Timur Askerov, forming different groupings, from circles to lines, often coming to a stop in difficult yet beautiful positions, in front of a forest set designed by Vladimir Dementiev and Alexei Popov based on original sketches by Orest Allegri. The relative quiet of Alexandra Zhilina’s piano allows the percussive tapping of their in-union en-pointe movement to echo through the Howard Gilman Opera House. Chopiniana is followed by Benjamin Millepied’s dynamic 2011 work Without, in which five pairs of dancers, the women in red, orange, green, blue, and violet dresses, the men in similarly colored tops, with black pants and shoes (Millepied designed the costumes as well), interact with strong emotions, creating different relationships in short vignettes; it’s quite a relief when the dancers finally match up by color. On January 24, the pairings were Anastasia Matvienko and Konstantin Zverev, Kristina Shapran and Andrey Ermakov, Ndezhda Batoeva and Filipp Stepin, Tatiana Tiliguzova and Ernest Latypov, and Margarita Frolova and Xander Parish, with Philipp Kopachevsky playing Chopin preludes and études. If you took Chopiniana and Without and mixed them together, you’d end up with Jerome Robbins’s splendid 1970 piece, In the Night. In this staging by Ben Huys, stars twinkle on a back curtain as three couples (Anastasia Matvienko and Filipp Stepin, Yekaterina Kondaurova and Yevgeny Ivanchenko, and Viktoria Tereshkina and Yuri Smekalov) perform a series of graceful pas de deux in costumes by Anthony Dowell, with Liudmila Sveshnikova at the piano. Chopin: Dances for Piano is an exquisite trip through the history of the Mariinsky, with works separated by more than one hundred years, set to the majestic music of a masterful composer.
NEW YORK JEWISH FILM FESTIVAL: THE GO-GO BOYS
Documentary looks into the life and career of Menahem Golan and Yoram Globus
THE GO-GO BOYS: THE INSIDE STORY OF CANNON FILMS (Hilla Medalia, 2014)
Film Society of Lincoln Center, Walter Reade Theater
165 West 65th St. between Eighth Ave. & Broadway
Thursday, January 29, 1:00 & 6:15
Festival runs through January 29
212-875-5050
www.filmlinc.com
www.facebook.com
At the beginning of The Go-Go Boys: The Inside Story of Cannon Films, director Hilla Medalia asks Menahem Golan, “How do you become a filmmaker?” He answers, “Don’t do anything else.” For most of his life, that is exactly what Golan did. He started out making movies as a kid, then went into business with his cousin, Yoram Globus. The Israeli dynamic duo formed quite a pair, Golan the outgoing, bombastic, viciously driven writer, director, and producer, Globus the behind-the-scenes moneyman and dealmaker. The Go-Go Boys documents their careers as they first succeed in Israel with such movies as Eldorado and Sallah Shabati, the latter starring Topol and earning an Oscar nomination for Best Foreign Language Film, then setting off to take over Hollywood, where in 1979 they bought Cannon Films, specializing in the rapid-fire release of low-budget schlock and exploitation pictures. All told, Golan and Globus made more than two hundred films, from Death Wish II with Charles Bronson and American Ninja with Michael Dudikoff to Missing in Action and The Delta Force with Chuck Norris and New Year’s Evil with Roz Kelly, from King Solomon’s Mines with Richard Chamberlain and Sharon Stone and The Last American Virgin to John Cassavetes’s Love Streams and John Derek’s Bolero with Bo Derek. Golan and Globus are perhaps most well known for their biggest failures: The Apple, considered one of the worst films ever made; Over the Top, in which they overspent and overreached with Sylvester Stallone in a misguided mess about arm wrestling; and Superman IV: The Quest for Peace, which led to their ultimate downfall.
Israeli cousins Menahem Golan and Yoram Globus sought to become the kings of Hollywood — and did for a while
Both Golan and Globus sit down for new interviews with Medalia, who also speaks with Joel Silberg, whose Breakin’ firmly established the duo as real players; Israeli actors Yehuda Barkan (Lupo Goes to New York) and Yehoram Gaon (Kazablan), who share funny vignettes about working with them; director Boaz Davidson (Lemon Popsicle), who says, “They were the Israeli Hollywood”; director Andrei Konchalovsky and actor Jon Voight, who made Runaway Train, which tallied three Oscar nominations; Jean-Claude Van Damme (Bloodsport), who talks about crying in front of Golan while trying to get a job; and writer-director Eli Roth, who discusses the influence of their work on him. Medalia also meets with members of Golan and Globus’s family, as their wives and children relate stories about the pair’s utter dedication to cinema, often at the expense of being around. But as Globus’s son Ram says, “They completed one another. It was a train that couldn’t be stopped.” The film is a bit of a rehashed mishmash; even at a mere eighty-five minutes, it is overloaded with old interviews and entertainment segments; although it’s fun seeing some of Ed Bradley’s 60 Minutes report on how Golan and Globus took over the Cannes Film Festival — where, appropriately enough, The Go-Go Boys premiered, in May 2014 — far too much of the TV program is shown. The documentary also doesn’t delve quite deep enough into how really bad so many of their pictures were, giving their stunning low quality relatively short shrift. When Medalia says to Golan, who passed away last summer at the age of eighty-five, “I want to hear about the failures,” he responds quite defiantly, “There were none.” The Go-Go Boys is screening at the New York Jewish Film Festival on January 29 at 1:00 and 6:15 at the Walter Reade Theater; the twenty-fourth annual festival continues through that night with screenings and special events at the Film Society of Lincoln Center and the Jewish Museum.
EL GRECO AT THE FRICK COLLECTION / EL GRECO IN NEW YORK
El Greco, “St. Jerome,” oil on canvas, 1590-1600, Henry Clay Frick Bequest (photo by Michael Bodycomb)
EL GRECO AT THE FRICK COLLECTION
The Frick Collection
1 East 70th St. at Fifth Ave.
Tuesday – Sunday through February 1, $20 (pay-what-you-wish Sundays 11:00 am – 1:00 pm)
212-288-0700
www.frick.org
In the summer of 2008, the Frick moved six of its masterpieces from the Living Hall to the Oval Room while the former was being refurbished, offering art lovers the opportunity to view such Frick favorites as Hans Holbein the Younger’s breathtaking “Sir Thomas More” and El Greco’s marvelous “St. Jerome” in close conjunction and different surroundings, giving them a kind of new lease on life. In celebration of the quadricentennial of the death of Crete-born artist Domenikos Theotokopoulos, better known as El Greco, the Frick has moved all three of its paintings by the Spanish master into the Oval Room: “St. Jerome,” “Vincenzo Anastagi,” and “Purification of the Temple.” Presented side by side for the first time ever, the trio forms a striking triumvirate. In the center, above the fireplace, stands Italian knight Vincenzo Anastagi, wearing armor over his upper body and puffy green pantaloons, his helmet on the floor to his left, an open window barely visible to his right, his sword oddly showing through between his legs, a curtain behind him creating geometric shapes in the background. He is both mysterious and dignified. On one side of “Vincenzo Anastagi” is a rare religious scene purchased by Henry Clay Frick, “Purification of the Temple,” a small, richly dense, boldly colorful depiction of Christ throwing the moneychangers out of the temple. To Christ’s right are sinners, a relief of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden above them; to his left are his believers, a relief of Abraham about to sacrifice Isaac above them. El Greco’s brushwork dazzles in this compact, claustrophobic, emotionally powerful work. Meanwhile, on the other side of “Vincenzo Anastagi” resides “St. Jerome,” the biblical translator looking just away from the viewer. His head, ears, nose, gray-white beard, and fingers are elongated, his red robe sharply defined against a dark background. Up close, one can revel in the folds of his clothes, the touch of color peeking through the end of his white sleeves, his left thumb placed firmly in the margin of the Bible in front of him. His face is craggy and wrinkled, with dark, deep-set eyes and sunken cheekbones. The painting is centered by the vertical buttons running down St. Jerome’s robe, pulling at the viewer. It’s a striking portrait that is a joy to behold in this new setting, like experiencing it again for the first time.
El Greco (Domenikos Theotokopoulos), detail, “View of Toledo,” oil on canvas, ca. 1598–99 (The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, H. O. Havemeyer Collection)
EL GRECO IN NEW YORK
Metropolitan Museum of Art
1000 Fifth Ave. at 82nd St.
Gallery 608
Through Sunday, February 1, recommended admission $25
212-535-7710
www.metmuseum.org
A later version of El Greco’s portrait of St. Jerome, “Saint Jerome as Scholar,” is part of the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s “El Greco in New York,” which brings together all of their El Greco holdings along with those from the Hispanic Society of America, collected by Archer Huntington. The Met’s pieces are highlighted by the unfinished and truncated “The Vision of Saint John,” in which the apostle, in blue dress, dominates the left side of the frame, holding his hands up to the heavens, the color palette similar to the Frick’s “Purification of the Temple”; “Cardinal Fernando Niño de Guevara,” a portrait of the Spanish inquisitor in elegant dress sitting in a chair, his hands dangling over the armrests, with ornate wallpaper behind him and a sheet of paper at his feet, looking as if he is ruing what he has to do next; and “View of Toledo,” one of the greatest landscapes in art, with dark, foreboding clouds hovering over lush green fields and gray buildings, a condensed, ominous depiction of “the Holy City.” The Hispanic Society works include “Pietá,” showing Christ being carried in the center, the three crosses nearly hidden at the upper left, his mother in agony behind him; “The Holy Family,” with the baby Jesus nursing at his mother’s teat; the rare miniature “Portrait of a Man”; and “Saint Francis,” a side view of the friar that was originally part of a larger canvas. Over the course of the more than four hundred years since El Greco began painting, his work has been in and out of style, forgotten and rediscovered, widely hailed and sinfully dismissed. But the gathering of all his paintings in New York, from the Frick, the Met, and the Hispanic Society, reveal him to be a man ahead of his time, an artist whose influence continues to grow.
SUNDAYS ON BROADWAY
Yvonne Rainer’s CARRIAGE DISCRETENESS kicks off marathon opening of Sundays on Broadway winter season
Who: Cathy Weis Projects
What: Rare screening of 9 Evenings: Theatre and Engineering, documenting collaboration between experimental artists and Bell Labs in 1966 at the 69th Regiment Armory
Where: WeisAcres, 537 Broadway between Prince & Spring Sts., buzzer #3
When: Sunday, January 25, free, 2:00 (all future events at 8:00)
Why: The 2014 winter season of Sundays on Broadway begins on January 25 with a ten-hour marathon of 9 Evenings: Theatre and Engineering, consisting of films by David Tudor, John Cage, Deborah Hay, Övynid Fahlström, Robert Rauschenberg, Yvonne Rainer, Steve Paxton, Robert Whitman, Alex Hay, and Lucinda Childs; the salon-style series continues Sunday nights at 8:00 through March 29 with live performances, readings, film screenings, discussions, and more, including a selection of Trisha Brown’s early works on February 1 with Wendy Perron, a screening of Léonide Massine’s Choreartium on February 8 with Tatiana Massine Weinbaum, and a reading of Fortunato Depero’s unpublished Dramma plastico futurista by puppeteer Dan Hurlin on February 15 (advance reservations are required for the immersive installations taking place the last four Sundays in March with Jon Kinzel, Jennifer Miller, Vicky Shick, and others)
MATT BOLLINGER: READING ROOMS
Matt Bollinger, “The Reading Room,” flashe, acrylic, collage on unstretched canvas, 2014
Zürcher Studio
33 Bleecker St. at Mott St.
Tuesday – Sunday through January 30, free, 12 noon – 6:00 pm (Sunday 2:00 – 6:00)
212-777-0790
www.galeriezurcher.com
www.mattbollinger.com
Matt Bollinger’s latest exhibit at Zürcher Studio, “Reading Rooms,” is highlighted by a pair of stunning large-scale canvases, “The Reading Room” and “The Reservoir,” that depict old bookstore shelves; in the former, the shelves are collapsing in on themselves, books, paper, magazines, and garbage strewn about, while in the latter, the shelves are still standing and full, with books piled on the floor, but in both cases it feels like it’s been quite some time since someone has been there. The two works set the stage for the rest of the show, as if all the other paintings are pages from books from these shelves, each merging Bollinger’s — and the viewer’s — past and present. “I used to work in a bookstore,” Bollinger says in a catalog interview for his spring 2014 show at Zürcher in Paris, which also included “The Reservoir.” He continues, “It had a mold-riddled basement that I was always eager to explore; you could find all sorts of stuff down there. I want this picture of a bookstore to operate as a reservoir. A holder, a backdrop, for all the other reservoirs in the show.” Now Bollinger has symbolically transformed Zürcher’s Bleecker St. gallery into a kind of psychological library, with works that are like pages from a book. Among the chapters of Bollinger’s tome are “Mayhem,” “Nancy (Reflection),” “Odd Jobs,” “Brian in Nancy’s Room,” and “Sheet Rock,” featuring repeating characters. In the back room, “Renovations” consists of twenty-eight smaller pieces arranged in rows, creating another kind of narrative; nearby is a painting of the book’s torn cover. However, despite the serious nature of the paintings and how they bring up thoughts of the future of libraries and bookstores and hard copy, Bollinger, who was born in Kansas City and is based in Brooklyn, also says in the catalog, “I’ve been thinking about the obsolescence of the paper book, but I don’t want the pieces to be laments. I want the work to present treasures, private discoveries.” There are many treasures and private discoveries to be found in “Reading Rooms.”