twi-ny recommended events

LUNA PARK OPENING DAY 2015

First one hundred visitors will get a free ride on the Cyclone on Luna Park opening day

Luna Park in Coney Island
1000 Surf Ave.
Sunday, March 29, 12 noon – 8:00 pm
718-373-5862
lunaparknyc.com

It might not quite feel like spring yet, but on Sunday, March 29, Luna Park in Coney Island is set to open its gates to the public, a sure sign that summer will eventually be here. The centerpiece, of course, is the Cyclone, and the festivities will include a free ride on the historic wooden roller coaster, which turns eighty-eight this year, for the first one hundred visitors; there will also be a Cyclone trivia game, so study up. (Admission to the 110-second ride is otherwise nine dollars.) Among the other rides are the Thunderbolt, the Sling Shot, Zenobio, the Steeplechase, the Tickler, Wild River, Soarin Eagle, the Brooklyn Flyer, the Hang Glider, and Electro Spin.

ON THE 20th CENTURY

Oscar Jaffee (Peter Gallagher) is desperate for former flame Lily Garland (Kristin Chenoweth) to star in his next Broadway show (photo by Joan Marcus)

American Airlines Theatre
227 West 42nd St. between Broadway & Eighth Ave.
Tuesday – Sunday through January 4, $67-$142
212-719-1300
20thcenturyonbroadway.com
www.roundabouttheatre.org

“There’s something about a train that’s magic,” Richie Havens sang in a series of Amtrak commercials in the 1980s. There’s more than just a little magic in the first revival of Betty Comden, Adolph Green, and Cy Coleman’s 1978 screwball musical comedy, On the 20th Century, which has pulled into the American Airlines Theatre, brought back to glorious life by director Scott Ellis in this celebratory Roundabout production. It’s 1932, and suddenly bankrupt theatrical impresario Oscar Jaffee (Peter Gallagher), trying to recover from a series of failures, has boarded the glamorous Twentieth Century Limited with his musketeer henchmen, Oliver Webb (Mark Linn Baker) and Owen O’Malley (Michael McGrath), in order to convince his former leading lady, Lily Garland (Kristin Chenoweth), to put aside the Academy Award (aka the Oscar, of course) she’s just won and return to Broadway in his new show. But her new lover and frequent onscreen costar, Bruce Granit (Andy Karl), is jealous, and Lily herself is suspicious of the scheming Oscar, who discovered her when she was shlumpy Mildred Plotka and turned her into a star. Also on board the train is a little old lady, Mrs. Letitia Peabody Primrose (Mary Louise Wilson), a religious zealot secretly slapping up signs demanding that all of these heathens “Repent!” while also considering financing Oscar’s next show. As the train continues its overnight journey from Chicago to New York, Oscar grows more and more desperate, resulting in ever-wackier high jinks. “New York in sixteen hours / Anything can happen in those sixteen hours / On that might-y / Ride-the-night-ly / Miracle of engineering brains . . . / On the Twentieth Century / On the luxury liner of locomotive trains,” conductor Flanagan (Jim Walton) proclaims, and indeed, anything can and does occur.

Lily Garland (Kristin Chenoweth) finds herself in a bit of a triangle between Bruce Granit (Andy Karl) and Oscar Jaffee (Peter Gallagher) in Roundabout revival (photo by Joan Marcus)

The show has a storied history, adapted from Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur’s 1932 play, Twentieth Century (itself based on Charles Bruce Millholland’s unproduced Napoleon of Broadway) and Howard Hawks’s 1934 film, 20th Century, which starred John Barrymore as Oscar and Carole Lombard as Lily. (Various other versions and iterations have featured Fredric March, John Cullum, Rock Hudson, Orson Welles, José Ferrer, and Alec Baldwin as Oscar and Madeline Kahn, Judy Kaye, Anne Heche, Lily Palmer, Constance Bennett, Gloria Swanson, and Betty Grable as Lily.) Tony nominee Gallagher (Guys and Dolls, Long Day’s Journey into Night) has just the right amount of smarm and charm as Oscar, even if his singing voice is not quite virtuosic (although he is dealing with an illness that has forced him to miss several performances and delayed the official opening by a week), but Tony winner Chenoweth (Wicked, You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown) more than makes up for that in a role that she fully inhabits, giving a rafters-rattling performance that will knock your socks off, as if this were the role she was born to play. (In fact, in 2000, Green told Chenoweth, “You know what part you’re born to play?” To which Comden replied, “Lily Garland.”) When Oscar says about Mildred, “It was there. The pixie . . . the eternal woman . . . the fire . . . the passion . . . and the singing voice of a lost child heard by its mother echoing from beyond a corner,” it could just as well be Gallagher talking about Chenoweth. It’s a spectacular display that actually includes fireworks.

The operetta-like score is not particularly memorable, overloaded with repetition and redundancy, but three-time Tony nominee David Rockwell’s Art Deco sets are, along with six-time Tony nominee Ellis’s (The Elephant Man, 1776) gleefully chaotic staging and Tony winner Warren Carlyle’s (After Midnight) glittering choreography. Tony winner McGrath (Nice Work If You Can Get It, Spamalot) and Linn-Baker (You Can’t Take It with You, Perfect Strangers) are a kind of Harpo and Chico to Gallagher’s Groucho, while Tony nominee Karl (Rocky, The Mystery of Edwin Drood) chews up the scenery as the narcissistic Granit. It all makes for one joyous journey, even when things get too silly, but the show’s self-deprecating humor, knowing nods and winks, and endless magic make you overlook its shortcomings (while reveling in the irony that the show that takes place on board a train is playing in a theater named for an airline and is produced by a company whose title can refer to a circular intersection cars drive around). Throughout the show, characters keep knocking on Oscar’s door, waving their scripts in his face. “It’s all about life on a train / I call it ‘Life on a Train,’ Flanagan sings, continuing, “I put it down just as it happened / Oh, the things I’ve seen!” I can happily say the same thing about On the 20th Century, itself: Oh, the things I’ve seen!

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)
Lincoln Plaza Cinema, 1886 Broadway at 63rd St., 212-757-2280
Angelika Film Center, 18 West Houston St. at Mercer St., 212-995-2570
Opens Friday, March 27
www.sonyclassics.com

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.

LA SAPIENZA

LA SAPIENZA feature glorious sights and sounds as a couple tries to rekindle their spark

LA SAPIENZA (THE SAPIENCE) (Eugène Green, 2014)
Film Forum
209 West Houston St.
March 27 – April 9
212-727-8110
filmforum.org

New York City-born French filmmaker Eugène Green equates humanity and architecture in the lush, rich film La Sapienza. Named for the concept of gaining wisdom as well as Italian architect Francesco Borromini’s seventeenth-century Roman Catholic Baroque church Sant’Ivo alla Sapienza, the film follows an older couple who rediscover their personal and professional passion after meeting a young pair of siblings. Architect Alexandre Schmidt (Fabrizio Rongione) and his wife, sociologist Aliénor (Christelle Prot Landman), are walking through a park in Switzerland when they see a teenage girl (Arianna Nastro) nearly collapse into the arms of a slightly older boy (Ludovico Succio). It turns out that Lavinia is suffering from incapacitating dizzy spells and is cared for by her brother, Goffredo, who is interested in studying architecture. Aliénor becomes involved in Lavinia’s situation while Alexandre, an intense, cynical man, returns to the book he is writing on Borromini (who famously worked in the shadow of Bernini) and travels to Italy with Goffredo as the boy’s reluctant mentor. Green’s (Toutes les nuits, Le monde vivant) first digital feature opens with the glorious sounds of Claudio Monteverdi accompanying cinematographer Raphaël O’Byrne’s magisterial shots of statuary and architecture in Rome. The acting at the start, particularly Rongione’s, is purposefully stiff and mannered, cold and stonelike, but it warms up as the characters learn (or relearn) about the myriad possibilities life offers. Green, who also appears in the film as the grizzled Chaldean, uses the metaphor of Baroque architecture’s role in the Counter-Reformation as a symbol for Alexandre and Aliénor’s relationship, as they finally face long-held emotions and reconsider their future, all while Green lingers on magnificent structures.

TICKET ALERT: BACON AND BEER CLASSIC

Bacon and Beer Classic will take the field at Mets’ home stadium on April 25

Citi Field
123-01 Roosevelt Ave.
Saturday, April 25, brunch session 12 noon – 3:00 pm, evening session 7:00 – 10:00, $29-$129
www.baconandbeerclassic.com

Two great tastes that taste great together — bacon and beer — make up the menu at the annual Bacon and Beer Classic, returning to Citi Field on April 25 while the Mets are playing the Yankees up north in the Bronx. More than one hundred craft brews will be available, along with more than fifty bacon-inclusive dishes from local restaurants. There will also be workshops, demonstrations, live music, interactive games, a DJ, and other activities. Among the participating breweries are Broken Bow, Two Roads, Central Waters, Thirsty Dog, Knee Deep, the Radiant Pig, Elysian, River Horse, and Angry Orchard, while bacon delicacies will be served by City Crab, Landhaus, Route 66 Smoke House, Pig Guy NYC, Bamboo Bites, BarBacon, Ribs Within, BacoBurger, Carnal, and others. There are two sessions, one for brunch and one for dinner, with VIP tickets gaining you early admission, as well as access to the warning track and dugouts. If you’re not an imbiber, you can get in for a mere $29 for food and nonalcoholic beverages; otherwise, ticket packages range from $59 to $129. In addition there will be various awards given out by a panel of judges consisting of Liza De Guia, Lisa Fernandes, Derrick Prince, Adam Poch, and David “the Rev” Cancio.

CHURCHILL

Ronald Keaton portrays Sir Winston Churchill in one-man show at New World Stages (photo by Jason Epperson)

New World Stages
340 West 50th St. between Eighth & Ninth Aves.
Wednesday – Monday through September 13, $67
churchilltheplay.com
newworldstages.com

In The Audience, now on Broadway at the Gerald Schoenfeld Theatre, Helen Mirren transforms into Queen Elizabeth II, making the crowd gasp as she seems to become Her Royal Highness right before our eyes. In Ronald Keaton’s one-man show, SoloChicago’s production of Churchill at New World Stages, Keaton never quite fully embodies the larger-than-life political figure — who is played in The Audience by Dakin Matthews — and the audience never forgets it is seeing a staged performance, but he still does hit all the right notes as he relates the life of one of the most important figures of the twentieth century. But whereas the text of The Audience is complete fiction, imagined by writer Peter Morgan, in Churchill Keaton, who both adapted and stars in the play, uses the writings and speeches of Sir Winston to give a clear and concise history of the man and his influence on world politics, focusing on the two world wars while including plenty of classic Churchill quips. It’s 1946, and Churchill has arrived in the United States to meet with President Dwight D. Eisenhower. Speaking directly to the audience, Churchill shares the details of critical moments in his life, beginning with his premature birth on November 30, 1874, the son of a British duke and an American woman: “So I am myself a kind of English-speaking union,” he says. “I came miraculously into the world with a certain amount of impatience and a good deal of energy.” Churchill discusses his schooling, his embarrassing lisp and stutter, his relationship with his loving mother and stiff-upper-lipped father (“You want to know how many conversations I had with my father over a lifetime? Maybe five.”), his marriage to Clementine Hozier (“In our first meeting at a social gathering, I took note of her personal grace and beauty. The second meeting convinced me that this was a woman of great character and intelligence, and I fell almost instantly.”), and his joining the military, which changed the course of his future, as he became a war hero, a bestselling author, and a savvy politician with an unrivaled talent for witty repartee and sharp comebacks. (“A female acquaintance of mine, one of those plutocrats who claimed to love the working man —indeed, they love to see him work — said to me, ‘Mr. Churchill, I care for neither your politics nor your mustache.’ I said, ‘Don’t distress yourself, dear lady, you’re not very likely to come in contact with either.’”)

“I must be very tough or very lucky. Or both,” Churchill (Ronald Keaton) declares in biographical play (photo by Jason Epperson)

The second act begins as England enters WWII on September 1, 1939, with Churchill becoming first lord of the admiralty (“‘Sir! You’re scuttling the traditions of the Royal Navy!’ ‘Admiral, have you ever considered what the traditions of the Royal Navy really are? I can tell you in three words: rum, sodomy, and the lash!’”) and, on May 10, 1940, prime minister for the first time. (“But at last, I had been given complete authority over the whole scene. I felt as if I were walking with destiny, and that all my past life had been preparation for this hour, this trial.”) Churchill speaks humbly yet proudly of his own vast accomplishments (“I’ve derived continued benefit from criticism in my life and never known any time when I was short of it.”) and fondly of his relationship with FDR. (“Meeting President Roosevelt was like opening your first bottle of champagne. And knowing him was like drinking it. He was the best friend England ever had.”) Director Kurt Johns has Keaton wander rather randomly across Jason Epperson’s somewhat cramped set, which includes an easel where the British Bulldog paints, two chairs, a desk, and a window on which Paul Deziel projects Churchill family photographs, the Union Jack, Churchill canvases, and other images. I attended the show with a Churchill aficionado, someone so enamored with the man that his daughter was even born on Winnie’s birthday, and he gave the show high marks for its historical accuracy and ability to encapsulate Churchill’s life and career in less than two hours (with intermission). I can’t be quite so generous with the staging itself, but Churchill, part of Churchill 2015, a celebration of the fiftieth anniversary of the eminent statesman’s death, is still a heartfelt look at an inspiring figure who changed the course of history. (On June 19, Keaton will be at the 92nd St. Y for the special talk “Behind the Scenes of Off-Broadway’s Churchill” with Tricia McDermott.)

LA MAISON DU CHOCOLAT TASTING AND GIVEAWAY

La Maison du Chocolat is ready to get chocoholics in the mood

Who: La Maison du Chocolat boutiques
What: Chocolate and pastry tastings and $60 raffle giveaways
Where: 1018 Madison Ave. at 78th St., 30 Rockefeller Center at 49th St., 63 Wall St., the Plaza Food Hall at One West 58th St., the Shops at Columbus Circle at 10 Columbus Circle
When: Wednesday, April 1, free, 2:00 – 6:00
Why: Just in time for Easter, La Maison du Chocolat — where we did our Valentines Day shopping last month — is hosting an afternoon of free tastings of their chocolate and pastries, at all five Manhattan locations. You can also sign up for a raffle to win a $60 basket of luxury chocolates.