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TICKET ALERT: BROADWAY WEEK WINTER 2015

THE CURIOUS INCIDENT OF THE DOG IN THE NIGHT-TIME is one of nearly two dozen Great White Way shows offering two-for-one tickets during Broadway Week

THE CURIOUS INCIDENT OF THE DOG IN THE NIGHT-TIME is one of nearly two dozen Great White Way shows offering two-for-one tickets during Broadway Week

January 20 – February 5, buy one ticket, get one free
Tickets go on sale Friday, January 9, 10:30 am
www.nycgo.com/broadwayweek

Tickets go on sale January 9 at 10:30 am for the winter edition of Broadway Week, which runs January 20 to February 5 and offers theater lovers a chance to get two-for-one tickets in advance to see new and long-running shows on the Great White Way. Twenty-two shows are participating, including most of the hottest shows from the current season: The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, It’s Only a Play, Disgraced, You Can’t Take It with You, Honeymoon in Vegas, A Delicate Balance, On the Town, and The River. Also on the bill is such recent fare as Cabaret, Beautiful: The Carole King Musical, A Gentleman’s Guide to Love and Murder, Kinky Boots, If/Then, the rebooted Les Misérables, Matilda the Musical, and The Lion King in addition to such longtime mainstays as Wicked, Jersey Boys, Chicago, The Phantom of the Opera, and Mamma Mia! As usual, you can look all you want, but the two-for-one list does not include The Book of Mormon, unfortunately.

THE BABADOOK

THE BABADOOK

A mother (Essie Davis) and her young son (Noah Wiseman) must get past terrible tragedy in THE BABADOOK

THE BABADOOK (Jennifer Kent, 2014)
IFC Center
323 Sixth Ave. at West Third St.
212-924-7771
www.ifccenter.com
www.thebabadook.com

A sleeper hit at Sundance that is now enjoying a hair-raising extended run at the IFC Center and has been named Best First Film of 2014 by the New York Film Critics Circle, The Babadook is a frightening tale of a mother and her young son — and a suspicious, scary character called the Babadook — trapped in a terrifying situation. Expanded from her 2005 ten-minute short, Monster, writer-director Jennifer Kent’s debut feature focuses on the relationship between single mom Amelia (Essie Davis), who works as a nursing home aide, and her seemingly uncontrollable six-year-old son, Samuel (Noah Wiseman), who is constantly getting into trouble because he’s more than just a little strange. Sam was born the same day his father, Oskar (Ben Winspear), died, killed in a car accident while rushing Amelia to the hospital to give birth, resulting in Amelia harboring a deep resentment toward the boy, one that she is afraid to acknowledge. Meanwhile, Sam walks around with home-made weapons to protect his mother from a presence he says haunts them. One night Amelia reads Sam a book that suddenly appeared on the shelf, an odd pop-up book called Mister Babadook that threatens her. She tries to throw it away, but as Sam and the book keep reminding her, “You can’t get rid of the Babadook.” Soon the Babadook appears to take physical form, and Amelia must face her deepest, darkest fears if she wants she and Sam to survive.

Writer-director Jennifer Kent brings out classic horror tropes in her feature debut, the sleeper hit THE BABADOOK

Writer-director Jennifer Kent explores classic horror tropes in her feature debut, the sleeper hit THE BABADOOK

The Babadook began life as a demonic children’s book designed by illustrator Alex Juhasz specifically for the film — and one that can now be preordered from the movie’s website, although you might want to think twice before inviting the twisted tome into your house. The gripping film, shot by Polish cinematographer Radek Ladczuk in subdued German expressionist tones of black, gray, and white with bursts of other colors, evokes such classic horror fare as Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining, Roman Polanski’s Repulsion, and Edgar Allan Poe’s The Fall of the House of Usher, where place plays such a key role in the terror. The Babadook itself is a kind of warped combination of the villains from F. W. Murnau’s Nosferatu, Robert Wiene’s The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, and Hideo Nakata’s The Ring. Kent, a former actress who studied at Australia’s National Institute of Dramatic Art with Davis, lets further influences show in the late-night television Amelia is obsessed with, which includes films by early French wizard Georges Méliès. But the real fear comes from something that many parents experience but are too ashamed or embarrassed to admit: that they might not actually love their child, despite trying their best to do so. At its tender heart, The Babadook is a story of a mother and son who must go through a kind of hell if they are going to get past the awful way they were brought together.

VIDEO OF THE DAY: “SHADOW PEOPLE” BY DR. DOG

Who: Dr. Dog
What: The Dr. Dog 4×4
Where: Music Hall of Williamsburg, 66 North Sixth St., 718-486-5400, and Bowery Ballroom, 6 Delancey St., 212-533-2111
When: January 9-12 at Music Hall of Williamsburg, January 14-17 at Bowery Ballroom, $25-$35
Why: Philly six-piece celebrates next week’s release of its first concert album, Live at a Flamingo Hotel (the Anti- two-LP set can currently be streamed here), featuring live versions of songs from such albums as 2002’s Toothbrush, 2007’s We All Belong, 2008’s Fate, 2010’s Shame, Shame, 2012’s Be the Void, and 2013’s B-Room, playing Music Hall of Williamsburg with Twain (1/9), the Districts (1/10), Elvis Perkins in Dearland (1/11), and mewithoutyou (1/12) and Bowery Ballroom with Roadkill Ghost Choir (1/14), mewithoutyou (1/15), Yellerkin (1/16), and Field Mouse (1/17)

KARA WALKER: AFTERWORD

Kara Walker follow-up packs another powerful punch (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

Kara Walker follow-up packs another powerful punch (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

Sikkema Jenkins & Co.
520 West 22nd St. between Tenthy & Eleventh Aves.
Tuesday – Saturday through January 17, free, 10:00 am – 6:00 pm
212-929-2262
www.sikkemajenkinsco.com

Brooklyn-based multimedia artist Kara Walker didn’t have much to say about her staggering installation “A Subtlety or the Marvelous Sugar Baby: an Homage to the unpaid and overworked Artisans who have refined our Sweet tastes from the cane fields to the Kitchens of the New World on the Occasion of the demolition of the Domino Sugar Refining Plant” before and during its May 10 to July 6 run in Williamsburg. Instead, she let the work, a monumental white sphinx/mammy hovering over a collection of molasses-dripping “Sugar Babies,” speak for itself to more than 130,000 visitors who came to experience it (and posted nearly 20,000 photographs to Instagram and Twitter). Walker has now followed that up with “Afterword,” a telling three-part exhibit at Sikkema Jenkins that gives new perspective on the work, which was commissioned by Creative Time. The first room contains a series of preparatory sketches, including a 2013 ink-and-watercolor version of the central figure throwing up and a cut-paper black silhouette of the sphinx on archival board, reversing the black-white, racially charged color scheme. The second room is dominated by the sphinx’s left fist, along with several “Sugar Babies”; watercolors in bold pinks, yellows, blues, and reds made during the run of the installation that reveal aspects of the history of the sugar trade and the building of the sphinx, visualizing the construction activities in terms of slavery; and the large-scale gouache-on-paper “Terrible Vacation,” a swirling horizontal update of J. M. W. Turner’s The Slave Ship (which plays an important role in the new film Mr. Turner).

Kara Walker has the last word in examination of her popular Domino Sugar Refinery installation (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

Kara Walker has the last word in examination of her popular Domino Sugar Refinery installation (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

In the third room, a brown maquette of the sphinx sits in a glass case, surrounded by more sketches, including a twenty-panel narrative on the history of sugar production, leading to a screening room that shows a pair of films: For An Audience, six cameras captured the last hour of the installation, as visitors took pictures in front of the work, stared in disbelief, cried, laughed, and, in the final few minutes, were allowed to touch it, each person relating to it in a unique way. “During its eight week run,” Walker writes about the twenty-eight-minute film, “conversation around A Subtlety wound its way across different social media platforms to become an object of contention as well as reverence, and a talking point about historic injustice, artistic hubris, the public gaze, responsible viewership, black audiences vs. white ones, black female representation, aggressive male behavior, self recognition, and ‘selfies.’ . . . It was certainly a curiosity.” Of course, she knows it was much more than a curiosity, continuing, “One could observe many meanings taking shape in individual viewers, and unlike most contemporary art events — especially one featuring large nude female figures with negro physiognomies and colossal genitalia — full families with small children, elderly churchgoers, artists, grandstanders, and a general public of all shapes came out each weekend in large numbers to bear witness.” If you were not able to bear witness yourself when the piece was on display in Brooklyn — the lines did tend to get rather long at prime times — you can at least get a feel for what all the deserved hoopla was about through this exhibit, which looks at the before, during, and after, culminating in the other film being screened, the six-and-a-half-minute Rhapsody, which shows the installation being torn down to the “exuberant” sounds of Emmanuel Chabrier’s 1883 orchestral composition, “España.”

VIDEO OF THE DAY: “HEAVENLY ALL” BY INVISIBLE FAMILIARS

Who: Invisible Familiars
What: Friday-night January residency in Brooklyn
Where: Bar LunÀtico, 486 Halsey St., 718-513-0339, and Baby’s All Right, 146 Broadway, 718-599-5800
When: Friday, January 9, 16, and 23 at Bar LunÀtico, followed by release party January 30 at Baby’s All Right
Why: Invisible Familiars leader Jared Samuel has returned from his houseboat with the band’s debut album, Disturbing Wildlife (Other Music, January 27, 2015), which channels ’60s psychedelia and ’70s glam rock through a decidedly twenty-first-century filter; Samuel, guitarist Robbie Mangano, and drummer Tim Kuhl will be previewing songs from the disc, which includes such tracks as “Clever Devil,” “Elaine Serene,” “Bestial Western,” and “New Mutation Boogie” and guest appearances by Nels Cline, Jolie Holland, Yuka Honda & Miho Hatori, and Stuart Bogie, Friday nights in Brooklyn, first at Bar LunÀtico in Bed-Stuy, then with a big blow-out at Baby’s All Right in Williamsburg.

ROBERT ALTMAN: MASH

MASH

Trapper (Elliott Gould), Duke (Tom Skeritt), and Hawkeye (Donald Sutherland) think up new schemes in MASH

MASH (Robert Altman, 1970)
MoMA Film, Museum of Modern Art
11 West 53rd St. between Fifth & Sixth Aves.
Saturday, January 10, 4:00
Series runs through January 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.moma.org

Ostensibly set during the Korean War but actually about the controversial battle that was raging in Vietnam, Robert Altman’s MASH is one of the most subversive, and funniest, antiwar films ever to come from a Hollywood studio. Adapted by Hollywood Ten blacklisted writer Ring Lardner Jr. from Richard Hooker’s bookMASH: A Novel about Three Army Doctors, the film focuses on a different kind of hero: the doctors and nurses at a Mobile Surgical Army Hospital not far from the front lines. These brave men and women don’t go around with guns, grenades, and helmets; instead, they equip themselves with surgical masks, clamps, and scalpels, fighting to save the lives of those who risked theirs on the battlefield. Instead of celebrating killing, they celebrate survival, and celebrate they do, led by Capts. Benjamin Franklin “Hawkeye” Pierce (Donald Sutherland) and John Francis Xavier “Trapper John” McIntyre (Elliott Gould), who have their own way with wine, women, and song. Joined by Capt. Augustus Bedford “Duke” Forrest (Tom Skerritt), they ridicule Majs. Margaret “Hot Lips” Houlihan (Sally Kellerman) and Frank Burns (Robert Duvall), regularly embarrass Father John Patrick “Dago Red” Mulcahy (René Auberjonois), flirt endlessly with Lt. Maria “Dish” Schneider (Jo Ann Pflug) and her nursing staff, and generally wreak havoc that their commanding officer, Lt. Col. Henry Blake (Roger Bowen), will usually let them get away with, as long as they don’t interrupt his fishing outings. Hawkeye, Duke, and Trapper drink from a homemade still, take bets on whether Hot Lips’ carpet matches the drapes, play golf, and make fun of the military and religion every chance they get, especially during a mock funeral for Capt. Walter Koskiusko Waldowski (John Schuck), the dentist known as “Painless,” who has decided to commit suicide. The wacky cast of characters also includes Gary Burghoff as Cpl. Radar O’Reilly, Altman regular Michael Murphy as Capt. Ezekiel Bradbury “Me Lay” Marston IV, Bud Cort as Pvt. Lorenzo Boone, G. Wood as Brig. Gen. Charlie Hammond, and Kim Atwood as Ho-Jon. But Hawkeye and Trapper also happen to be outstanding doctors who take their oath very seriously, even when operating on an injured enemy. Their brazen disregard for authority of all kinds and the rule of military law is a knowing slap in the face to governments around the world, who so often send their young men and women off to war for highly questionable reasons.

MASH

A special show is about to begin for the 4077th in Korea

The brash, outrageous satire, the first studio film to get the F-word past the censors, also features a wild football game with real-life gridiron stars Buck Buchanan, Ben Davidson, and Fred Williamson as, yes, Capt. Oliver Harmon “Spearchucker” Jones (and came four years before The Longest Yard), won the Palme d’Or at Cannes and was nominated for five Academy Awards, including Best Picture, Best Director, Best Supporting Actress (Kellerman), and Best Film Editing (Danford B. Greene), winning only for Best Adapted Screenplay, and it gave birth to the hugely popular television series that ran from 1972 to 1983. But there’s nothing quite like the film, a brilliant deconstruction of a different side of war, one where life is more important than death. The film’s overt misogyny gets a bit much all these years later, but it’s still a mad romp that served as the real starting point of Altman’s stellar career, which is being honored at MoMA with a comprehensive retrospective that runs through January 17 with upcoming screenings of Gosford Park and Nashville, Altman’s excellent political cable series, Tanner ’88, filmed versions of such plays as The Dumbwaiter and The Caine Mutiny Court Martial, and Ron Mann’s 2014 documentary, Altman. (MASH is being shown January 10 at 4:00 with Altman’s 1966 four-minute short, Ebb Tide, in which Lili St. Cyr enjoys herself on the beach.)