twi-ny recommended events

NEW YORK FILM FESTIVAL: A TOUCH OF SIN

Zhao San (Wang Baoqiang) is one of four protagonists who break out into sudden acts of shocking violence in Jia Zhangke’s A TOUCH OF SIN

A TOUCH OF SIN (TIAN ZHU DING) (Jia Zhangke, 2013)
Film Society of Lincoln Center
Alice Tully Hall, 1941 Broadway at 65th St.
Saturday, September 28, 6:00
Francesca Beale Theater, 144 West 65th St. at Amsterdam Ave.
Wednesday, October 2, 8:30
Festival runs September 27 – October 13
212-875-5601
www.filmlinc.com

During his sixteen-year career, Sixth Generation Chinese filmmaker Jia Zhangke has made both narrative works (The World, Platform, Still Life) and documentaries (Useless, I Wish I Knew), with his fiction films containing elements of nonfiction and vice versa. Such is the case with his latest film, the powerful A Touch of Sin, which explores four based-on-fact outbreaks of shocking violence in four different regions of China. In Shanxi, outspoken miner Dahai (Jiang Wu) won’t stay quiet about the rampant corruption of the village elders. In Chongqing, married migrant worker and father Zhao San (Wang Baoqiang) obtains a handgun and is not afraid to use it. In Hubei, brothel receptionist Ziao Yu (Zhao Tao, Jia’s longtime muse and now wife) can no longer take the abuse and assumptions of the male clientele. And in Dongguan, young Xiao Hui (Luo Lanshan) tries to make a life for himself but is soon overwhelmed by his lack of success. Inspired by King Hu’s 1971 wuxia film A Touch of Zen, Jia also owes a debt to Max Ophüls’s 1950 bittersweet romance La Ronde, in which a character from one segment continues into the next, linking the stories. In A Touch of Sin, there is also a character connection in each successive tale, though not as overt, as Jia makes a wry, understated comment on the changing ways that people connect in modern society. In depicting these four acts of violence, Jia also exposes the widening economic gap between the rich and the poor and the social injustice that is prevalent all over contemporary China — as well as the rest of the world — leading to dissatisfied individuals fighting for their dignity in extreme ways. A gripping, frightening film that earned Jia the Best Screenplay Award at Cannes this year, A Touch of Sin is an official selection of the fifty-first New York Film Festival, screening September 28 at Alice Tully Hull and October 2 at the Francesca Beale Theater, with Jia and Zhao participating in a Q&A following the first show. (The film then opens October 4 at Lincoln Plaza and the IFC Center.)

BAM NEXT WAVE FESTIVAL: ANNA NICOLE

Sarah Joy Miller is front and center in glamorous production of ANNA NICOLE at BAM (photo by Stephanie Berger)

BAM Howard Gilman Opera House
30 Lafayette Ave. between Ashland Pl. & St. Felix St.
Through September 28, $25-$235
718-636-4100
www.bam.org
www.roh.org.uk

If Anna Nicole ends up being New York City Opera’s final presentation, then the organization (founded in 1943 and dubbed the People’s Opera by Mayor Fiorello La Guardia) is certainly going out with quite a, well, bang. Commissioned by London’s Royal Opera House and originally performed at Covent Garden, Anna Nicole is a playfully entertaining pop operetta based on the life of celebrity diva Anna Nicole Smith, following her life from her early years as Vickie Lynn Hogan in Mexia, Texas, through her apprenticeship as a stripper in Houston and then her success as a model in print ads and as Playboy Playmate of the Year. Composer Mark-Anthony Turnage, librettist Richard Thomas, and director Richard Jones tell the tale chronologically as Anna Nicole (Sarah Joy Miller) argues with her mother (Susan Bickley), marries and divorces her first husband, Billy Boy (Ben Davis), visits Doctor Yes (Richard Troxell) to get a huge pair of golden Winnebagos, meets and marries billionaire octogenarian J. Howard Marshall II (Robert Brubaker), and becomes a tabloid regular and reality TV superstar. It’s all bright lights and flashy colors on Miriam Buether’s wonderfully cheesy sets and Nicky Gillibrand’s riotous costumes while the cast, which includes sixty-six members of the New York City Opera, belt out self-referential, tongue-in-cheek lyrics that contain the kind of language not usually heard at opera houses around the world, highlighted by F-bombs galore and a host of naughty nicknames for breasts. The story skips around in often confusing ways, too much time is spent on some relatively insignificant sections just for shock effect (for example, the stripper scene), and Thomas, who cowrote Jerry Springer: The Opera, never really gets inside Anna Nicole’s head, which keeps the audience at a distance. In addition, Miller doesn’t quite embody Anna Nicole, and it is occasionally hard to interpret what she’s singing, forcing the audience to read the surtitles, which is not necessary for all the vocalists. The standout performers are Bickley and tenor Brubaker, who is a hoot, especially in his glam outfit. This coproduction with BAM continues at the Howard Gilman Opera House through September 28; it would indeed be a shame if this were New York City Opera’s swan song, as they are willing to take on challenges that other companies wouldn’t touch with a ten-foot (stripper?) pole. (You can contribute to keep their 2013-14 season alive here.)

NEW YORK FILM FESTIVAL: MANAKAMANA

A mother and daughter eat ice cream in experimental documentary MANAKAMANA

MANAKAMANA (Stephanie Spray & Pacho Velez, 2013)
Film Society of Lincoln Center
Walter Reade Theater, 165 West 65th St. at Amsterdam Ave.
Saturday, September 28, 1:30
Howard Gilman Theater, 144 West 65th St. at Amsterdam Ave.
Monday, September 30, 3:30
Festival runs September 27 – October 13
212-875-5601
www.filmlinc.com
www.manakamanafilm.com

If you’re an adventurous filmgoer who likes to be challenged and surprised, the less you know about Pacho Velez and Stephanie Spray’s Manakamana, the better. But if you want to know more, here goes: Evoking such experimental films as Michael Snow’s Wavelength, Hollis Frampton’s Zorns Lemma, and Andy Warhol’s Screen Tests as well as the more narrative works of such unique auteurs as Jim Jarmusch and Abbas Kiarostami, Manakamana is a beautiful, meditative journey that is sure to try your patience at first. The two-hour film, which requires a substantial investment on the part of the audience, takes place in a cable car in Nepal that shuttles men, women, and children to and from the historic Manakamana temple, on a pilgrimage to worship a wish-fulfilling Hindu goddess. With Velez operating the stationary Aaton 7 LTR camera — the same one used by Robert Gardner for his 1986 documentary Forest of Bliss — and Spray recording the sound, the film follows a series of individuals and small groups as they either go to or return from the temple, traveling high over the lush green landscape that used to have to be traversed on foot before the cable car was built. A man and his son barely acknowledge each other; a woman carries a basket of flowers on her lap; an elderly mother and her middle-age daughter try to eat melting ice-cream bars; a pair of musicians play their instruments to pass the time.

A heavy metal band takes a picture of themselves in meditative documentary

Each trip has its own narrative, which must be partly filled in by the viewer as he or she studies the people in the cable car and the surroundings, getting continually jolted as the car glides over the joins. The film is a fascinating look into human nature and technological advances in this era of surveillance as the subjects attempt to act as normal as possible even though a camera and a microphone are practically in their faces. Produced at the Sensory Ethnography Laboratory at Harvard, Manakamana consists of eleven uncut shots of ten-to-eleven minutes filmed in 16mm, using rolls whose length roughly equals that of each one-way trip, creating a kind of organic symbiosis between the making and projecting of the work while adding a time-sensitive expectation on the part of the viewer. A film well worth sticking around for till the very end — and one that grows less and less claustrophobic with each scene — Manakamana is screening September 28 and 30 in the Motion Portraits section of the fifty-first New York Film Festival at Lincoln Center.

MUSEUM DAY LIVE! 2013

Multiple venues
Saturday, September 28
Admission: free for two people with printed ticket
www.smithsonianmag.com/museumday

The ninth annual free museum day, sponsored by Smithsonian magazine, takes place on Saturday, September 28, with institutions all over the country opening their doors to people who have downloaded a free ticket for two from the above website. There’s only one ticket allowed per household/e-mail address, so be careful before filling out the online form; some of the museums are free anyway, either all the time or on Saturdays, while others might be between exhibits so there won’t be all that much to see. The participating venues in the five boroughs include the Asia Society Museum (“Iran Modern”), the Bartow-Pell Mansion Museum, the Cathedral Church of Saint John the Divine (“Dog Bless You: The Photography of Mary Bloom”), the Children’s Museum of Manhattan (“Red Grooms’ New York City”), El Museo del Barrio (“La Bienal: Here Is Where We Jump!”), the Fraunces Tavern Museum (“Rating the Attic: A Crowdsourced Exhibit”), the Hispanic Society, Historic Richmond Town, the Jewish Museum (“Chagall: Love, War, and Exile”), the Morgan Library (“Tiepolo, Guardi, and Their World: Eighteenth-Century Venetian Drawings”), the Mount Vernon Hotel Museum & Garden, the Museum of American Finance (“The Fed at 100”), the Museum of Arts & Design (“Body & Soul: New International Ceramics”), the Museum of Chinese in America (“Shanghai Glamour: New Women 1910s-40s”), the New York City Fire Museum, the Noble Maritime Collection (“Tides of 100 Years”), the Rubin Museum of Art (“Flip Side”), the Skyscraper Museum, the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian (“Before and After the Horizon: Anishinaabe Artists of the Great Lakes”), the Staten Island Museum (“They’re Baaack! Return of the Seventeen-Year Cicadas”), the Ukrainian Museum (“Out of Tradition: Contemporary Decorative and Applied Art”), the U.S. Lighthouse Tender LILAC (“Industrial Waters”), the Van Cortlandt House Museum, the Vilcek Foundation (“Brian Doan: hôme hôme home”), and the Waterfront Museum (“Pollywogs and Shellbacks: Marine Paintings by Frank Hanavan”). Of course, if you pair up with friends and relatives, you can get more tickets for different places.

THE DAN BAND

The Dan Band continue their residency at Stage 48 on September 27 (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

Stage 48
605 West 48th St. between Tenth & Eleventh Aves.
Friday, September 27, $26, 8:00
Residency continues October 26 and December 12
www.thedanband.com
www.stage48.com
the dan band slideshow

Actor and comedian Dan Finnerty has carved out quite a niche for himself. Finnerty, who has appeared in such stage productions as Hair and Stomp, has spent the last decade heading the Dan Band, an outrageously funny group that specializes in covers of songs originally performed by women. On August 15 the Dan Band, who made a name for themselves by appearing in a trio of Todd Phillips movies, Old School, Starsky & Hutch, and The Hangover, began a four-show, four-month residency at Stage 48 on the Far West Side. Backed by a live band, Finnerty, wearing a mechanic’s outfit and a backward-facing baseball cap, and his two nerdy cohorts, Gene Reed and John Kozeluh, glided their way through such gems as ABBA’s “Fernando,” Anita Ward’s “Ring My Bell,” Christina Aguilera’s “Genie in a Bottle,” Vanity 6’s “Nasty Girl,” Suzanne Vega’s “Tom’s Diner,” Irene Cara’s “Flashdance (What a Feeling)” and “Fame,” and the pièce de résistance, Bonnie Tyler’s “Total Eclipse of the Heart,” complete with non-radio-friendly bonus lyrics. They closed with their cult hit, “Candy Shop,” a raunchy original in which Finnerty sings, “You be a nympho / I’ll be a nympho / Got the magic stick / I’m the love doctor.” Finnerty walked across every inch of the stage, joined the suited Reed and Kozeluh in some corny choreographed moments with bells, Hula hoops, and other objects, and wandered into the audience numerous times, establishing a funny rapport with some of the fans up front. Finnerty, who has been married to actress and comedian Kathy Najimy since 1995, is in the process of recording the band’s third album, following 2005’s all-covers The Dan Band Live! and 2007’s all-original Ho: A Dan Band Christmas, featuring such key tracks as “I Wanna Rock U Hard This Xmas,” “Get Drunk & Make Out This Christmas,” and, of course, “Ho Ho Ho.” Though seemingly a one-trick pony, the Dan Band has so far avoided becoming overly gimmicky, as the shtick still works; they put on one damn entertaining show. The Dan Band will be back at Stage 48 on September 27, October 26, and December 12, so if you’re looking for some stupid fun, then this is the place to be.

THE OLD FRIENDS

Sybil (Hallie Foote), Gertrude (Betty Buckley), and Howard (Cotter Smith) desperately try to find happiness in Horton Foote’s THE OLD FRIENDS (photo by Joan Marcus)

The Pershing Square Signature Center
The Irene Diamond Stage
480 West 42nd St. between Tenth & Eleventh Aves.
Through October 13, $75
212-244-7529
www.signaturetheatre.org

The world premiere of The Old Friends at the Signature Theatre gathers together some old friends indeed. The play was written by Horton Foote, stars his daughter Hallie Foote, and is directed by longtime Foote collaborator Michael Wilson (The Trip to Bountiful, Talley’s Folly). In addition, the play, which began life as The Dispossessed in the mid-1960s, had a staged reading at the Signature in 2002. After that long gestation, it finally is having its first full-scale production, which has been extended at the Signature’s Irene Diamond Stage through October 13. Set in 1965 in Harrison, Texas, The Old Friends is a stark tale of greed, disloyalty, selfishness, envy, drunkenness, and infidelity that is part Tennessee Williams, part Dallas. Lois Smith stars as family matriarch Mamie Borden, who lives with her bon vivant daughter, Julia Price (Veanne Cox), and her oversized, very wealthy husband, Albert (Adam LeFevre). They are joined by the brash, blustery, and extremely rich Gertrude Hayhurst Sylvester Ratliff (Betty Buckley) and her companion, the gentle Howard Ratliff (Cotter Smith), as they await the arrival of prodigal daughter Sybil (Hallie Foote), who has spent the last decade with her husband, Hugo, in Venezuela. Sybil shows up alone, setting into motion jealousy, flirtations, lies, deception, gunshots, and lots and lots of drinking while they all battle over the family farm and other matters, mostly involving love and money.

Gertrude (Betty Buckley), Albert (Adam LeFevre), and Julia Price (Veanne Cox) don’t exactly see eye-to-eye in dysfunctional family drama (photo by Joan Marcus)

Buckley beautifully chews up the scenery as Gertrude, a deeply unhappy, lonely woman who uses her power and money to get what she wants, which includes Howard, her former brother-in-law, and young stud Tom Underwood (Sean Lyons), whom she fights over with her former sister-in-law, the pseudo-elegant Julia. Smith (The Trip to Bountiful onstage, East of Eden on film) has a weak first act as Mamie, but she gets much stronger in the far superior second act, as long-held secrets emerge and relationships get even more explosive. At the center of it all is Foote’s solid portrayal of the complex Sybil, a quiet woman who is disappointed in how her life has turned out and tries her best to avoid getting caught up in the others’ nonsense, but she has a plan of her own as well. Wilson, who helmed Horton Foote’s epic Orphans’ Home Cycle with Hallie Foote at Signature in 2009, never lets things slow down as the characters make their way through a trio of lovely sets by Jeff Cowie, leading to a powerful ending that changes everyone’s lives. In this poignant Signature production, The Old Friends feels like, well, an old friend.

DUMBO DANCE FESTIVAL

WHITE WAVE Young Soon Kim Dance Company hosts the thirteenth annual DUMBO Dance Festival this week (photo by Mei Yamanaka)

John Ryan Theatre
25 Jay St.
September 26 gala, $100-$250
September 27-29, free
www.whitewavedance.com

The DUMBO Dance Festival returns for its thirteenth year, helping promote up-and-coming dance companies and choreographers from the United States, Korea, England, and Canada, with a particular focus on New York City, but it almost didn’t happen. The waterfront warehouse that host company WHITE WAVE Young Soon Kim Dance Company transformed into the John Ryan Theater was severely damaged by Hurricane Sandy, but a successful GoFundMe campaign made this year’s festival possible, though more donations are needed. Things get under way with a gala fundraiser ($100-$250) on September 26 at the John Ryan Theater featuring performances by Antonio Brown, OUI DANSE/Brice Mousset, Kuperman Brothers, Billy Bell /Lunge Dance Collective, Buglisi Dance Theatre, and WHITE WAVE Young Soon Kim Dance Company, along with opening remarks by John Ryan himself. More than fifty companies will then present short works and excerpts September 27-29 for free, including Maya Orchin’s Recipe, gamin’s Metamorphose, Vangeline Theater’s White Fencing, z3movement project’s I hold nothing, though I embrace the world, Catherine Lawrence’s State of Mind, John J Zullo Dance/Raw Movement’s How Brief Eternity, and Bianca Dancers & Company’s The Woodman Project: Untitled 4. There will be family-friendly programs and classes on September 27, with the grand finale Sunday night at 8:00 consisting of Antonio Brown’s Unwritten, Amalgamate Dance Company’s Inside Aphasia, Jacobs Campbell Dance’s The Box, Alyson Laury’s Lurid, Tiffany Rea-Fisher / Elisa Monte Dance Company’s Identity, and an excerpt from WHITE WAVE Young Soon Kim Dance Company’s Eternal Now. The DUMBO Dance Festival runs concurrently with the DUMBO Arts Festival; WHITE WAVE will be back October 23 – November 10 with its annual Wave Rising Series.