twi-ny recommended events

SPEAKEASY DOLLHOUSE

Immersive production re-creates shady tale in 1930s New York City (photo © Margee Challa, 2012)

102 Norfolk St.
First monthly Saturday and Monday, September 7 – December 14, $55 general admission, $145 VIP
800-838-3006
www.speakeasydollhouse.com

New York has gone crazy for immersive theatrical productions recently, as the audience interacts with the actors in various ways in such hit shows as Sleep No More at the McKittrick Hotel and Natasha, Pierre & the Great Comet of 1812 at the temporary Klub Kazino. Things go even further in Speakeasy Dollhouse, a flashy, lurid tale of murder and deception taking place in a series of rooms in an underground location on Norfolk St. Once you purchase your tickets — which just jumped from $30/$55 to $55/$145 — you start receiving e-mails from Cynthia von Buhler detailing the real-life murder of her grandfather Frank Spano and its cover-up, which reached all the way inside Tammany Hall. “My grandmother died in the 1980s and I never knew my grandfather,” one von Buhler missive explains. “He was mysteriously killed in 1935. He died on the very same day my mother was born. She told us that he was shot and nobody knew why. It was a secret. They boarded up the club and bakery after that.” Speakeasy Dollhouse re-creates that time period, acting out the events that led to the shooting, based on both facts and supposition, as von Buhler seeks to uncover the truth. Attendees are given a password and asked to dress in Prohibition-era costumes, which is a good idea, as the vast majority of people do so. Upon entering the nightclub, each person receives a piece of paper from the Fortune Teller (Jordana Rollerdazzler) giving them a specific role to carry out. For the next few hours, the cast, crew, and audience mingle as they travel from room to room and various plot elements are revealed, from an autopsy and a secret lovers tryst to back-room machinations and a card game.

Evidence is presented as SPEAKEASY DOLLHOUSE seeks to find answers to real-life murder (photo © Margee Challa, 2012)

The story revolves around the killing of club owner Frank Spano (Russell Farhang) by barber John Guerrieri (Silent James), which soon involves such figures as Detective Thomas Crane (Justin Moore), mobster Dutch Schultz (Travis Moore), Tammany Hall party boss Jimmy Hines (Charley Layton), and Magistrate Hulon Capshaw (Scott Southard). To further the atmosphere, there are a series of live performances by burlesque singers and dancers and the Howard Fishman Quartet. Meanwhile, a cash bar serves drinks and a bakery offers cannoli and other pastries. Originally planned as a one-time-only presentation, Speakeasy Dollhouse is now playing the first Saturday and Monday of each month through December, with each show centering on a different theme investigating the possible motive behind the killing; on October 26, there will be a special Halloween performance only for people who have previously attended a show, complete with zombies, werewolves, vampires, and unicorns. The production captures the feel of 1930s New York City, but the allowance of photography detracts a bit from the overall experience; the producers might want to have pictures spread all over social media, but there weren’t really many iPhones back in those days. Still, the more you immerse yourself in Speakeasy Dollhouse, the more fun you’re going to have. And there’s a whole lot of fun to be had as von Buhler, who appears as herself, keeps trying to get to the bottom of what happened to her family.

TCM CLASSIC FILM TOUR

Meet near Broadway at 51st St.
Tuesday, Thursday, Saturday, August 22 – January 9, children $27, adults $43, 11:30 am
212-913-9780
www.onlocationtours.com

Throughout Hollywood’s fabled history, many of its greatest films were made right here in New York City. Turner Classic Movies and On Location Tours have now teamed up to present the TCM Classic Film Tour, a three-hour exploration through some of the Big Apple’s most iconic cinema sites. Among the dozens of stops the bus will make are at the Empire State Building (King Kong, An Affair to Remember), Grand Central Terminal (North by Northwest, Superman), Central Park (Ghostbusters, The Fisher King), the Dakota (Rosemary’s Baby, Hannah and Her Sisters), the Plaza Hotel (Plaza Suite, Barefoot in the Park), Rockefeller Center (Elf, On the Town), Tiffany’s (Breakfast at Tiffany’s), FAO Schwarz (Big, Baby Boom), and Zabar’s (You’ve Got Mail). There will also be trivia quizzes and movie clips along the way. We’re a little disturbed that the On Location website promises a “fantastic view of the Manhattan Bridge you’ll recognized [sic] from Woody Allen’s Manhattan,” since it’s actually the Queensboro Bridge that appears in the iconic scene (as displayed in the tour logo), but we’ll catch them a break this time and hope that the tour itself isn’t laden with additional mistakes.

FANTASTIC FICTION AT KGB: LIBBA BRAY AND NOVA REN SUMA

KGB Bar
85 East Fourth St. off Second Ave.
Wednesday, August 21, free, 7:00
www.kgbbar.com

KGB Bar’s latest Fantastic Fiction lineup should be a mutual lovefest, as Michael L. Printz Award winner Libba Bray (Going Bovine, Beauty Queens) teams up with rising YA star Nova Ren Suma (Imaginary Girls) for an evening of readings and discussion hosted by Ellen Datlow and Matthew Kressel. Here’s what Bray, who is a YA goddess — from her popular books to her band, Tiger Beat, which features fellow YA authors Natalie Standiford, Barnabas Miller, and Daniel Ehrenhaft, to her potentially lucrative Tampon Poetry™ — has to say about Suma’s latest novel, 17 & Gone: “Elegant, riveting, powerful, and poignant, this suspenseful, supernatural tale slips under the skin, inking out a haunting tapestry of menace and madness. Nova Ren Suma is, quite simply, a masterful storyteller and one of my favorite writers.” Suma is one of our favorite writers as well, and not only because we used to work with her and that she gave her first public reading of Imaginary Girls at twi-ny’s tenth anniversary party. She is also an expert craftsperson who agonizes over every word of the complex, fascinating worlds she creates, filled with wholly believable characters trapped in extraordinary situations. Here’s a tiny taste, from the first chapter of 17 & Gone (Dutton, March 2013, $17.99): “Abby Sinclair. There at the intersection. I’m not saying she was there in the flesh with her thumb out and her hair wild in the wind and her bare knees purpled from cold — it didn’t start out that way. The first time I saw Abby, it was only a picture: the class photograph reproduced on her Missing poster.” We know that makes us want to read a whole lot more, and it should do the same to you. Suma’s next book, The Walls Around Us, is due out from Algonquin in 2015.

JOHN CHAMBERLAIN: THE HEDGE

John Chamberlain, “The Hedge,” painted and chromium-plated steel, sixteen elements, 1997 (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

Lever House Art Collection
390 Park Ave. at 54th St.
Through August 31, free
www.leverhouseartcollection.com
the hedge photo set

Indiana-born sculptor John Chamberlain has seemingly been omnipresent since his death in December 2011 at the age of eighty-four. Sadly, the longtime Shelter Island resident passed away shortly before his wonderful career retrospective, “Choices,” last year at the Guggenheim, which showed off the surprising breadth of his work, which went well beyond car chrome and steel assemblages. Then the Gagosian put together a small outdoor sculpture installation on Seagram Plaza in Midtown last summer and fall, allowing such recent biomorphic aluminum pieces as “FROSTYDICKFANTASY,” “MERMAIDSMISCHIEF,” and “ROBUSTFAGOTTO” to glitter in the sun. Now Lever House is presenting one of Chamberlain’s largest sculptures, 1997’s “The Hedge,” which consists of a forty-six-foot-long row of sixteen evenly spaced forty-four-inch-high squares composed of painted chromium-plated steel from automobiles. A kind of three-dimensional Abstract Expressionist canvas come to life, “The Hedge” cuts through the mostly black-and-gray glassed-in Lever House lobby, where it can be seen residing next to a row of live green plantings. Each piece has a square hole in the middle, allowing visitors to look through them all, directly out onto Park Ave., where more colors pass by with the traffic, adding sly commentary on America’s consumerist car culture. Using such tools as a sledgehammer, a compactor, an acetylene torch, a band saw, and a steel cutter on automobile parts, Chamberlain is able to evoke the natural world with “The Hedge,” which features an array of bright, bold colors in a unique kind of metallic topiary. Each piece is a work of art in its own right, but together they invite viewers into a multifaceted, multidimensional space that seems to morph as seen from different angles.

A TIME FOR BURNING — CINEMA OF THE CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT: THE INTRUDER / NINE FROM LITTLE ROCK

William Shatner plays shady character Adam Cramer in powerful film about school integration in a southern town

THE INTRUDER (Roger Corman, 1962)
BAMcinématek, BAM Rose Cinemas
30 Lafayette Ave. between Ashland Pl. & St. Felix St.
Tuesday, August 20, 9:30
Series continues through August 28
718-636-4100
www.bam.org

Exploitation master Roger Corman shot out of the gates in the mid-1950s, directing and/or producing more than three dozen films between 1955 and 1961, directing doomsday disasters (Day the World Ended, Last Woman on Earth) and sci-fi quickies (It Conquered the World, Attack of the Crab Monsters), cheapie Westerns (Gunslinger, The Oklahoma Woman) and teen rave-ups (Sorority Girl, Teenage Doll), crime dramas (Machine-Gun Kelly; I, Mobster) and horror (A Bucket of Blood, The Undead), as well as the tales of Poe (House of Usher, The Pit and the Pendulum). But he tried something a little different with 1962’s The Intruder, a gripping, yet still exploitative, story of integration set in the ultraconservative south. Adapted by Charles Beaumont from his 1959 novel, which itself was inspired by the Little Rock Nine, the film stars William Shatner as Adam Cramer, a self-styled “social reformer” who arrives in the small southern town of Caxton just after integration has become law and just as ten black students, led by Joey Greene (Charles Barnes), are about to join whites at the local high school. Under the auspices of the John Birch-like Patrick Henry Society, Cramer is determined to continue the fight against integration, stirring the locals to potential mob violence through carefully orchestrated speeches filled with hate and lies. He allies himself with wealthy plantation owner Verne Shipman (Robert Emhardt) and cozies up to high school girl Ella McDaniel (Beverly Lunsford), daughter of newspaper editor Tom McDaniel (Frank Maxwell), one of the only reasonable white men in town. The manipulative Cramer will do just about anything to rile up the masses to keep the blacks from ruining America, but his own questionable personal morality might just get in the way, especially as he flirts with Vi (Jeanne Cooper), the wife of traveling salesman Sam Griffin (Leo Gordon).

Beaumont, who wrote nearly two dozen episodes of The Twilight Zone — though neither of the classics starring Shatner — appears in the film as Mr. Paton, a teacher in the school, along with fellow Twilight Zone scribe George Clayton Johnson, who plays Phil West; Johnson later wrote “The Man Trap,” the first regular episode of Star Trek. Indeed, The Intruder contains numerous Rod Serling-like elements, from the general social and political themes to Taylor Byars’s black-and-white cinematography and Herman Stein’s score. The Intruder is screening August 20 with Charles Guggenheim’s Oscar-winning short, Nine from Little Rock, as part of the BAMcinématek series “A Time for Burning: Cinema of the Civil Rights Movement,” which runs through August 28 with such other political films as Robert Wise’s Odds Against Tomorrow, Daniel Petrie’s A Raisin in the Sun, Edward Pincus and David Neuman’s Black Natchez, and St. Clair Bourne’s Let the Church Say Amen! The two-week festival was organized to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the March on Washington, but it now takes on even more meaning with the recent U.S. Supreme Court ruling that a central part of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 is unconstitutional.

VIDEO OF THE DAY: “USE ME” BY LIV WARFIELD, SHELBY J, AND NEW POWER GENERATION AT CITY WINERY

Over the years, Prince has put the spotlight on a series of musical protégés, from Wendy and Lisa, Sheila E., and Vanity to Apollonia 6, Carmen Electra, and Sheena Easton. City Winery will be celebrating His Most Purpleness’s newest up-and-comers as current backup singers Shelby J and Liv Warfield take center stage, with the NPG Hornz, for a series of hotly anticipated shows. The Purple Week festivities begin on August 19 with a free screening (advance RSVP required) of Albert Magnoli’s 1984 film Purple Rain, in which Prince stars as the Kid, performing such classic tracks as “Let’s Go Crazy,” “Darling Nikki,” “When Doves Cry,” and “I Would Die 4 U.” The movie will be preceded by a set by Prince tour DJ Dudley. Then Shelby J, Liv Warfield, and the New Power Generation Hornz will play two shows a night August 21, 22, 23, and 25 ($75 – $150), with special unannounced guests at each show. Will TAFKAP himself show up? He currently is not out on the road, so who knows. In any case, it should be one funky week.

SOUL DOCTOR: JOURNEY OF A ROCK STAR RABBI

Shlomo Carlebach (Eric Anderson) and Nina Simone (Amber Iman) develop an unusual friendship in SOUL DOCTOR (photo by Carol Rosegg)

Circle in the Square Theatre
1633 Broadway at 50th St.
Tuesday – Sunday through October 13, $39 – $135
www.souldoctorbroadway.com

The new Broadway musical Soul Doctor follows the unusual relationship between a gentle, soft-spoken Orthodox rabbi and a vivacious chanteuse who wind up having a lot more in common that either would ever think. Eric Anderson stars as Shlomo Carlebach, the real-life Singing Rabbi whose family left Nazi-occupied Vienna when he was a boy, making a new life in New York City. While trying to find his place in America, Carlebach meets singer and activist Nina Simone (Amber Iman), and the two develop a long-term friendship, becoming each other’s muse. As Simone goes on to become the High Priestess of Soul, Carlebach turns away from the rigid rules of his Orthodox background, which severely disappoints his rabbi father (Jamie Jackson), his worried mother (Jacqueline Antaramian), and his devout brother (Ryan Strand), who has fallen under the influence of Lubavitcher Rebbe Menachem Schneerson (Jackson). But soon Carlebach, the King of Kosher Music, has a hit record, is playing in nightclubs, and forms his own, unique temple, the House of Love and Prayer, in hippie-era San Francisco. But he’s constantly trying to prove to himself and his family that what he is doing matters, that it is all part of the expansion of the Jewish faith.

The King of Kosher Music preaches love and peace in San Francisco temple (photo by Carol Rosegg)

Anderson, who left the Kinky Boots ensemble to reprise the role of Carlebach, which earned him a Drama Desk nomination for last year’s presentation at New York Theatre Workshop, brings a sweet innocence to the mild-mannered Rock Star Rabbi, displaying the kind of charm that established Carlebach’s success and reputation. And Iman is a force as Simone, dominating the stage with her bold, brash style. The book, by director Daniel S. Wise, glosses over too many details, including Carlebach’s relationship with follower Ruth (Zarah Mahler), and just skips over others, leaving too many unexplained holes, and Carlebach’s never-ending battle with his childhood teacher and later cantor, Reb Pinchas (Ron Orbach), who he calls the “holy heckler,” grows repetitive and tiresome. The script is filled with such platitudes as Carlebach telling Pinchas, “If I had two hearts, I could use one to love and one to hate. But I only have one heart, so . . . I use it to love!” Despite less-than-inspiring choreography by former Cedar Lake artistic director Benoit-Swan Pouffer, the musical numbers, from the Carlebach tunes (“Rosh Hashanah Rock,” “Ki Va Moed,” “Yerushalyim,” “Am Yisrael Chai”) to new songs with lyrics by David Schechter, are mostly a lot of fun, with the exuberant cast, dressed in Maggie Morgan’s period costumes, often running up and down the aisles. Mahler turns in a strong solo near the end, “I Was a Sparrow,” that will have audiences wondering why she wasn’t featured more. Although you don’t have to be Jewish to enjoy the show, those who attend High Holiday services will be thrilled to hear many familiar liturgical melodies that were written by Carlebach. But Soul Doctor does more than merely preach to the converted, instead exploring a fascinating figure in American folk music.