Chagall Family Day at the Jewish Museum offers special look at new exhibit (© 2013 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris./Marc Chagall)
The Jewish Museum
1109 Fifth Ave. at 92nd St.
Sunday, October 6, adults $15, children eighteen and under free, 12:00 – 4:00
212-423-3200
www.thejewishmuseum.org
The paintings of Russian-born modernist Marc Chagall are imbued with a childlike sense of wonder in their use of color and their depiction of animals and people often in the midst of flying. So it is appropriate that the Jewish Museum’s next family day celebrates the career of the master artist, who was born in Belarus and spent much of his life in France before passing away in 1985 at the age of ninety-seven. Held in conjunction with the new exhibit “Chagall: Love, War, and Exile,” which examines Chagall’s oeuvre from the 1930s until 1948, Chagall Family Day includes live performances by the Pop Ups, art workshops in which kids can make puppet characters, participate in a dream mural, and step into life-size creatures created by the Puppeteers’ Cooperative, tell personal stories through drawing and watercolor techniques, take tours of the exhibit and make sketches of three of Chagall’s paintings, and go on a gallery hunt. Chagall Family Day is recommended for children ages three and up and is free with general admission — which is always free for children eighteen and younger.
Zachary Heinzerling’s 
Oh yes, there will be blood. Tim Burton’s adaptation of the hit Broadway musical Sweeney Todd is bloody good fun. After being sent to prison for fifteen years by Judge Turpin (Alan Rickman), who had designs on his wife (Laura Michelle Kelly), innocent barber Benjamin Barker (Johnny Depp) returns to nineteenth-century London, reborn as Sweeney Todd, now a dark, ominous figure dead set on gaining his dastardly revenge. He gets back his coveted silver razors, which he considers an extension of his arm, and sets up shop in his old place, above the store where Mrs. Lovett (Helena Bonham Carter) sells meat pies crawling with cockroaches. When Todd begins slicing throats with expert precision, Lovett has a novel way of doing away with the bodies — while increasing business. Burton and screenwriter John Logan (The Aviator, The Last Samurai) terrifically translate the show onto the big screen, as Depp, Bonham Carter, and the rest of the cast — including Sacha Baron Cohen as a magical elixir salesman, Timothy Spall as the judge’s wingman, and Jayne Wisener as Todd’s daughter, who is doomed to marry the judge — do a wonderful job with such Stephen Sondheim songs as “No Place Like London,” “Poor Thing,” “My Friends,” “Pretty Women,” and “Not While I’m Around.” Depp is marvelous as the demon barber of Fleet Street, wearing a fright wig with a shocking streak of white, singing most of his dialogue with a gentle devilishness, enhanced by his haunting, penetrating eyes. The goth opera not only sounds good but looks even better, courtesy of cinematographer Dariusz Wolski, Oscar-winning production designer Dante Ferretti, and costume designer Colleen Atwood. Burton and Depp, who previously collaborated on Edward Scissorhands, Ed Wood, Sleepy Hollow, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, and Corpse Bride, have another winner on their hands. Sweeney Todd is screening September 30 at 4:00 as part of the MoMA series “Dante Ferretti: Designing for the Big Screen,” being held in conjunction with the exhibit “Dante Ferretti: Design and Construction for the Cinema” and continues through February 9 with such other fab-looking works as Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Medea, Federico Fellini’s City of Women, and Julie Taymor’s Titus.
