Jonathan Slaff reads from HENRY V at 2014 birthday bash for the Bard in Bryant Park (photo by Claire Taddei)
Who: The Drilling Company, with artistic director Jonathan Eric Foster, managing director Sarah George, and more than fifty actors, including company members Kyle Acheson, Sam De Roest, Nyssa Duchow, and Corley Pillsbury
What: Second annual Shakespeare Birthday Bash
Where: Bryant Park, 40th to 42nd Sts. between Fifth & Sixth Aves.
When: Wednesday, April 23, free, 12:30 – 2:30
Why: The Drilling Company, those creative folks behind Shakespeare in the Parking Lot and who brought Hamlet to Bryant Park last year, will celebrate the Bard’s 451st birthday with a free party in the park on Thursday afternoon. At 12:30, a flash mob of actors will be roaming the area, presenting “Wonderful Words,” consisting of famous speeches, sonnets, and lines. At 1:00, folk band Thicket & Thistle will perform original music based on Shakespeare sonnets on the Fountain Terrace. At 1:30, anyone can join the festivities by reading a speech from a Bard play to win a T-shirt. Finally, at 2:00, banners will be raised, filled with quotations that people have been adding to all afternoon. The Drilling Company will be back in the park later this spring and summer, presenting Two Gentlemen of Verona May 15-31, followed by Romeo and Juliet July 10-26 and The Taming of the Shrew September 4-20; they will also perform As You Like It July 9-26 and Macbeth July 30 to August 15 in their new parking lot home on Norfolk St. behind the Clemente Soto Velez Cultural and Educational Center.
In April 2005, Neil Young underwent brain surgery for an aneurysm. Four months later, he gathered together friends for two special nights at Nashville’s historic Ryman Auditorium, captured on film by Oscar-winning director Jonathan Demme, who has previously helmed such fab music docs as Stop Making Sense and Storefront Hitchcock. Neil Young: Heart of Gold was an intimate portrait of man who looked death in the face and survived; the film featured acoustic songs primarily from Young’s beautiful Prairie Wind album. But the Godfather of Grunge wasn’t about to let a little thing like a brain aneurysm stop him from rocking in the free world. As he continued his long-term project of reaching deep into his past for his archival box sets, he released Chrome Dreams II in October 2007, a sequel to an unreleased 1977 album that was rumored to include such future Young classics as “Pocahontas,” “Like a Hurricane,” “Homegrown,” and “Powderfinger.” For Chrome Dreams II, Young strapped on the electric guitar and held nothing back, joined by longtime partners in crime Ralph Molina on drums, Rick Rosas on bass, and Ben Keith on guitars and keyboards.
Greendale, Neil Young’s “musical novel” about a small American town encountering a few troubles — including drugs, corporate greed, extramarital doings, the murder of a police officer, and a little red devil — is simplistic, amateurish, silly, and a lot of fun. The music, especially “Falling from Above,” “Devil’s Sidewalk,” and “Bandit,” is awesome, featuring Young’s soaring guitar and the solid backing of Crazy Horse. There’s no dialogue in the film, just the characters lip-synching to Young’s singing. With Greendale, Young has created his own little world, and for nearly ninety minutes, it’s a pleasure to be a part of it. The direction is credited to Young’s alter ego, Bernard Shakey, who is enjoying a weeklong retrospective at the IFC Center, consisting of a 35mm print of Greendale, a digital restoration of the director’s cut of Human Highway, the twentieth-anniversary of Dead Man (with director Jim Jarmusch participating in a postscreening discussion on April 23 at 7:00), a high-definition digital projection of Journey Through the Past, a 35mm print of Year of the Horse (with Jarmusch at the IFC Center for the 9:45 screening on April 23), and other musical journeys starring Young, who continues to make vibrant music as he heads toward seventy. 
