Who: Kerstin Anderson, Phillip Attmore, Jason Gotay, Nyla Watson, more
What: 92Y’s Lyrics & Lyricists
Where: 92nd St. Y, Kaufmann Concert Hall, 1395 Lexington Ave. at 92nd St., 212-415-5500
When: May 4-6, $30-$85
Why: Daniel Fish’s current Broadway adaptation of Rodgers & Hammerstein’s first collaboration, Oklahoma!, has many singing its praises and others decrying it as an abomination. I raved about it in my review, to which Oscar Hammerstein III replied, “Nonsense. The play is a travesty posing as experimental; a parasite feasting on the original musical.” In honor of the work’s diamond anniversary, the 92nd St. Y’s Lyrics & Lyricists series is presenting “A Beautiful Dawning: Oklahoma! at 75,” five shows May 4-6 celebrating its ongoing influence and legacy. The cast features vocalists Kerstin Anderson, Phillip Attmore, Jason Gotay, and Nyla Watson, with Justin Smith on violin, Scott Kuney on guitar, Mark Vanderpoel on bass, and Perry Cavari on drums. Parker Esse directs; Ted Chapin is writer and host and Andy Einhorn the music director, with projection design by Dan Scully. “We’ll be taking a deep look at the show — from its unlikely creation, through its years as a staple of the repertoire, through to the various modern reinterpretations that attest to the show’s continuing relevance,” Chapin said in a statement. “And of course, because this is L&L, there will be a few oddities thrown in among the show’s beloved and well-known songs.” We’re guessing that chili will not be served.
Davy Rothbart follows a Washington, DC, family trying to break the cycle of drugs, gun violence, and poverty over twenty years in 17 Blocks, a powerful documentary making its world premiere at the Tribeca Film Festival, where it won Best Editing in a Documentary Film. “The award for best editing goes to a film for its profound treatment of vast amounts of honest, often raw footage. The film is structured in a way that renders some of the most affecting moments with great subtlety. Viewers are transformed over the course of the film, a testament to the choices made in its making,” the jury said in its official announcement. Written, produced, and directed by Rothbart and written and edited by Jennifer Tiexiera, 17 Blocks features footage shot in 1999, 2009, and more recently, much of it taken by members of the Sanford family, including Cheryl Sanford, her sons Emmanuel Durant Jr. and Akil “Smurf” Sanford, and her daughter Denice Sanford-Durant, in addition to Rothbart and cinematographer Zachary Shields. Rothbart became friends with fifteen-year-old Smurf in 1999 and taught nine-year-old Emmanuel how to use a video camera, so the family was comfortable sharing intimate, deeply personal details of their lives over the years.
Director Abel Ferrara packs a whole lot into controversial Italian writer and filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini’s last day on earth in the multinational coproduction Pasolini. Unfortunately, it all ends up a rather confusing jumble, with Ferrara (Bad Lieutenant, The Addiction) and screenwriter Maurizio Braucci (Gomorrah, Black Souls) squeezing too much into too little. Willem Dafoe stars as Pasolini on November 2, 1975, as the director is interviewed by a journalist, reads the newspaper on the couch, sits down at his typewriter to work on his novel Petrolio, edits what would be his final film (Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom), and goes cruising to pick up a young stud. Ferrara adds enactments of scenes from the never-realized Porno-Teo-Kolossal, with Pasolini’s real-life lover, Ninetto Davoli, playing the fictional character Epifanio. (Davoli was supposed to play the younger Nunzio in the hallucinatory tale, about a search for faith and the messiah. Davoli is played by Riccardo Scamarcio in Ferrara’s film.) Ferrara never really delves into the internal makeup of Pasolini (The Gospel According to Matthew, Teorema), an openly gay outspoken social and political activist, poet, Marxist, Christian, and documentarian, instead using brief episodes that only touch the surface, as if Dafoe is playing a character based on Pasolini rather than the complex man who was indeed Pasolini. But Ferrara does get very specific about Pasolini’s mysterious, brutal death. Pasolini is screening May 3 at 7:00 in the MoMA series “Abel Ferrara: Unrated” and will be followed by a Q&A with the director and Dafoe.