Vanderbilt Hall, Grand Central Terminal
89 East 42nd St. at Vanderbilt Ave.
August 24-28, free, 11:00 am – 2:00 pm & 4:00 – 7:00 www.grandcentralterminal.com
For the second August in a row, Grand Central Terminal’s classy Vanderbilt Hall is getting a makeover, being transformed into an indoor public picnic space August 24-28, with tables covered in gingham cloth, an AstroTurf floor, prizes and giveaways, and food from many of the restaurants that are located throughout GCT. “Life’s a Picnic in Grand Central” will also feature free Wi-Fi, air-conditioning, and live performances. You can bring your own lunch or pick up specials from a rotating lineup of GCT eateries, including Café Spice, Ceriello Fine Foods, Café Grumpy, Jacques Torres Ice Cream, Financier Patisserie, Junior’s Bakery, Magnolia Bakery, Neuhaus Belgian Chocolate, Zaro’s Bakery, Manhattan Chili Co., Li-Lac Chocolates, Manhattan Chili Co., Shiro of Japan, and Murray’s Cheese. Below is the lineup of special events.
Monday, August 24
Live Food Demonstrations: The Bar Burger by Chef Cenobio Canalizo of Michael Jordan’s, sushi rolling by Chef Hiro Isikawa of Shiro of Japan, mozzarella making with Dan Belmont of Murray’s Cheese, and cupcake decorating by Amy Tamulonis from Magnolia Bakery, 11:00 am – 2:00 pm
Joe’s Pub at the Public Theater presents “Echoes of Etta: A Tribute to Etta James,” featuring William Blake & Michael Thomas Murray, 4:30 – 6:30
Tuesday, August 25
Broadway Hour featuring live performance and more from the Broadway musical Wicked, 12:30
Music Under New York: Robert Anderson Jazz Trio, 4:00 – 7:00
Wednesday, August 26
Big Apple Circus presents Peety the Clown’s Yo-Yos & Stuff Show, 12 noon – 2:00 pm
Joe’s Pub at the Public Theater presents Danny Lipsitz and His Brass Tacks, 4:00 – 7:00
Thursday, August 27
Broadway Hour featuring musical performances from the Broadway musicals On the Town and Finding Neverland, 12:30 – 1:30
Music Under New York: Receta Secreta, 4:00 – 7:00
Friday, August 28
Broadway Hour: musical performances from Chicago, Something Rotten! and A Gentleman’s Guide to Love and Murder, 12:30 – 1:30
Juliette Binoche stars in new adaptation of ANTIGONE as part of BAM Next Wave Festival (photo by Jan Versweyveld)
Brooklyn Academy of Music
BAM Howard Gilman Opera House, 30 Lafayette Ave.
BAM Harvey Theater, 651 Fulton St.
BAM Fisher, 321 Ashland Pl.
September 16 – December 20, $20-$135
718-636-4100 www.bam.org
Every fall, we practically move into BAM for its annual Next Wave Festival, three months of exciting, challenging, and cutting-edge dance, music, theater, and other arts. And this year is no exception, with a roster of events that has us salivating. The star attraction is Ivo van Hove’s Antigone, a multimedia adaptation of Sophokles’s classic Greek tragedy in a new colloquial translation by Anne Carson and featuring Oscar winner Juliette Binoche in the title role. Other theater highlights are Stan Douglas and Chris Haddock’s multimedia stage noir, Helen Lawrence; Carl Hancock Rux’s The Exalted, about German-Jewish writer and art historian Carl Einstein, genocide, and genealogy, directed by Anne Bogart and with live music by Theo Bleckman; Royal Shakespeare Company actor Paterson Joseph portraying Charles “Sancho” Ignatius in the one-man show Sancho: An Act of Remembrance; and John Jahnke and Hotel Savant’s Alas, the Nymphs, a modern reimagination of the story of Greek mythological figure Hylas.
Sankai Juku returns to BAM for the first time since 2006 with UMUSUNA (photo courtesy of Sankai Juku)
The dance lineup at the 2015 Next Wave Festival is extraordinary as always, led by the return of German choreographer Sasha Waltz with Continu, a wild piece of dance theater set to Edgard Varèse’s “Arcana,” and Japanese Butoh troupe Sankai Juku’s Umusuna: Memories Before History, Ushio Amagatsu’s meditative exploration of history through fire, water, air, and earth. The season also includes Finnish choreographer Kenneth Kvarnström’s experimental Tape, the Cloud Gate Dance Theatre of Taiwan’s Rice, U-Theatre’s Beyond Time, Souleymane Badolo’s Yimbégré, Urban Bush Women’s Walking with ’Trane, Mark Morris’s annual holiday favorite The Hard Nut, and Wendy Whelan and Jock Soto in David Michalek’s Hagoromo, with choreography by David Neumann, puppetry by Chris M. Green, and Nathan Davis’s score performed live by the International Contemporary Ensemble.
William Kentridge stars in his multimedia opera REFUSE THE HOUR (photo by John Hodgkiss)
The music program features one of the most unusual works, Kid Koala’s adaptation of his graphic novel Nufonia Must Fall, about a robot in love with an office mate, for which Kid Koala will be joined by the Afiara Quartet. In All Vows, cellist Maya Beiser teams up with bassist Jherek Bischoff, drummer Zachary Alford, and filmmaker Bill Morrison. Timur and the Dime Museum say a glam farewell to the environment in Collapse. In Real Enemies, Darcy James Argue and his Secret Society big band join forces with filmmaker Peter Nigrini, writer-director Isaac Butler, and designer Maruti Evans to delve into American conspiracy theories. South African genius William Kentridge is back at BAM with the multimedia opera Refuse the Hour, a companion piece to his immersive “Refusal of Time” installation recently acquired by the Met. Drummer Jim White and Sasha Waltz & Guests dancer Claudia de Serpa Soares perform on one side of a two-way mirror in More up a tree. And Steppenwolf cofounder Terry Kinney turns Portland indie group Other Lives’ stage show into a multimedia experience. Tickets are going fast — Miranda July’s participatory New Society is already sold out, as is Théâtre de l’Atelier’s Savannah Bay, both of which take place at the small BAM Fisher, where all tickets are always a mere $25 — so don’t hesitate if you want to catch some of these fab presentations.
Jack Ferver and Marc Swanson will present the glittering CHAMBRE as part of FIAF’s annual Crossing the Line festival (photo by Julieta Cervantes)
French Institute Alliance Française and other locations
Florence Gould Hall, 55 East 59th St. between Madison & Park Aves.
FIAF Gallery, 22 East 60th St. between Madison & Park Aves.
September 10 – October 4, free – $35
212-355-6160 www.fiaf.org
Tickets are now available for FIAF’s ninth annual late summer/early fall multidisciplinary arts festival, and you better act fast if you want to see some of this year’s most intriguing programs. For us, the highlight is Jack Ferver and Marc Swanson’s Chambre, an installation and performance piece at the New Museum inspired by Jean Genet’s The Maids and pop-culture elements, with extravagant costumes by Reid Bartelme and experimental sound and music by twi-ny fave Roarke Menzies. British artist Ant Hampton’s Autoteatro series continues with The Extra People, in which participants will go on an individual adventure through FIAF’s Florence Gould Theater. The U.S. premiere of Brazilian artist Gustavo Ciriaco and Austrian artist Andrea Sonnberger’s Here whilst we walk will take small groups, bound by a giant rubber band, on a silent trip through Red Hook. Elana Langer’s free What I Live By will pop up at three locations, examining brand identification and personal values. Iranian artist Ali Moini searches for freedom in the multimedia dance work Lives at New York Live Arts (NYLA). Miguel Gutierrez will present the New York City premiere of all three parts of his Age & Beauty series, Mid-Career Artist/Suicide Note or &:-/; Asian Beauty @ the Werq Meeting or The Choreographer & Her Muse or &:@&; and Dancer or You can make whatever the fuck you want but you’ll only tour solos or The Powerful People or We are strong/We are powerful/We are beautiful/We are divine or &:’////, at NYLA, featuring such collaborators as Mickey Mahar, Michelle Boulé, Jen Rosenblit, Ishmael Houston-Jones, and Alex Rodabaugh. Italian artist Alessandro Sciarroni asks Folk-s, will you still love me tomorrow? in his unique interpretation of Bavarian folk dance at NYLA. French director Joris Lacoste investigates multiple languages and human spoken expression in Suite n°2 in Florence Gould Hall. Also on the bill are Shezad Dawood’s “It was a time that was a time” exhibition at Pioneer Works, a photography show by Mazaccio & Drowilal in the FIAF Gallery, Olivia Bransbourg’s ICONOfly magazine, and Adrian Heathfield and André Lepecki’s three-day symposium, “Afterlives: The Persistence of Performance,” at FIAF and MoMA.
THE CURIOUS INCIDENT OF THE DOG IN THE NIGHT-TIME is among nearly two dozen Broadway shows offering half-price tickets September 7-20 (photo by Joan Marcus)
Brothers Darren (Jack DiFalco) and Elliot (Zane Pais) are caught up in some shady dealings in Philip Ridley’s MERCURY FUR (photo by Monique Carboni)
The New Group at the Pershing Square Signature Center
The Romulus Linney Courtyard Theatre
480 West 42nd St. between between Ninth & Tenth Aves.
Tuesday – Sunday through September 27, $25-$75 www.thenewgroup.org www.signaturetheatre.org
British playwright Philip Ridley — who also writes children’s books, pens screenplays, song lyrics, and poetry, directs films, is an experienced photographer, and has staged multimedia installations and performance art projects — has a special relationship with his audience. In Tender Napalm, which enjoyed a limited run at 59E59 in 2012, the audience sat in two rows across a narrow, horizontal space between which two actors shared their dreams and fantasies in abstract soliloquies. If a patron had to use the rest room (there was no intermission), he or she would have to walk right through the action, and would not be allowed back in. There’s a similar conceit in Mercury Fur, Ridley’s confrontational 2005 work being revived by the New Group at the Signature’s Linney theater, which has been transformed by Derek McLane into a dilapidated room in an abandoned New York City housing project, strewn with debris, the windows boarded up. On two facing sides, the audience sits in folding chairs, ratty couches, or decaying love seats; on the other two sides, people sit high atop walls that offer occasionally limited views of what is happening below. Once again, there is no intermission, so getting up to use the facilities would be rather noticeable, and reentry is only at the discretion of management. Then again, Mercury Fur has been known to cause audience members to leave and not want to come back; in fact, Ridley’s publisher rejected it, refusing to release a printed edition. (Ridley defiantly took the play, and his backlist, to a different company.) Which is all rather beside the point, as the two-hour Mercury Fur is a bold, engrossing work that is not afraid to challenge audiences as it digs deeply into the dark part of the soul, revealing the lengths to which humans will go when faced with imminent disaster. As the David Leavitt epigraph in the published play states, “Sometimes brutality is the only antidote to sorrow.”
Things don’t go so well at a bizarre party in the New Group revival of MERCURY FUR (photo by Monique Carboni)
As the play opens, nineteen-year-old Elliot (Zane Pais) and his younger brother, sixteen-year-old Darren (Jack DiFalco), are cleaning up a ramshackle apartment, preparing it for a special party. Elliot is by far the stronger of the two, telling his not-too-swift sibling, “You know what you’re like? A fucking anvil round my neck. The lifeboat’s sinking and I’m bailing it out like a good egg but I’ve got this fucking anvil getting heavier and heavier dragging the whole thing down.” The brothers, who soon touch each other’s hearts in a sweetly innocent moment, are working for Spinx (Sea McHale), a dangerous tough guy who throws parties for wealthy people in which they can do any degraded thing they want, for a price. Afterward, the entire building will be burned down, leaving no evidence of the depravity that occurred there. In this case, with WWIII on the horizon, a Wall Streeter called Party Guest (Peter Mark Kendall) has very specific, and deviant, plans for the ten-year-old Party Piece (Bradley Fong), involving gold lamé, Elvis Presley style. Also on hand for the festivities are Lola (Paul Iacono), a scantily clad transgender makeup artist; Spinx’s date, the Duchess (Emily Cass McDonnell), who is brought along unexpectedly, complicating things for Elliot, who sells hallucinogenic butterflies, and Darren, who likes to eat those colorful treats; and Naz (Tony Revolori), a fifteen-year-old who is squatting in the building and wants to join in the fun, thinking it’s going to be a regular party. Oh, how wrong he is.
New Group artistic director Scott Elliott (Sticks and Bones, Hurlyburly) directs this Off-Broadway premiere with pre/post-apocalyptic punk flair, keeping the aggression level high while maintaining an intoxicating yet uncomfortable intimacy. You can’t look away, even when you know what’s going to happen, even though most of the ultraviolence takes place offstage. The play includes elements of Greek tragedy and Shakespeare, J. G. Ballard and Tennessee Williams, so you never know which direction it will turn. The brave, talented cast — which features several actors with little or no professional stage experience, including Revolori, who recently won accolades for his portrayal of Zero the lobby boy in Wes Anderson’s Oscar-nominated The Grand Budapest Hotel — holds nothing back as events spin out of control and an overwhelming sense of doom dominates the proceedings. The characters live in a frightening world, one that is even more terrifying because it doesn’t feel that much removed from our current situation, as if all of this is waiting for us, just around the corner. With Mercury Fur, the New Group, which staged Ridley’s The Fastest Clock in the Universe in 1998, takes a good look at the future, and it is not a happy prospect.
Everyone has a story to tell in world premiere of Annie Baker’s JOHN at the Signature (photo by Matthew Murphy)
The Pershing Square Signature Center
The Irene Diamond Stage
480 West 42nd St. between Tenth & Eleventh Aves.
Tuesday – Sunday through September 6, $25-$55
212-244-7529 www.signaturetheatre.org
“Tell me a story,” Jenny (Hong Chau) says to her boyfriend, Elias (Christopher Abbott), near the beginning of Annie Baker’s wonderful John, her follow-up to the Pulitzer Prize-winning The Flick. It’s a direct reference to what we, the audience, are essentially saying when we take our seats in a dark theater, something that Baker makes abundantly clear throughout John’s smoothly paced three-hour-and-fifteen-minute running time. Jenny and Elias have arrived at a tchotchke-filled bed and breakfast owned by the sweetly doddering Mertis (Georgia Engel) in Gettysburg, where the guest rooms are named for Stonewall Jackson, Abraham Lincoln, and Joshua Chamberlain. The Civil War setting is an apt metaphor for the battle between the sexes, as Elias and Jenny are tense and nervous, suffering through a rough patch in their relationship; Mertis, who prefers to be called Kitty, is on her second husband, although he is never seen or heard; and Kitty’s best friend, the blind Genevieve (Lois Smith), thinks that her ex-husband, John, has driven her legitimately insane, filling her brain with deadly scorpions. “Everyone knows someone named John,” Genevieve says, and indeed, we all do, with all the demons that implies. While Elias wants to explore the history of Gettysburg, Jenny complains that he chews his food too loud and that she is suffering through a bad period; more important, she is scared of one of Kitty’s myriad decorations, an American Girl doll named Samantha, the same model that terrorized her as a child. There is something unspoken between Elias and Jenny, a wall that is threatening to collapse all around them. Meanwhile, Genevieve believes that the house is haunted, as if personal ghosts, as well as those from the country’s deadliest war, are hovering in the air; although there are little touches of the supernatural amid Baker’s trademark hyperrealism, it’s really the characters themselves who are haunted.
Kitty (Georgia Engel), Elias (Christopher Abbott), and Genevieve (Lois Smith) riff on theater and real life in Annie Baker’s JOHN (photo by Matthew Murphy)
Baker and regular collaborator Sam Gold, who has directed nearly all of Baker’s plays, including Circle Mirror Transformation, The Aliens, and The Flick, which has been extended through January 2016 at the Barrow Street Theatre, reveal the artifice behind the theater and the art of storytelling in John, making it a central focus of the narrative. Kitty opens and closes the curtain before and after each act, pushing and pulling it across the stage, and she regularly moves the hands of a grandfather clock to indicate time shifts, as Mark Barton’s lighting increases or decreases with the passing hours. (The set design is by Mimi Lien.) Kitty calls the breakfast nook next to the living room “Paris,” alluding to the magic of the theater, which can turn a New York City stage into a foreign land. “Do you ever feel watched, Jenny?” Kitty asks. “Like someone is watching you?,” a direct reference to the audience. A later joke, in which one character says to another, “What are you still doing there?,” is a riff on the audience still in their seats after more than three hours, experiencing this play that unwinds at the mundane speed of life. At the end of the second act, after Kitty has closed the curtain and the house lights have come on, Genevieve takes the stage and explains, “I’m going to tell you a story but I’m going to do it in under five minutes,” another funny reference to the length of John. Near the end, Jenny says, “I want to hear the rest of the story,” but Elias responds, “The rest of the story doesn’t exist yet.” Those lines get to the heart of Baker’s play, which is about both fictional storytelling and real life; the former usually comes with everything wrapped up in a neat little bow, but the latter does not always provide easy answers, if any answers at all. The actors are uniformly excellent, particularly Engel (The Drowsy Chaperone, Baker’s Uncle Vanya) in a role written specifically for her, and Gold’s (Fun Home,The Realistic Joneses) direction makes the hours go by surprisingly smoothly. John is a beautifully rendered work by an extremely talented playwright who’s got her finger firmly placed on the pulse of modern existence, and contemporary theater.
Cymbeline, one of Shakespeare’s later, lesser-known plays, is not easy to bring to the stage. It’s a sort of greatest-hits mash-up of previous Bard themes and plot devices, lacking in memorable lines and named after a relatively minor character. So Tony-winning Shakespeare in the Park veteran Daniel Sullivan has added a large dose of whimsy to what turns out to be a rather charming and modern romantic comedy. In fact, whereas the first folio identifies it as “The Tragedy of Cymbeline,” a framed backdrop that is visible throughout nearly all of the Public Theater presentation calls it “The Story of Cymbeline,” as tragedy becomes farce. With war threatening between Britain and Rome in ancient times, King Cymbeline (Patrick Page) has banished Posthumus Leonatus (Hamish Linklater), a commoner who is married to, and very much in love with, his daughter, Imogen (Lily Rabe), so she can instead wed the queen’s not-too-swift progeny, Cloten (Linklater). Meanwhile, in a 1950s-era Vegas-y Rome, Posthumus boasts about his wife’s virtue, leading the Italian playboy Iachimo (Raúl Esparza), after performing a glitzy Sinatra-like number, to lay a wager that he can bed Imogen and despoil her honor. The bet is overseen by Philario (Page), a sharp-dressed gangster who is Posthumus’s host. As the queen conspires to poison Imogen, both Iacomo and Cloten attempt to woo the princess, who soon sets out for Wales disguised as a boy to set things straight with her one true love. But on the way she gets lost in the woods and is taken in by an oddball anarchist family consisting of a bent-over father (Kate Burton) and his two would-be sons (David Furr and Jacob Ming-Trent). It all leads to a dizzying finale with more than two dozen revelations coming fast and furious.
The cloddish Cloten (Hamish Linklater) makes his case to marry Imogen (Lily Rabe) (photo by Carol Rosegg)
Sullivan (Proof, Twelfth Night) has a ball revealing the artifice behind the production while also taking the story to some surprising extremes. Riccardo Hernandez’s set features a pair of large gold frames and boxes and props from other Shakespeare productions (Hamlet, King Lear), reminding everyone of the machinations behind it all. There are several rows of audience members on either side of the stage who do indeed get involved in the action, while some of the actors sit at the back of the stage between their scenes. Rabe and Linklater, who are partners in real life and have previously appeared together in Seminar on Broadway and in The Merchant of Venice and Much Ado About Nothing at the Delacorte, are at their best in Cymbeline, she as the strong-willed and sexy Imogen, he going back and forth between the noble-to-a-fault Posthumus and the dumb-and-dumber Cloten (complete with Jim Carrey–like wig), pausing in his line readings for maximum double-entendre effect. Page (Casa Valentina,Cyrano de Bergerac) is gallant as the king and Philario, balancing power with a conscience; Burton is nicely wicked as the queen and almost unrecognizable as Belarius; four-time Tony nominee Esparza (Company, Taboo) is appropriately smarmy as Iachimo, who spans two eras; Teagle F. Bougere (A Raisin in the Sun, Macbeth) is solid as Roman ambassador Lucius and court doctor Cornelius, particularly in the grand finale; Steven Skybell (Pal Joey, A Midsummer Night’s Dream) is engaging as Pisanio, Posthumus’s loyal servant who dedicates himself to Imogen; and Furr (As You Like It, The Importance of Being Earnest) and Ming-Trent (Hands on a Hardbody, Shrek the Musical) bring a sweet nature to their portrayals of the mountain brothers as well as the play’s narrators. Yes, it’s lesser Shakespeare, and at nearly three hours it runs too long (even with the excision of the Jupiter dream sequence), but Sullivan’s fanciful production is a whole lot more fun than Cymbeline usually is. (Don’t forget that in addition to waiting on line at the Delacorte to get free tickets, you can also enter the daily virtual ticketing lottery online here.)
