Film: Manifesto at the Park Avenue Armory

Artists discuss their personal revolutions with, through, and against the art of their ages.

Review: http://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/15/arts/design/12-faces-of-cate-blanchett-a-chameleon-in-the-armory.html?_r=0

Theater: Hundred Days (Under the Radar Festival)

Conceived by Abigail and Shaun Bengson
Book, Music and Lyrics by Abigail and Shaun Bengson
Additional Material by Sarah Gancher
Directed by Anne Kauffman

Featuring Abigail Bengson, Shaun Bengson, Colette Alexander, Geneva Harrison, Jo Lampert, and Reggie D. White

Hundred Days is the uncensored, exhilarating, and heartrending true story of how Abigail and Shaun Bengson met and fell in love, and how that love unleashed their terror of mortality. With magnetic chemistry and anthemic folk-punk music, the Bengsons explore the fundamental question of how to make the most of the time that we have.

Hundred Days was created by Abigail and Shaun Bengson with their collaborators Anne Kauffman and Sarah Gancher.

American folk/rock duo The Bengsons have performed their music worldwide. Theatre and Dance:You'll Still Call Me By Name (NYLA), Anything That Gives Off Light (Edinburgh Theater Festival),The Place We Built (The Flea), Iphigenia in Aulis (CSC). Upcoming: Sun Down, Yellow Moon (Ars Nova, Women’s Project), The Lucky Ones (Ars Nova), and a LCT commission.

Review: http://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/05/theater/hundred-days-review-under-the-radar.html?_r=0

Theater: The Strange Undoing of Prudencia Hart

Melody Grove in The Strange Undoing of Prudencia Hart.

(© National Theatre of Scotland/Drew Farrell)

The National Theatre of Scotland's The Strange Undoing of Prudencia Hart.

"Created by writer David Greig and director Wils Wilson, with design by Georgia McGuinness, movement by Janice Parker and musical direction by Alasdair Macrae, The Strange Undoing of Prudencia Hart is described as "a transporting, music-filled folk theater fable." The show "unfolds among and around its audience, weaving an ingenious, lyrical and enchanting story told with live music throughout its intimate and supernatural setting."

The production will feature a full Scottish cast from the National Theatre of Scotland, including Annie Grace, Melody Grove, Peter Hannah, Alasdair Macrae, and Paul McCole.

The McKittrick Hotel's bar and music venue, the Heath, has been transformed into a high-spirited Scottish Pub for the production."

Theater: A Christmas Carol at the Merchant's House Museum

Summoners Ensemble Theatre's A Christmas Carol will return to the Merchant's House for the fourth consecutive holiday season, December 7-24.

John Kevin Jones portrays Charles Dickens as he tells the timeless Christmas tale in the Greek Revival parlor of the landmark 1832 Merchant's House Museum. The one-hour performance, created from Dickens' own script and directed by Dr. Rhonda Dodd, transports audiences back 150 years in a setting surrounded by 19th-century holiday decorations, flickering candles, and richly appointed period furnishings.

Theater: Fiddler on the Roof

http://fiddlermusical.com/

From: http://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/21/theater/review-a-fiddler-on-the-roof-revival-with-an-echo-of-modernity.html

The score, by Jerry Bock (music) and Sheldon Harnick (lyrics), enters your bloodstream, indelibly, upon a single hearing, so rousing are its songs of celebration, so beautiful the melodies of its songs of love and loss — two sides, for Tevye, of the same coin. And Joseph Stein’s book miraculously blends borscht belt humor (he was an alumnus of the fabled writing staff of “Your Show of Shows”) with a moving depiction of Tevye’s conflicted heart and the suffering of the Jews under Russian imperialism.

Music: Monteverdi's Vespers of 1610

TENET's Green Mountain Project returns to offer their beloved performance of this monumental work. "A treasured staple in New York" (The New York Times), TENET's all-star cast will present Claudio Monteverdi's Vespers of 1610 under conductor and music director Scott Metcalfe and with Dark Horse Consort in a historically informed approach and appropriate chants.

MUSICAL DIRECTOR: SCOTT METCALFE
ARTISTIC DIRECTOR: JOLLE GREENLEAF

Sopranos:  Jolle Greenleaf and Molly Quinn
Alto: Laura Pudwell
Tenors: Colin Balzer, Owen McIntosh, Jason McStoots, Aaron Sheehan and Sumner Thompson
Basses: Mischa Bouvier, Stephen Hrycelak and John Taylor Ward

Violins: Ingrid Matthews and Scott Metcalfe
Violas: Dongmyung Ahn and Daniel Elyar
Bass Violin: Emily Walhout
Violone: Anne Trout
Theorbo: Hank Heijink and Daniel Swenberg
Theorbo/Chant: Charles Weaver
Organ: Jeffrey Grossman

Dark Horse Consort

Cornettos: Alexandra Opsahl and Kiri Tollaksen
Trombones: Greg Ingles, Mack Ramsey and Erik Schmalz

More: http://tenet.nyc/green-mountain-project

Film: The 90 Minute War

2016 | 85 minutes | Narrative
Director: Eyal Halfon

A comic mockumentary based on the book by Itay Meirson. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict has lasted 100 years. One hundred years of war, bloodshed, bitterness, and suffering. One hundred years of stalemate, intransigence, and failed peace deals. And now it’s all over. They’ve finally found the solution: a winner-take-all soccer match. The winner gets to stay. The loser leaves forever. And no whining.

Film: Beyond the Mountains and the Hills

2016 | 90 minutes | Narrative
Director: Eran Kolirin

David Greenbaum is discharged from the army after serving for 27 years, and tries to find himself in his new civilian life. His family seems at first to be in decent shape, but things unravel in dramatic ways as the Greenbaum family faces life-changing decisions. The film has been compared to an Israeli American Beauty, and explores the disturbed feelings of many Israelis who try to rationalize their sense of personal identity against the dysfunction of the state.

Film: Margaret Mead Film Festival 2016 at AMNH

A Revolution in Four Seasons
http://www.amnh.org/explore/margaret-mead-film-festival/films/opening-night-a-revolution-in-four-seasons

Under the Clouds (Das Nuvens Pra Baixo)
http://www.amnh.org/explore/margaret-mead-film-festival/films/under-the-clouds-das-nuvens-pra-baixo

Kolwezi on Air
http://www.amnh.org/explore/margaret-mead-film-festival/films/kolwezi-on-air

Drokpa
http://www.amnh.org/explore/margaret-mead-film-festival/films/drokpa

Nagarjuna Art School
http://www.amnh.org/explore/margaret-mead-film-festival/films/nagarjuna-art-school

Train to Adulthood
http://www.amnh.org/explore/margaret-mead-film-festival/films/train-to-adulthood

Walls
http://www.amnh.org/explore/margaret-mead-film-festival/films/walls

Salero
http://www.amnh.org/explore/margaret-mead-film-festival/films/salero

Sonia's Dream
http://www.amnh.org/explore/margaret-mead-film-festival/films/sonia-s-dream-el-sueno-de-sonia

Reindeer in My Saami Heart
http://www.amnh.org/explore/margaret-mead-film-festival/films/reindeer-in-my-saami-heart

Seven Songs for a Long Life
http://www.amnh.org/explore/margaret-mead-film-festival/films/seven-songs-for-a-long-life

J.C. Abbey, Ghana’s Puppeteer
http://www.amnh.org/explore/margaret-mead-film-festival/films/j.c.-abbey-ghana-s-puppeteer

Theater: Public Enemy

From the web site: http://www.pearltheatre.org/production/public-enemy/

Henrik Ibsen’s PUBLIC ENEMY
in a version by DAVID HARROWER
directed by Artistic Director HAL BROOKS

“When a local doctor discovers that the water in his small town’s mineral baths is contaminated, it sets off a cataclysmic showdown between  a corrupt government that doesn’t want to be blamed, an angry community that doesn’t want their economy ruined, and a single man’s determination to tell the truth—no matter the cost to family, town, or self.

The play offers a story of political corruption (a poisoned water supply and the conspiracy to cover it up) and one man’s almost self-destructive need to reveal the truth. This adaptation offers a 90 minute compression of the Ibsen original that streamlines the action of the story, but sticks closely to his style. The setting and costumes have been updated to reflect 2016, and, although it doesn’t draw a one-to-one comparison with Flint, MI (the play doesn’t entirely allow it), that narrative is very much in our minds.  It’s an incredibly timely piece, with a great cast.”

From Kate Farrington , Director of Education and Dramatury

Theater: "Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea"

From the web site: http://www.twentythousandleaguesunderthesea.ca/about

Twenty Thousand Leagues Under The Sea is an immersive theatrical production that connects the wonders of the Victorian era with today’s scientific and water environmental issues. Four talented actors and an award-winning design team from Canada and the U.S. retell Jules Verne’s classic undersea adventure, with the help of original multimedia, action figures, puppets and video content.

Richard Clarkin as Captain Nemo
Suzy Jane Hunt as Claire Wells/Claire Aronnax
Marcel Jeannin as Ned Land
Rick Miller (director) as Jules

Written by Craig Francis and Rick Miller

Theater: A Taste of Honey

From the web site: http://www.pearltheatre.org/production/a-taste-of-honey/

In 1959 at age 18, playwright Shelagh Delaney rocked the theatre world with a play that both defined and defied her generation.  A Taste of Honey is the clever, passionate, and poignant story of a young woman facing an uncertain future in a hostile world—and learning to trust that love, in its every heartbreaking and messy form, will see her through.

“Delaney was only 18 when she wrote this story of a complex mother-daughter relationship challenged and defined by a world of poverty, gender inequality, racism, and sexual identity. The play asks deep questions, but does so  with humor and optimism. Delaney mixes hyper-realistic details of life in England’s poorest industrial towns in the late 1950s with a dose of meta-theatrical emotional exploration through music—the play incorporates a live jazz band that the actors are (sort of) aware of.

It’s a tender story of a young woman trying to engage with a much larger and more complex world than the one she’s grown up in—in many ways, far more than Osborne’s Look Back in Anger of the same time period, Delaney anticipates the social questions of the 1960s and sets her heroine on the path to answer them”

– From Kate Farrington, Director of Education and Dramaturgy

by SHELAGH DELANEY
directed by AUSTIN PENDLETON

Rebekah Brockman
John Evans Reese
Rachel Botchan
Bradford Cover
Ade Otukoya

Review: http://www.ny1.com/nyc/all-boroughs/theater-reviews/2016/09/30/theater-review---a-taste-of-honey-.html

Dance: Figure a Sea by Deborah Hay

The review: http://mobile.nytimes.com/2016/10/08/arts/dance/review-deborah-hay-peak-performances-montclair-state.html?_r=0&referer=https://www.google.com/

Dance: Maria Hassabi: Staged at The Kitchen, NYC

http://thekitchen.org/event/maria-hassabi-staged

My impressions: 

Slow

Tense

Deeply sad

Beautiful

Music: Momenta Festival II at TENRI

Thursday, September 29, 2016

An Interval of Infinity
Curator: Alex Shiozaki, violin // Guest Artist: Nana Shi, piano

Joji Yuasa: Solitude — in Memoriam T.T. (1997)
Somei Satoh: Birds in warped time II (1980)
Toru Takemitsu: A Way a Lone (1980)
Akira Nishimura: Sonata II, “Trance Medium” (2005)
Ludwig van Beethoven: String Quartet No. 15 in F Major, op. 135 (1826)

Tenri Cultural Institute
43A West 13th St.
New York, NY

http://www.momentaquartet.com/

Theater: What Did You Expect?

From the Public Theater web site: http://www.publictheater.org/en/Public-Theater-Season/Gabriels-What-Did-You-Expect/

Tony winning writer and director Richard Nelson (The Apple Family Plays, James Joyce’s The Dead) returns to The Public this fall with the second play in his new three-play cycle, The Gabriels: Election Year in the Life of One Family.

WHAT DID YOU EXPECT? brings us back to the kitchen of the Gabriel family, with the country now in the midst of the general election for President. In the course of one evening in the house they grew up in, history (both theirs and our country's), money, politics, family, art and culture are chopped up and mixed together, while a meal is made around the kitchen table.

From left: Meg Gibson, Lynn Hawley, Roberta Maxwell, Maryann Plunkett, Jay O. Sanders, Amy Warren

World Premiere Three-Play Cycle
THE GABRIELS: Election Year in the Life of One Family
Play Two: WHAT DID YOU EXPECT?
Written and Directed by Richard Nelson
Featuring Meg Gibson, Lynn Hawley, Roberta Maxwell, Maryann Plunkett, Jay O. Sanders, Amy Warren

Scenic Designers Susan Hilferty and Jason Ardizzone-West
Costume Designer Susan Hilferty
Lighting Designer Jennifer Tipton
Sound Designers Scott Lehrer and Will Pickens
Production Stage Manager Theresa Flanagan

.....
My notes on the play:

To know that the tragedy is in your hands to be delivered, but to soften the blow by adding the details.
Something is being revealed while something else is intentionally hidden.
The man had a sexy voice and a trusting face.
The eternal optimist says: Things get better.
The famous psychiatrist says: The people who are ill are brave, they should be regarded as heroes.
Some will always seek to know who they are, where they belong, why they are different.
The parents sat on a bench and wept after dropping their child off at college.
In mourning for the deceased, the worst moment is the one when your senses fool you to believe that the deceased is alive and near you again - and this trick of your senses is swiftly crushed by reality.
The quiet grief is unspoken: the notes of the song which the siblings all learned to play on the family piano; Richard's piano students and the dire necessity to sell the piano.  - dp

Theater: The Hunger

From the web site: http://www.bam.org/opera/2016/the-hunger

OPERA
By Donnacha Dennehy
Alarm Will Sound
Conducted by Alan Pierson
Directed by Tom Creed

Presented in association with Irish Arts Center

Part of 2016 Next Wave Festival
Underdog history comes to life through new music and old Irish songs in composer Donnacha Dennehy’s opera about the Great Famine of 1845-52, rooted in Asenath Nicholson’s harrowing first-person account in Annals of the Famine in Ireland. Featuring acclaimed ensemble Alarm Will Sound (Nonesuch Records at BAM, 2014 Next Wave) and celebrated Irish folk singer Iarla Ó Lionáird, The Hunger imagines soprano Katherine Manley as Nicholson and Ó Lionáird as the voice of the voiceless, with instrumentalists integrated into the staging. Old recordings of traditional sean-nós songs dovetail seamlessly with Dennehy’s score, while video clips of interviews with Noam Chomsky, Paul Krugman, and others underscore the political roots of this tragedy that brought a nation to its knees.

PROGRAM NOTES
Set and video design by Jim Findlay

Co-produced by Alarm Will Sound and Opera Theatre of Saint Louis
Commissioned by Alarm Will Sound with additional funding from Arts Council of Ireland, MAP Fund, The Sinquefield Charitable Foundation, and New Music USA

Theater: Songs of Lear

From the BAM web site: http://www.bam.org/theater/2016/songs-of-lear

THEATER
Song of the Goat Theatre (Teatr Piesn Kozla)
Directed by Grzegorz Bral


Part of 2016 Next Wave Festival
Gathered in a semicircle on a bare stage, 10 women and men weave a frenzied tapestry of raw physicality and emotion: a Corsican chant wailed to the ocean, the visceral howl of funereal grief. Distilling Shakespeare’s great tragedy to its essence, Polish troupe Song of the Goat Theatre and director Grzegorz Bral make their BAM debut with the breathtaking song cycle Songs of Lear, a favorite among critics and audiences alike at the 2012 Edinburgh Fringe Festival. King Lear’s storm of the soul—madness, despair, disappointment, love—becomes a feverish deluge of polyphonic sound, as these formidable vocalists harness the sheer power of the human body, voice, and spirit.

LANGUAGE
In Polish, English, and Latin

The review in the NYTimes: http://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/30/theater/review-songs-of-lear-we-hear-cordelia-singing.html

Theater, Forced Entertainment: Tomorrow’s Parties

"Two performers marooned under a string of carnival lights invite you to crash the end of a good party—or maybe it’s the end of the world—as they serve the audience with their wildest predictions and deepest fears about the future. From magical realism to science fiction, utopia to apocalypse, they offer a poignant and comic look at contemporary life."

US Premiere
Wed, Sep 28, Fri, Sep 30, and Sat, Oct 1
at 7:30pm

FIAF Florence Gould Hall
55 East 59th Street, NYC

https://crossingthelinefestival.org/events/forced-entertainment/

From the review by Lyn Gardner @  https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2013/oct/24/tomorrows-parties-theatre-review

Like much of this company's best work, it is built around lists and statements, and is based on the very simplest of ideas. Two performers stand side by side on a stage that is bare – bar a skein of multicoloured fairground lights – and take it in turns to speculate on what the future could bring. 

Every proposition is responded to by another statement that offers a different possible version of the future. So a world ruled over by a single government is pitted against one operating on a primitive feudal system. Eating meat will be barbaric – or alternatively everyone will have become cannibals. 

This is a challenging piece, and you have to allow yourself to be seduced by its quiet rhythms and wry asides. It operates as a kind of talisman, as if by imagining the very worst we can stop it from happening. But there is a touch, too, of JG Ballard's call to the power of the imagination "to remake the world" and "hold back the night". 

Tomorrow's Parties is both unbearably sad and absurdly optimistic, as it projects further and further into an unknown future and points out the fragile insignificance of our lives.

Theater: Summer Shorts 2016: Series B at 59E59

From the NYTimes review by LAURA COLLINS-HUGHES AUG. 7, 2016 

“The Dark Clothes of Night,” though, pops and fizzes with one quick-change delight after another, and it’s the kind of fun that can happen only onstage. With a terrific cast of three, it cuts between the detective-movie world of the private eye Burke Sloane (Dana Watkins) — where femmes fatales are plentiful and clever wordplay is the native tongue — and the more pedestrian life of Rob Marlowe (also Mr. Watkins), a film professor whose marriage is giving out.

For the full review, and more about the other pieces on this program, visit: http://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/08/theater/review-a-femme-fatale-a-private-eye-and-dorm-mates-at-summer-shorts.html?_r=0