Good show!

Tuesday, February 21, 2017

Film: Mr. Gaga

Director: Tomer Heymann
2015Israel/Sweden/Germany/Netherlands English and Hebrew with English subtitles
100 minutes

Enter the world of Ohad Naharin, renowned choreographer and artistic director of the Batsheva Dance Company, and creator of an innovative and exciting movement language known as Gaga. Eight years in the making, this high-energy documentary immerses the audience in the creative process behind Batsheva’s unique performances. Using intimate rehearsal footage, extensive unseen archival materials, and stunning dance sequences, acclaimed director Tomer Heymann (Paper Dolls, The Queen Has No Crown, I Shot My Love) tells the fascinating story of an artistic genius who redefined the language of modern dance.

Monday, February 20, 2017

Film: Kedi

2016 / 80min / DCP

DIRECTOR: CEYDA TORUN
In this sumptuously-shot documentary tribute to the street cats of Istanbul, the people of the city warmly reflect on these collective pets who are neither stray nor domestic, and the role that they play in the life of the dynamic megalopolis. A movie of enormous, playful charm, with keen insights into this rapidly changing city trying to hang on to its felines, and its soul. Cat lovers, meet the best movie you will ever see.

An Oscilloscope Laboratories release

Sunday, February 19, 2017

Theater: The Tempest by the Donmar Warehouse, St. Ann’s, Brooklyn

The Donmar Warehouse (London) returns to St. Ann’s with The Tempest, the finale to Phyllida Lloyd’s thrilling all-female Shakespeare Trilogy. Led by the great Harriet Walter as Prospero, and with songs by the legendary Joan Armatrading, The Tempest takes place in a women’s prison, where Lloyd’s intrepid “inmates” play the roles Shakespeare originally wrote for men. The Tempest proves a moving metaphor, conjuring Prospero’s magical island from the stark prison setting. The result “…is a multilayered act of liberation.” (Ben Brantley, The New York Times) https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/18/theater/review-in-the-tempest-liberation-and-exhilaration.html?_r=0

Theater: Kunstler at 59E59

The Creative Place International in Association with AND Theatre Company presents

Jeff McCarthy in:

KUNSTLER

by Jeffrey Sweet

Directed by Meagen Fay

With Nambi E. Kelley

Broadway star Jeff McCarthy brings William Kunstler back to life in Jeffrey Sweet's fascinating play, which revisits Kunstler's timely message of Constitutional civil rights under rule of law in an exciting theatrical event.

Friday, February 17, 2017

Theater: THE DRESSMAKER'S SECRET at 59E59 Theater

By Sarah Levine Simon and Mihai Grunfeld

Directed by Roger Hendricks Simon

Featuring Bryan Burton, Robert S. Gregory, Caralyn Kozlowski, Tracy Sallows

Nineteen-year-old Robi is eager to escape the oppression of Communist Romania to forge a new life in the west. The unexpected return of his mother's estranged fiance after a 20 year absence, may hold a key to his freedom. However, when his mother reveals that Robi's father was not killed in action as he'd believed, but is either a Jewish teacher his mother hid during the war or the Hungarian soldier who persecuted him, Robi must decide whether to embrace his ancestry or run from it.

The Simon Studio in association with Amanagion LLC.

Tuesday, January 10, 2017

Dance: Antony Hamilton and Alisdair Macindoe (Australia) MEETING

"Two performers share space with 64 robotic instruments. A relentless stream of activity unfolds, where the bodies enter states of heightened physical and mental agency, with all actions carried by the meditative pulse of the machine beat.

MEETING reveals a fascination with the articulation of the body and mind in motion. A choreographic study stripped to the bare essentials, the work pairs Hamilton’s compulsive choreography and unique physical grammar with Macindoe’s obsessive machine-making practice."

MEETING composes the body, space and robots into a riveting choreographic soundscape flooding your eyes and ears with technical mastery at its finest.

“MEETING is a quietly rich encounter between man, machine, motion and sound that rewards your attention with mesmeric human feats and meditative sonic patterns.” – Ian Abbott, Writing about Dance

Choreographer, Director and Performer: Antony Hamilton
Instrument Design & Construction, Composer, Performer: Alisdair Macindoe

Dance: Pavel Zuštiak/Palissimo (NYC)  "Custodians of Beauty"

http://www.ps122.org/custodians-of-beauty/

"For decades in the humanities, various arguments have been put forward against beauty. Where do we find beauty today and does it need our defense? Bessie Award–winning choreographer/director Pavel Zuštiak and his Palissimo Company examine beauty and its intrinsic relationship with art through minimalist movement, sensuous abstraction and potent stage imagery.

Drawn from a dark Eastern European dance-theater aesthetic, this richly postmodern dance/live music event casts the human body as a sculptural form, an emotional trigger, or a political symbol. In an age when humanity, disenchanted with itself, seems to have rejected the necessity of beauty, Custodians of Beauty asks us to look again, beyond the surface, to see differently."

“Plunges headlong into questions about what is ‘beautiful’ by interrogating sources like Plato, Pope Benedict XVI, and of course, the dancing body.” – Time Out New York

Dancers: Nicholas Bruder, Emma Judkins, Justin Morrison

Pavel Zuštiak is a NYC-based director, choreographer and performer, born in the communist Czechoslovakia and trained at the School for New Dance Development in Amsterdam. His works for stage and public spaces merge the abstract aspects of dance with nonlinear qualities of “theatre of images” into multidisciplinary pieces rich in evocative imagery and piercing emotional resonance. Zuštiak is the 2015 Bessie Juried Award winner for his “poetic layering of movement and visual imagery, conceiving the stage space as a decentralized world in which the corporeal body is the focus and canvas for a wide range of human expression,” a 2015-17 Princeton Arts Fellow, the recipient of 2013 LMCC President’s Award for Excellence in Artistic Practice and 2012 NEFA/NDP Production and Residency Grants, 2010 Guggenheim Fellow and 2014, 2009, and 2007 Princess Grace Awards Winner. His 5-hour trilogy The Painted Bird received a 2013 Bessie Award nomination for Outstanding Production. www.palissimo.org

Saturday, January 7, 2017

Theater: Real Magic by Forced Entertainment, COIL Festival 2017

Forced Entertainment’s Real Magic

Caught in a world of second-chances and second-guesses, variations and changes, distortions and transformations, Real Magic takes you on a hallucinatory journey, creating a compelling performance about optimism, individual agency and the desire for change.

In Real Magic, Forced Entertainment create a world of absurd disconnection, struggle, and comical repetition. To the sound of looped applause and canned laughter, a group of performers take part in an impossible illusion – part mind-reading feat, part cabaret act, part chaotic game show – in which they are endlessly replaying the moment of defeat and the moment of hope.

Time Out New York calls it like it is: "Finally, the buzziest company coming to COIL is Tim Etchells’s long-lived Forced Entertainment, who bring Real Magic, a deconstructed cabaret act that will likely be one of January’s most confident pieces."

“Beckett meets trash TV” – Nachtkritik(Germany)

Director Tim Etchells

Devised with and Performed by Jerry Killick, Richard Lowdon and Claire Marshall

Forced Entertainment Creative Team Robin Arthur, Tim Etchells (Artistic Director), Richard Lowdon (Designer), Claire Marshall, Cathy Naden and Terry O’Connor.

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

Friday, January 6, 2017

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

Monday, December 12, 2016

Theater: The Strange Undoing of Prudencia Hart

Melody Grove in The Strange Undoing of Prudencia Hart.

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."

Friday, December 9, 2016

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

Thursday, December 8, 2016

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.