This is going to be a new experience for us. We are going to watch a presentation projected on a screen of The Merchant of Venice by Shakespeare.
"In the melting pot of Venice, trade is God. With its ships plying the globe, the city opens its arms to all, as long as they come prepared to do business and there is profit to be made.
With the gold flowing all is well, but when a contract between Bassanio and Shylock is broken, simmering racial tensions boil over. A wronged father, and despised outsider, Shylock looks to exact the ultimate price for a deal sealed in blood."
Barrymore Theater
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
The acclaimed National Theatre production of THE CURIOUS INCIDENT OF THE DOG IN THE NIGHT-TIME is the most award-winning show of the year! Honored with 5 Tony Awards® including BEST PLAY, this "dazzling" (Associated Press) adaptation by Tony and Olivier Award winner Simon Stephens brings Mark Haddon’s internationally best-selling novel to thrilling life. Two-time Tony Award winner Marianne Elliott (War Horse) directs.
Fifteen-year-old Christopher has an extraordinary brain; he is exceptionally intelligent but ill-equipped to interpret everyday life. When he falls under suspicion for killing his neighbor’s dog, he sets out to identify the true culprit, which leads to an earth-shattering discovery and a journey that will change his life forever.
Called “one of the most fully immersive shows ever to wallop Broadway” by The New York Times, THE CURIOUS INCIDENT OF THE DOG IN THE NIGHT-TIME is a record-breaking theatrical phenomenon that simply must not be missed.
Friday, August 21, 2015
LINCOLN CENTER
Avery Fisher Hall
Mostly Mozart Festival
The Creation - Haydn
Mostly Mozart Festival Orchestra
Louis Langrée - Conductor
Sarah Tynan - Soprano
Thomas Cooley - Tenor
John Relyea - Bass
Concert Chorale of New York
James Bagwell, director
The 2015 festival closes on a jubilant note with Haydn’s masterpiece and a high-spirited expression of Enlightenment idealism. Louis Langrée takes up the baton a final time this summer to lead the Festival Orchestra and a stellar lineup of soloists in this triumphant oratorio.
Wednesday, August 19, 2015
LINCOLN CENTER
David Geffen Hall
Mostly Mozart Festival - Joshua Bell Plays Bach
Mozart - Adagio and Fugue in C monor
Bach - Violin Concerto in E major
Bach/Mendelssohn - Chaconne
Schumann - Symphony No. 2
It feels good to get back into Lincoln Center events. It's been a long summer!
Violin virtuoso Joshua Bell leads the Festival Orchestra for a Bach concerto and an orchestrated version of his towering Chaconne, while festival favorite Andrew Manze conducts glorious works by Mozart and Schumann—inspired by studies of Bach’s counterpoint—to open and close this thoughtful program.
Wednesday, August 12, 2015
THEATER
The Al Hirschfeld Theater
Kinky Boots
A drag queen comes to the rescue of a man who, after inheriting his father's shoe factory, needs to diversify his product if he wants to keep the business afloat. Charles Price may have grown up with his father in the family shoe business, but he never thought that he would take his father's place. Yet, the untimely death of his father places him in that position, only to learn that Price & Sons Shoes is failing. While in despair at his failed attempts to save the business, Charles has a chance encounter with the flamboyant drag queen cabaret singer, Lola. Her complaints about the inadequate footwear for her work combined with one of Charles' ex-employees, Lauren, leads to a suggestion to change the product to create a desperate chance to save the business: make men's fetish footwear. Lola is convinced to be their footwear designer and the transition begins. Now this disparate lot must struggle at this unorthodox idea while dealing with both the prejudice of the staff, Lola's discomfort in the small town and the selfish manipulation of Charles' greedy fiancée who cannot see the greater good in Charles' dream.
Tuesday, August 11, 2015
THEATER
Barrow Street Theater
The Flick - Annie Baker
We're headed back to small theater in the West Village. Read the reviews below. The second is from the New York Times.
The play lasted 3.5 hours! The first act was 1.5 hours. The pace was slow with many extended moments of no movement and no talking. It was a realistic style and as natural as possible. It did win a Pulitzer, though.
Penn Jillette and his wife sat immediately in front of us.
Annie Baker's Pulitzer Prize-winning The Flick has extended its return engagement off-Broadway through January 10, 2016.
Following its world premiere as part of Playwrights Horizons' 2012-13 season, the reprised production features its original cast made up of Alex Hanna, Louisa Krause, Matthew Maher, and Aaron Clifton Moten. Tony winner Sam Gold (Fun Home) directs.
Set in a run-down Massachusetts movie theater,The Flick follows the heartbreaks, loneliness, and battles of three underpaid employees as they sweep up popcorn, mop the floors, play "Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon," and tend to one of the last 35-millimeter film projectors in the state.
Review: In ‘The Flick,’ Moments at the Movies, but Not on Screen
“People always freak out when like, you know, when like art forms move forward,” says Sam, one of the lonely souls working in a run-down Massachusetts movie theater in the wondrous Annie Baker play “The Flick.” That line made me laugh out loud, although it’s hardly a punch line — and the movie whose radicalism is being celebrated happens to be, um,“Avatar.”No, the words resonate because Ms. Baker’s play is a notable case in point: a work of art so strange and fresh that it definitely freaks people out. When this moving drama about the beauty and sadness in small lives wasfirst stagedat Playwrights Horizons in 2013, it won ardent admirers (most critics included, and certainly this one) but also irritated some viewers, who found its surface lack of theatrics and quietly observational pacing a trial. Walkouts at intermission — or indeed midact — were not rare. But go figure: “The Flick” went on towin the Pulitzer Prizelast year, in a rare case of the award’s going to a play that truly nudges the art form in new directions; more regularly it’s the traditional and easily digestible works that win that trophy. On the strength of such recognition, and the many who responded enthusiastically to the play, it has now been remounted at theBarrow Street Theater, where it opened on Monday night with the sublime original cast intact, once again under the deep-focus direction of Sam Gold. I’d bet a pile that the response to the play will again run along similar lines. Nobody lurched up and stalked out during the (90-minute!) first act at the performance I saw, but the auditorium was mildly pockmarked with empty seats after intermission. It’s less Ms. Baker’s matter than her manner that makes “The Flick” get under people’s skin, in ways both good and bad. There’s nothing radical about the language or the story, nor anything visibly avant-garde to shock the sensibility. No surrealism. No obscurity. No stylized acting. No puppets. The story that unfolds is a sweet and simple one depicting the evolving friendship among three movie-theater workers: the genial Sam (Matthew Maher), who’s slouching through his 30s in a dead-end job but doesn’t quite know how to turn his life around; the younger, slightly intimidating Rose (Louisa Krause), who’s been promoted to the projection booth, to Sam’s consternation, and who favors unflattering shroudy clothes and black boots; and the newbie, Avery (Aaron Clifton Moten), a movie nerd of spectacular skills who can connect the filmic dots between, say, Michael J. Fox and Britney Spears, without even skipping a stroke in his popcorn-sweeping. They get to know one another, but not through the style of traditional naturalism, in scenes moving cleanly toward an emotional or dramatic turning point. Instead, they probe one another’s hearts, souls and sore spots the way we all do with our co-workers, in fits and starts, by making desultory small talk, by not letting on what’s really taking place inside, until gradually intimacy grows and friendship blooms (and perhaps withers, too). More than most playwrights working today, Ms. Baker really does have an interest in holding the proverbial Shakespearean mirror up to nature to illuminate the way we treat each other and the way we communicate — and fail to communicate. The audience gets to know Sam, Rose and Avery at the same pace they do, which is what people may find disconcerting, as we spend a few long minutes watching Sam and Avery clean the theater, only breaking the silence to make (often very funny) comments on contemporary film or, eventually, trade details of their personal lives. More important, we come to know them as deeply as they know one another.
If you respond at all to the play, Sam’s slow-burning crush on Rose, resulting in a confession that ends badly, will break your heart just as it does his. Equally stirring is Avery’s one-sided phone conversation (with a therapist on vacation) in which he glumly muses: “Like maybe I’m gonna be that weird depressed guy and I should just like accept it. And that’ll be the life I get. And that’ll be okay.” Rose’s fumbled attempt at seducing Avery will make you cringe for both characters, so honestly is it presented. And the play’s final stretches are as quietly devastating as anything I’ve seen since. The acting matches the fine-grained writing to perfection. I was happy to see the play again — a little over three hours, but just half of “Wolf Hall”! — to reimmerse myself in the superlative performances. Mr. Maher’s Sam, with his surface affability barely masking a soul in quiet torment, has grown much richer and more detailed. Ms. Krause’s Rose exudes a casually snarky vibe that’s amusing, but she also locates the character’s complicated humanity with clean precision. And Mr. Moten’s bespectacled (of course) Avery remains hilarious in his textbook geekiness — he’s hyper-articulate and speaks and even moves with a robotic awkwardness — but also reveals himself to be the most sensitive and morally mature character, younger than the others though he is. In its attention to the lives of low-wage employees with little prospect of financial reward (aside from Avery, who’s taken a break from college to work), “The Flick” today seems more keenly attuned to prominent social currents. In ways subtle and smart, it glancingly addresses issues of class and race, of who gets ahead and who gets left behind, and why. And while its style might be called micro-naturalism, or naturalism on steroids, there’s much art in Ms. Baker’s construction and a large vision behind the play’s concept. She might have written a similar play about workers in a fast-food outlet or a chain store in a mall. But by setting the drama in a strugglingmovie theater,Ms. Baker is also making a sly comment on what has become of our contemporary culture. (The terrific set, by David Zinn, shows us the grungy auditorium from the point of view of the screen.) As the projector’s eye bores into your own, in interstitial passages between scenes, you may wonder about the uses and abuses of entertainment these days, and why “reality” has become so popular when, as Ms. Baker’s infinitely touching play makes clear, reality without quotation marks is so much richer and more rewarding to observe.
THE SUMMER OF 2015
We have tried to escape the summer heat in New York City. We did that by traveling to Claryville in the Catskills a couple of times, once to California, and once to Fire Island. All escapes were fun but still hot!
The "season" of 2015/2016 is about to begin. We're ready!
