Author Archive
Pavlov’s Franchise
The Delusion of Marvel’s The Avengers Previous Marvel Comics superhero movies such as Iron Man, Hulk, Captain America and Thor were like roughly cut puzzle pieces that looked odd and unfinished by themselves—pretend movies derived from already established brands. Most of them, particularly Jon Favreau’s dung-colored Iron Man, were poorly directed. Now, fitted together in...
Skin Storm
Naughty Naked Nude Controversy at The Met By Mona Molarsky Do women have to be naked to get into the museum? The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s latest photo show suggests that—in 2012—the Guerilla Girls are still on target. Naked Before the Camera, at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, is presented as the history of the...
Limor Tomer
Limor Tomer became a curator of performance—the role she took at the Metropolitan Museum of Art last July—after a crisis of confidence. She had studied piano as a child raised in Israel, come to New York City with her family at age 13 and studied at Juilliard and the classics professionally for 10 years. But...
Life-Long Extensions
Sylvie Guillem stretches out Even Sylvie Guillem’s not doing it anymore, so ballerinas everywhere can just put their legs down (a bit)—can’t they? That was one takeaway from Guillem’s concert at the Koch theater early this month, presented by the Joyce Theater Foundation. Now 47, Guillem put her pointe shoes back on last year to...
EVENT: The Living Libretto, April 29, 2012 at OPERA America
Offers behind-the-scenes exploration of four new one-act operas-in-progress New York, NY – American Lyric Theater (ALT) presents The Living Libretto, the final event in its 2011-2012 Freshly Brewed Artist Brunch Series at OPERA America. Connected to the season’s final concert, Opera in Eden, together the two performances provide an intimate, insider’s view of the process...
CityArts Partner: The Kioi Sinfonietta Tokyo Celebrates the Centennial of Japan’s Gift of the Cherry Blossom Trees with a Four-City U.S. Tour
As the first cherry blossoms are beginning to bloom in New York, the musicians of the Kioi Sinfonietta Tokyo are preparing for their first visit to the U.S. to celebrate the 100th anniversary of Japan’s gift of the cherry blossom trees to the United States. As part of this tour, the Kioi Sinfonietta Tokyo, one...
THE CITYARTS INTERVIEW: James Houghton
In 1991, actor/director James Houghton founded the Signature Theatre with the mission of dedicating each season to key selections from a single playwright’s oeuvre—a grand summation of a lifetime’s work and thought. The first so honored was Romulus Linney; this season it’s Athol Fugard and Edward Albee, alongside emerging talent Katori Hall’s Hurt Village, her...
Drawlin’ from Nawlins
Dr. John goes BAM Dr. John’s nine-concert, three-week residency featuring three different programs at Brooklyn Academy of Music started last Thursday night with a classic example of New Orleans’ lackadasicality meeting institutional overkill. To have a good time in the Crescent City, you do your thing and rely on what’s always worked. To fill the...
Flash Rosenberg
Every dawn, as sunlight glinting off the top spire of the Empire State Building streams through the skylight positioned just over Flash Rosenberg’s bed, she springs up, eager for the fun of doing Flash work. She’s an award-winning filmmaker, a 2011 Guggenheim fellow in film and video, a performer in storytelling venues like Monologues and...
Projections
The return of Terence Davies Terence Davies is certainly an art filmmaker—England’s best since David Lean and Mike Leigh—but that doesn’t mean his movies are esoteric. They certainly are meticulous, though; painstaking recordings of social and emotional details of dailiness and desire that evoke Thornton Wilder’s uncanny line about observing existential life: “I can’t look...
A New Day Dawns
Why Doris Day matters By Dennis Delrogh Long before Beyoncé covered “At Last” in homage to Etta James, Doris Day in 1964 did the same and disclosed that she had always wished she could sing with James’ abandon. Day has become the surviving member of her big band generation of superstar singers, who include Frank...
A Sea of Sound
Tallying New York’s philharmonic excess By Joseph Smith Is it just me or is it too loud in here? Often, when I attend symphonic concerts, I find myself disconcerted by the noisiness of the programming. It seems to me that concerts now tend to be too unrelievedly composed of works from periods that favor dense,...
LIGHT BULB ARMOND WHITE 3.7.12
“At Sundown,” a deceptively cheery Doris Day number from the film Love Me or Leave Me, is sampled in filmmaker Terence Davies’ The Long Day Closes to underscore the moment its isolated adolescent protagonist goes to the movies to ease his troubles and become part of the great audience. Davies doesn’t deal in trite ironies;...
Whitney Biennial
Members and patrons were lined up around the block on Wednesday night to attend the Whitney Museum‘s 2012 Biennial. The show opens to the public today and runs through May 27, Wednesday through Sunday, 11 am to 6 pm. Friday nights until 9 pm. The Whitney is at 945 Madison at 75th Street. Amanda Gordon,...
Susan Feldman
Thirty-two years ago, the New York Landmarks Conservancy hired a young social activist named Susan Feldman to figure out how to bring people to St. Ann’s Church, a Brooklyn Heights architectural gem desperately seeking restoration funds but with a congregation barely topping out at 30. Concerts at the intimate church setting lured Manhattan classical music...
Turning Journalism Into Art
Djuna Barnes makes news at Brooklyn Museum By Marsha McCreadie We may have been reading the wrong thing all along. Blame it on T.S. Eliot, who proclaimed Djuna Barnes’ stylistically avant-garde Nightwood equal to great Elizabethan tragedy—the novel was canonized by many in lesbian literature as a breakthrough: a lightly disguised version of Barnes’ breakup...
Diaspora Story for All: A Biblical Trek in ‘400 Miles’
By Elena Oumano “You don’t look Jewish” (meaning not like the stereotypical hook-nosed European) is not a compliment, no matter what the speaker’s intentions. And what do Jews look like anyway? 400 Miles to Freedom, directed by husband and wife team Avishai and Shari Rothfarb Mekonen, addresses this and other issues of Jewish identity in...
Lichtenstein in Motion: Three Surprises on Whitney Screens
By Marsha McCreadie They are in town for a just a few more days, but since the only three films by Roy Lichtenstein, of Pop Art and the comic book style, haven’t been screened since 1971, you don’t have to think twice about catching them. Three Landscapes: A Film Installation by Roy Lichtenstein is at...
Not Necessarily So
‘Porgy’ reborn By Joseph Smith A Broadway production calls itself The Gershwins’ Porgy and Bess. There is no such thing. In a musical, the words may have as much importance as the music; thus, for instance, Girl Crazy is “by” the Gershwins, plural. But Porgy and Bess is an opera. (Music and singing are continuous,...
Modern Masters at Montclair Art Museum
Beginning Feb. 12, Montclair Art Museum, located at 3 South Mountain Ave. in Montclair, N.J., will host the exhibition Look Now: Modern and Contemporary Art from Private Collections. The exhibit will feature multi-media works by 31 modern masters and cutting-edge artists—including Roy Lichetnstein, Andy Warhol, Louise Bourgeois, Rachel Harrison and Ryan McGinness—through June 17. For more...
Architecture on Screen
This Feb. 3 and Feb. 4, The Center for Architecture and MUSE Film and Television present Architecture on Screen, selections from the 29th Montreal International Festival of Films on Art. The two-day affair will see films about Copenhagen’s city hall (A City Hall for All Occasions), Bauhaus, Le Corbusier and Daniel Burnham, among others, as...
