Brooklyn Academy of Music
Tyondai Braxton on crossing genres, and the 'Crossing Brooklyn Ferry' festival at BAM
While it’s useful for consumers and musicians alike to have a citywide infrastructure that can support both a composer like Missy Mazzoli as well as a band like Buke and Gase (who also have a new single out), it can also, at times, feel rather exquisitely figured out before you get to the show. Or, put another way, precisely un-Whitman-like in its sense of being a matter of minds already settled, rather than engaged with in an active process of collective self-discovery. Braxton, though, isn’t in a totally figured-out place—nor does he report any pressure or hurry to get there. More
May 3, 2012 10:24 am
At BAM, Questlove's post-iPod humanism brings brilliant cross-genre 'shuffling' to the concert hall
Questlove and company did what not even the most omnivorous of listeners could never do with the shuffle function: they made the different styles talk and react to each other synchronously, rather than merely offer up suggestions of connections to be appreciated as one follows the other asynchronously and linearly. More
April 20, 2012 1:45 pm
New York City Opera is profitable, says George Steel, and will live at B.A.M. and City Center for three years
“It’s not another million and a half or two million dollar loss, it’s whatever it is,” he said. “But when we think it makes sense to lose a little bit more money because there’s a larger audience for a given production we’ll do it,” Steel said.
April 18, 2012 1:49 pm
This afternoon at BAM, City Opera and Rufus Wainwright need a hit; will they get it?
Fittingly, Prima Donna is an opera about the opera. What better way for Wainwright to address his feelings towards the genre, and for Steel to communicate his vision of the place of City Opera, than by staging a work set around the failings of an aging diva who is losing her voice? More
(1)February 19, 2012 7:23 am
Kevin Spacey's Richard III lacks 'subtlety'? It wouldn't have bothered Shaw
George Bernard Shaw saw nothing ill in Richard's unsubtlety, writing that this play’s protagonist was written to indulge, not restrict, the grand gesture. (“His incongruous conventional appendages … the conscience, the fear of ghosts, all impart a spice of outrageousness which leaves nothing lacking to the fun of the entertainment, except the solemnity of those spectators who feel bound to take the affair as a profound and subtle historic study.”)
I’m with Shaw on this, and thus with Mendes and Spacey, who offer at BAM a solution to what has often been called a problem play—and has even more often been cut down to something resembling Richard’s own physical self-appraisal: “deform’d, unfinish’d, sent before my time … scarce half made up.” More
January 24, 2012 8:53 am
John Hurt's so good in excellent 'Krapp,' his New York debut
As unlikely as it might seem, this production marks Hurt's New York City stage debut. It's long overdue, but audiences couldn't have asked for a better introduction to his work. Hurt first played Krapp in a 1999 production in London, and by now he and the character seem indivisible. And the suitability of the actor for the role matters, as Beckett wrote the play as a monologue for the actor Patrick Magee, who died in 1982. More
December 7, 2011 9:34 am
Can Richard Dare save the Brooklyn Philharmonic?
At 47, Dare comes across a lot like Alec Baldwin’s husky Jack Donaghy from "30 Rock": The businessman with no experience in art who suddenly parachutes in from corporate America into a once proud 154-year-old franchise that has fallen hard. Very hard. He quite literally is the guy in the suit (“It’s the only clothes I own,” he says by way of explanation) amongst a staff that commonly takes off its shoes entirely at work, even with a reporter present.
Dare was explaining how he's going to get the Phil "out of the hole," to use a term he repeats often. Other terms he uses while describing his plan, and what he sees as the future of the ailing nonprofit arts scene: Strategic partnerships. Value. Strangest of all, profitability. More
(6)October 27, 2011 3:26 pm
Run to gallows: Beg, steal or kill to catch Robert Wilson’s historic 'Threepenny Opera' before it's gone
The brutally compact four-night run of this show, which you’d think could run at full capacity for weeks (if not months), closes with the Oct. 8 performance; while the last remaining performance is technically sold out, the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s website advertises “limited availability” through its box office line at (718) 636-4100, which opens at noon on Satuday, Oct. 8. Your best bet is to call it, since requests seem to be outstripping sale offers 10 to 1 right now, over on the Craigslist marketplace.
The answer to the question of why anyone might go to so much trouble to see this show lies, in part, with simple star-power. More
October 7, 2011 10:40 am
A crowded schedule that's worth the effort, from Anthony Braxton to Portishead to Anna Netrebko to Philip Glass
There’s too much to hear: that’s the first empirical fact to absorb about the coming music season in New York. From a consumer perspective the problem is compounded by the amount of effort it can take to see just the best stuff: tickets purchased online weeks or months in advance, forcing you to tick a date on the calendar when you really have no idea what work will have in store for you that day; or else the intellectual endurance required while trekking to the same venue over the course of multiple nights to see a single cycle of performances. Who has the time to plan for such extravagances, let alone commit them? More
September 8, 2011 11:10 am
'The Urge for Survival': Japanese movies about the horrors of war at home
Kaneto Shindo’s melodramas are about war, but they’re not about combat or fighting. In focusing on the domestic aftermath of violence, Shindo’s movies are like the war movies that François Truffaut tried to imagine when he posited that there was no way to make an anti-war film. More
April 22, 2011 7:49 am
Laurie Anderson tells very tall tales at B.A.M.
Are her stories true, exaggerated half-truths, or complete fabrications? Are they moral lessons, social commentary, or merely random ramblings? Should you try to figure out what her stories mean, or simply sit back and see where she leads you?
After all these years, most of these questions are still up for debate—except the last. With Anderson, you never end up where you thought you were heading, which is a good thing.
The vignettes that constitute Delusion, alternating with musical interludes and performed against a giant video backdrop, are a mixed lot. More
(1)September 27, 2010 9:28 am
How 'Brooklyn' is it? The meaning of Freddy's last night
A genuinely evocative gloss on a gritty, edgy Brooklyn that’s not long gone yet already irretrievable, Vicente Rodriguez Ortega’s Freddy's also a casually amusing introduction to the complicated power struggles between hipsters, oldsters, bankers, and developers that define a lot of the northwestern chunk of the borough today. More
June 11, 2010 1:21 pm
Writers
