NYT ARTs section 6-30-2011

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THURSDAY, JUNE 30, 2011

SARA KRULWICH/THE NEW YORK TIMES

Radio City Is Transformed Into a Cirque Tent The hearty-voiced fellow in the cherry-red top hat and matching silk cape obviously has a lot on his mind. Sweeping across the football-field stage of Radio City Music Hall as the ring master of THEATER “Zarkana,” the latest REVIEW Cirque du Soleil spectacular, he sings incessantly of an absent love, as if she could only be conjured by bombastic synthesizer-rich balladeer-

CHARLES ISHERWOOD

A Fresh Take Adds a Jolt To a Standard The modest idea of the New York Philharmonic’s Summertime Classics concerts, which began in 2004, is to provide a few postseason programs of lighter fare, novelties and a staple or two at reduced prices. The British conductor Bramwell Tovey, a lively musician who has charmed Avery Fisher MUSIC Hall audiences with his REVIEW avuncular commentaries on music, concert protocols or whatever else strikes him, remains the host of choice for these events. While they are perfectly pleasant, you do not attend to hear extraordinary performances at these concerts. A big exception took place on Tuesday night when the summer series opened. The Russian-born pianist Kirill Gerstein, in his Philharmonic debut, played a brilliant, perceptive and stunningly fresh account of Tchaikovsky’s First Piano Concerto. At 31 Mr. Gerstein is emerging as one of the most respected pianists of his generation. In 2010 he became the sixth winner of the distinguished Gilmore Artist Award. Every four years the prize is bestowed as a surprise upon a pianist who has been observed in performance over an exContinued on Page 6

ANTHONY TOMMASINI

ing, a whole iPod playlist of Celine Dion songs delivered one after another. For all the man’s throbbing vocalizing it’s pretty hard to feel his pain, I’m afraid, or even pay much heed to his lyric lamentations. That’s because you spend the usual amount of time at the new extravaganza from this French-Canadian entertainment behemoth trembling in dread for the aerialists, contortionists and other daredevils plying their phenomenal wares onstage.

Cirque du Soleil A new show, “Zarkana,”

fills Radio City with trapeze artists, above, and other trademark attractions.

As has been the case at Cirque shows I’ve seen in the past, more than once I had to resist the urge to leap from my seat and holler, “Get down from there, you senseless girl!” The tingly suspense generated by the many feats of gravity-defying gymnastics draws on

our instinctive fear that at any moment someone could end up splattered across the stage. (This uncomfortable pleasure is also, I suppose, among the reasons audiences remain hungry for the muchderided “Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark.”) Cirque du Soleil and its impresario, Guy Laliberté, belly-flopped without a net last year with their ill-fated production “Banana Shpeel,” in which the company attempted to forsake its trade-

‘Cripple’ Finally Comes to Inishmaan By PATRICK HEALY

INISHMAAN, Ireland — As captured by the dark imagination of the playwright Martin McDonagh, life on this storm-battered island near Galway inspired hardness, sarcasm and co-dependency in the characters in his 1996 play “The Cripple of Inishmaan.” It was home to a bachelor who both saved a drowning baby and called his mother a “hairy-lipped fool” and to a young dreamer so desperate to flee that he tricked a grieving friend into helping him escape. It was with some anxiety, then, that Mr. McDonagh took a ferry on Sunday to see the first performance of “Cripple” ever mounted here, along-

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In Alliance, Nets Arena To Offer Arts By MELENA RYZIK

A theater troupe travels to a play’s remote setting. side some of the 150 natives whose history he conjured. (The play is set in 1934.) Leaning forward on one of the folding chairs in a dusty village hall turned theater, Mr. McDonagh used an unprintable euphemism to explain that it has never been his intent to take the measure of his fellow Irishmen cruelly. “I like bringing the old country back to life, as a storyteller,” said Mr. McDonagh, a four-time Tony Award nominee. “I don’t set out to offend.” Nor did he, not terribly so. The Irish of Inishmaan have seen worse. Lives lost to the rough swells that Synge immortalized in his drama “Riders to the Sea.” Failed crops. Persistent Continued on Page 5

mark formula and create a more narrative-driven show with a vaudeville theme. Cirque has returned to home territory with “Zarkana,” written and directed by François Girard, which is essentially a traditional company presentation outfitted in extra layers of lavish digital technology and lush, exotic art direction. Careful attention to the song lyrics

ROBERT DAY

Martin McDonagh on the island of Inishmaan, Ireland, where his play “The Cripple of Inishmaan” was presented for the first time.

It’s been a springboard for Brooklyn nostalgia, a debate about urban design and the politics of eminent domain and, depending on your perspective or basketball affiliation, a community uniter or divider. Now Atlantic Yards, the development that will bring the New Jersey Nets to downtown Brooklyn, will also be a cultural center. The Barclays Center, the 18,000seat arena at the heart of the project, will host performances by artists selected by the Brooklyn Academy of Music in a programming alliance between the two neighboring institutions, their directors said. The collaboration will include three or four shows a year and allow the academy to bring to Brooklyn work that would not fit into its theaters — the largest of which has 2,000 seats — with costs underwritten by the arena. “I always like to put things that are a little bit ironic together,” Bruce C. Ratner, the chairman and chief executive of Forest City Ratner Companies, the developer of the arena, said in an interview Tuesday. “So here you have a place like BAM, which is a great contemporary-arts cultural institution, and then you have an arena, which, people think about sports and circus and so on,” he said from his office overlooking downtown Brooklyn. “And then you put them together, and then I think you’ve got something special.” The idea for the collaboration came from Mr. Ratner, who was chairman of Continued on Page 2

An Auld Lang Syne Kicks Off an Artistic Diaspora Artists, festivals, theaters, trends: they come and go with dizzying frequency in this city. It’s dangerous to get too attached to any one idea of New York’s cultural fabric. Still, certain losses hit CRITIC’S NOTEBOOK harder than others. Saturday night brought one such blow: the final show at Performance Space 122 before it vacates its storied East Village home, a former school-

CLAUDIA LA ROCCO

HIROYUKI ITO FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

New York Philharmonic Bramwell Tovey

leading a Summertime Classics concert on Tuesday at Avery Fisher Hall.

house, for a city-financed multiyear renovation. When P.S. 122 returns, it will be to an utterly transformed building, one that bears little physical resemblance to its scruffy, scrappy roots. There is much to be gained (access for the disabled and adequate restrooms, for starters). But something will also be lost. “I knew somehow that I was home,” Mark Russell, the theater’s artistic director from 1983 to 2004, said Saturday

of his first encounter with the space in 1979. “Over time it took on the weight of a community’s dreams and history. As all good theaters take on the resonance of the acts that happen in their space, and the people, the audience, who claim that room as theirs for just a moment.” He spoke during the closing moments of the four-day Old School Benefit, also the culmination of P.S. 122’s 30th anniversary. The evening had stretched to almost four hours at that

point, and the house was still packed well beyond capacity, the seats and cushions and floor filled, the stage’s central columns covered with numerous artist signatures, and the air loopy with all sorts of emotions. The Wooster Group, Elevator Repair Service, Big Dance Theater, Split Britches, Philip Glass, Penny Arcade, Banana Bag & Bodice, Mabou Mines, Continued on Page 4


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NYT ARTs section 6-30-2011 by The New York Times - Issuu