Disney on Broadway, Tony Kushner and More Among Theater Programs at NYPL, Nov-Dec 2014
By: BWW News Desk Nov. 04, 2014
The New York Public Library has announced its upcoming theater programs for this winter. Details below!
EXHIBITIONS:
November 8, 2014 through January 31, 2015
Broadway Revealed: Photographs by Stephen Joseph Behind the Theater Curtain
The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts
40 Lincoln Center Plaza
FREE
What happens behind the scenes of a Broadway production? Broadway Revealed answers these questions and shines the limelight on the men and women who make it all happen. The exhibition showcases artist Stephen Joseph's sweeping images of studios, designers, and workshops, revealing the process and complexity of creating theater. Also on view in the gallery will be costume bibles, costumes, wigs, props, hats, designed or made by the artists shown in the photographs.
EVENTS:
Wednesday, November 5 @ 6:30pm
Talks at the Schomburg: The State of Black American Theatres
The Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture
515 Malcolm X Boulevard at 135th Street
FREE
This past summer, Dr. Barbara Ann Teer's National Black Theatre (NBT) hosted Catalyst: Moving the Black Theatre Legacy Forward, the first national convening of its kind in the 21st century for 21 of America's leading black theater institutions. Join Sade Lythcott, NBT's CEO, and Jonathan McCrory, NBT's Director of Theatre Arts Program and curator of Howlround.com, for The State of Black American Theaters, a postmortem discussion about the outcome of such a convening and the financial and structural crisis facing black theaters nationwide.
Monday, November 10 @ 6pm
Michael Valenti's Lovesong
The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts
40 Lincoln Center Plaza
FREE - Advance registration recommended online or in person.
Follow four people through love and courtship, marriage, love gone wrong, and even love after death, during this semi-staged reading of Michael Valenti's musical Lovesong, which opened off Broadway at the Top of the Village Gate in 1976. Lovesong tells the story of four lovers, with words borrowed from such diverse historic authorities on romance as Richard Brinsley Sheridan, Lord Byron, and Edna St. Vincent Millay.
Saturday, November 22 @ 4pm AND 8pm
Homage 3: Illmatic
The Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture
515 Malcolm X Boulevard at 135th Street
Tickets: $10; available at schomburgcenter.eventbrite.com
In conjunction with Changing Perceptions Theater, the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture presents a revival of Homage 3: Illmatic, an original play by Shaun Neblett that was developed from NaS' album Illmatic and pays homage to the themes and lyrics of the classic album. Come see the play that African American scholar Dr. Michael Eric Dyson said was, "A great play that evokes a sense of history and a sense of intimacy with people who nurture you, surround you and are a mystery to you" when it premiered Off-Broadway.
Monday, November 24 @ 1:15pm
Lectures from the Allen Room and the Wertheim Study - The Women Who Grow Up: Feminism in the Works of James Barrie
The Stephen A. Schwarzman Building
5th Avenue and 42nd Street
FREE
James Barrie (1860-1937) is known today, if at all, as the creator of Peter Pan, the boy who didn't want to grow up. Yet, he wrote many other works that were successful with the public. He had six major plays produced in London's West End, and produced uncountable shorter works of drama, fiction, and journalism. And he was a feminist, from his earliest surviving works until the end of his life. The prime of his career, roughly 1900-1914, coincided with British women's bitter and often violent struggle for the right to vote and other rights. The female characters in all of Barrie's plays are presented as responsible, intelligent, vibrant-and adult-human beings. In this presentation, Cheryl Payer considers four of Barrie's short plays that most directly express his feminism: The Twelve-Pound Look, about a trophy wife who decides to become self-supporting; The Ladies' Shakespeare, in which Barrie revised The Taming of the Shrew to reveal that it was Kate who was manipulating Petruchio all along; The Fatal Typist, in which he made fun of gendered body language, and The Little Policemen, puncturing sexist slanders against the suffragettes.
Monday, November 24 @ 6pm
Songbook: Broadway's Future
The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts
40 Lincoln Center Plaza
FREE
A concert of new music by Broadway composers and lyricists sung by Broadway vocalists. Presented by Arts and Artists at St. Paul and directed by John Znidarsic.
Monday, December 1 @ 6pm
Behind the Scenes with Disney on Broadway
The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts
40 Lincoln Center Plaza
FREE - Advance registration recommended online or in person.
Celebrating 20 years of Disney on Broadway, this program reveals the process of collaboration, revision, and adaptation that transforms beloved Disney stories from idea to full life on the Broadway stage. Join our conversation with David Henry Hwang, book writer of Tarzan and Aida, Chad Beguelin, book writer of Aladdin, and Rick Elice, book writer of Peter and the Starcatcher.
Thursday, December 4 @ 6pm
A Celebration of Bertolt Brecht's Love Poems with Tony Kushner
The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts
40 Lincoln Center Plaza
FREE - Advance registration recommended online or in person beginning November 13.
In a stunning 1956 New Yorker piece, Hannah Arendt declared that Brecht "staked his life and art as few poets have ever done." For this evening, writer and director Tony Kushner, awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Angels in America and a National Medal of the Arts Award by President Obama, gathers actors for a riveting performance of the Brecht's love poems, representing work between 1918 and 1955 that often scandalized the German reading public with the force of Eros. Like Goethe, Brecht was always in love with various women, and as his daughter, Barbara Brecht-Schall, who will be present, writes in her preface to the collection this evening celebrates, "he was faithful to each of them." Presented by the Poetry Society of America.
Sunday, December 14 @ 2pm
Molly Picon: Star of the Yiddish Theater
The Stephen A. Schwarzman Building
5th Avenue and 42nd Street
FREE - advance registration suggested. Call 212-930-0601 or e-mail dorotjewish@nypl.org to register.
In a musical salute to "Molly Picon, Star of the Yiddish Theatre!" Dr. Cypkin tells -- through English narration -- the life story of this exciting First Lady of the Yiddish Stage, through the countless Yiddish songs she sang and often wrote during her many, many years on the Yiddish stage. Indeed, the concert is a cornucopia, a beautiful bouquet, of tangos, waltzes, and fox-trots, that will have you humming for days. In sum, the concert is a tribute to a legend!
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