vip in the city

Save Darfur

B and I headed downtown to the Astor Place for New Work Now!, the Public Theater’s festival of readings featuring new work from emerging and established artists. The festival kicked off last week with Jonathan Marc Sherman’s Things We Want, directed by Ethan Hawke, about a lovelorn cooking-school drop-out returning home. Tonight’s reading — untitled — explored the more serious subject of the crisis in Darfur.

Playwright Winter Miller chose to work with her colleague, New York Times columnist Nicholas D. Kristof in dramatizing the play’s subject matter. Miller’s previously produced work includes The Penetration Play, which I saw — twice, in fact… long story — at the Mint Theatre in 2004. Kristof won the Pulitzer Prize for Commentary in 2006 for his graphic, deeply reported columns on the genocide in Darfur.

In films dealing with genocide (Hotel Rwanda and Schindler’s List come to mind), directors can portray a sweeping scope of horrors on a widescreen. Limiting the action to the confines of a stage poses additional challenges. Miller personalized the story by centering it around a trio of characters of contrasting background and perspective: a New York Times reporter, a Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) aid worker and a Darfuri woman, whose personal nightmare has been chosen to put a face on the ravages in Africa.

From SaveDarfur.org:

Darfur has been embroiled in a deadly conflict for over three years. At least 400,000 people have been killed; more than 2 million innocent civilians have been forced to flee their homes and now live in displaced-persons camps in Sudan or in refugee camps in neighboring Chad; and more than 3.5 million men, women, and children are completely reliant on international aid for survival. Not since the Rwandan genocide of 1994 has the world seen such a calculated campaign of displacement, starvation, rape, and mass slaughter.

The actors on stage embodied their characters fully, despite never rising from their seats. Following the affecting play was a panel discussion, which included Miller, Kristof and NBC’s Ann Curry (who sat behind us during the reading.)

I would have liked to stay on, but B and I had made plans to meet up with M and L for post-theatre drinks at Public. Drinks became dinner. (This time, I opted for the grilled lamb tenderloin and merguez sausage with ancho spiced chickpeas and a radish queso fresco salad.) M broke into her mailbox for a bottle of pinot and the four of us toasted to future plans as the considerable bling on display sparkled in the candlelight.

One hell of an Elixir

At the New York City Opera tonight.

SYB got us tickets to tonight’s performance of Gaetano Donizetti‘s L’Elisir d’amore (The Elixir of Love). Sir Jonathan Miller’s new production — shared between the New York City and Royal Swedish Operas — is another of the director’s signature updates; Miller transplants the action in this Elixir from a 19th century Italian village to a 1950s high desert truck stop. The young hero, Nemorino (John Tessier), is transformed from a local villager to the town mechanic, donning the occasional cowboy hat. The local beauty for whom he pines is Adina (Anna Skibinsky in her company debut), who runs the roadside diner emblazoned with her name. Nemorino’s rival in love, the pompous soldier Belcore (Paulo Szot), is clad in Korean War-era Army fatigues; Dulcamara (Jan Opalach), who sells the titular elixir — actually, as he informs us in an aside: Robitussin — becomes the proverbial snake-oil salesman in his shiny blazer. The rest of the cast was outfitted in fitted floral dresses, jeans, leather jackets, pompadours and curler-set hair; at one point, a massive, flashy-finned Chevy convertible rolled onto the stage.

Our view from the first ring:

I’d enjoyed these whimsical, contemporary touches in the past. J and I attended Miller’s Mikado several years back, which was reset in an Edwardian English seaside resort; his Rigoletto played like a Mafia drama, unfolding in 1950’s Little Italy. (“La donna è mobile” blared on a jukebox.)

The performers sang in the original Italian, hamming up the action pretty admirably (taking a break only for the tenor showpiece “Una furtiva lagrima“), but the biggest laughs were elicited by the updated supertitles: lots of “dames,” “dolls” and “Daddy-O”s. To explain the legend of the elixir: “There was this chick named Isolde, and Tristan went ape over her.”

SYB noted that it was most fun he’d ever had at The Opera. Not for purists, though.

Nomadic Allstar Global Hip-Hop Throwdown

Continuing on with NYU’s (unofficial) distance learning program…

After cooking up yesterday’s collards, I sat at home, debating whether to venture out again. The night was still unseasonably warm, I had invitations in hand, and the venue was just two subway stops from my apartment.  I fought off entropy to meet SYB.

Nomadic Wax — the self-proclaimed “underground ‘guerilla-style’ record label — was in town for the NY Hip Hop Dance Convention‘s International MC Showcase at T-New York. The event featured international artists from all parts of Africa, Latin America and Asia culled from Nomadic Wax’s last CD, Nomadic Mixtape Vol. 2: East African Hip-Hop Beatdown.

As soon as I approached T on 52nd Street, I recognized it as the tri-level space formerly known as Temple, formerly known as Float. M and I attended the opening of its last incarnation in late 2004 — a night of free-flowing vodka tonics and much dancing, that I still recall with quite a bit of fondness, and a little queasiness.

Korean-American rapper El Gambina (shouldn’t this be La Gambina?) was on the stage when we arrived. She is a member of Organic Thoughts, a New Jersey based hip-hop crew. El Gambina was a charismatic performer, and “cute” as SYB noted — an assessment clearly shared by the eager male fans in the audience. Still, there’s something about East Asian rappers I find oddly discordant.

Next up: Chee Malabar, one half of the hip-hop outfit Himalayan Project, from San Francisco by way of India. His style was more laid back than his lead-in’s… heavier on the beats and thick with sociopolitical commentary. Malabar’s was the performance I enjoyed most of the evening.

Balozi Dola, a hip-hop artist from Tanzania, performed a short, frantic set as part of a trio of rappers.

The acts were each introduced by the MC of the evening, a striking woman from Kenya, who promised to perform a song for those staying through to the end. We didn’t. Minutes into the set by LF (from São Paulo) and DJ Laylo (from the South Bronx) we quietly slipped out.

Strolling through the theater district, we passed the Neil Simon Theatre, where fans were gathered on the sidewalk outside, post-show. The stage door opened and we heard a buzz of excitement run through the crowd. Hairspray star Shannon Durig emerged, smiling and gamely signing autographs for those assembled.

I suspect that at least a few of the people there were waiting not for Durig, but for a glimpse of American Idol Season 3 runner-up Diana DeGarmo, who rejoined the Hairspray cast in September after a three month stint earlier in the year.