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A Night at Norwood: 'NY Export: Opus Jazz'

Musicians, filmmakers, and dancers descended last evening on Norwood, a new social club on West 14th Street, for a sneak preview of "NY Export: Opus Jazz," a film of Jerome Robbins's 1958 urban ballet. Erica Orden wrote in the Sun last year about the film, which was the brainchild of two New York City Ballet dancers, Sean Suozzi and Ellen Bar.

The evening was hosted by the pop singer and pianist Vanessa Carlton. The small crowd at the 7 o'clock screening included the actress Julia Stiles, as well as the publicity queen Peggy Siegal and the art consultant Barbara Guggenheim, who has built collections for Steven Spielberg and Tom Cruise. Ms. Siegal said that she was a member of Norwood, but had never been before. She and Ms. Guggenheim left soon after the screening for dinner at the Waverly Inn.

The preview was intended to call attention to and help raise money for the film, whose budget is around $500,000, the art director, Ariel Schulman, said. Of the ballet's five movements, the one that was previewed –– the fourth movement, set on the High Line –– is the only one that has been shot. The other movements will be filmed in the Tobacco Warehouse in DUMBO, in a fort on Staten Island, on a rooftop in Manhattan, and on a bare stage.

By Kate Taylor | Thu, 7 Feb 2008 at 1:53 AM | Permalink

A Digitally Enhanced 'Sunday in the Park with George'

"Sunday in the Park with George" contains some of Stephen Sondheim's most heart-wrenchingly beautiful music. But audiences at the new revival of "Sunday," an import from London that opens February 21, will likely leave marveling at the beauty of the digitally animated set design.

The first act of "Sunday" revolves around the creation of George Seurat's masterpiece, "A Sunday on La Grande Jatte." The designers of the original 1984 production conjured the progress from blank canvas to fully composed painting by having cut-out elements of the picture pop up from the stage, or slide out of and back into the wings, as Seurat experimented with and rejected various arrangements of people, trees, and boats on the river.

Almost 25 years later, the director Sam Buntrock has harnessed the power of digital animation to reinvent this aspect of the play. Now, projections of the trees and people Seurat sketches appear magically onstage, as though the actor, Daniel Evans, were actually drawing a huge brush across the set. In the second act, during the song "Putting It Together" — in which, in the original, George propped up cut-outs of himself talking to various groups of people, to suggest the hyperactive schmoozing required of the successful artist –– George now summons up digital doppelgängers, who talk and laugh and gesticulate on their own.

All of these effects are funny and surprising. But in some ways, the most beautiful effect is in the last scene, when George visits the modern-day Grande Jatte. As the scene progresses, we see twilight slowly fall in a photographic image of the park.

Mr. Sondheim was apparently supportive of the idea of using digital animation to recreate "Sunday." The animation was designed by Timothy Bird, a former schoolmate of Mr. Buntrock's and a founder of the Knifedge Creative Network, which does branding strategy for corporate clients, as well as animation, video production, and lighting design.

By Kate Taylor | Thu, 7 Feb 2008 at 1:44 AM | Permalink

Theater as a Forum for Intellectual Debate? How British.

"A serious house on serious earth." This is how Philip Larkin describes a place of worship in his poem "Church Going," which plays a pivotal role in "Grace," the new play by Mick Gordon and A.C. Grayling that is in previews at MCC Theater.

To Mr. Gordon, a wunderkind of the London stage world, it is the theater that is — or should be — this "serious house." Mr. Gordon was previously an associate director at London's National Theatre and the artistic director of the Gate Theatre. Now he runs a company called "On Theatre," where he creates plays that address subjects of intellectual or social debate, such as religion, dying, love, and the nature of consciousness.

Before he started this work, Mr. Gordon said in a brief interview before last night's performance, "I was reading a lot of writing by young playwrights that wasn't about anything. I think that's a misuse of theater."

For each play, he chooses a collaborator –– an expert in the given field whom he admires. For "On Dying," he collaborated with Marie de Hennezel, a psychologist at a French hospital for the terminally ill, whose book "Intimate Death: How the Dying Teach Us to Live" was a bestseller in France. For "On Ego," which is about consciousness, Mr. Gordon collaborated with the neurologist and author Paul Broks. For "Grace" (the London production of which was called "On Religion"), his collaborator is Mr. Grayling, a philosopher, self-proclaimed "naturalist" (a term he prefers to "atheist"), and author of some 20-odd books.

Although the structure of Mr. Gordon's plays varies, his technique always involves doing lots of interviews, through which he looks for the interesting character or nugget of a story that he can steal for his play. For "Grace," the crucial germ was a story Richard Dawkins told him about going to Canada to visit Michael Persinger, a cognitive neuroscientist who experimented with inducing religious experiences by stimulating the brain's temporal lobes. Subjects had to wear an apparatus, known as the "God helmet," which produced a weak magnetic field. At the beginning of "Grace," the main character, a female academic based loosely on Mr. Dawkins, undergoes the experiment, triggering a series of flashbacks to her painful falling-out with her son after he decided to become an Anglican priest.

You would not know from watching "Grace" that it is based partly on reporting; it is structured as a fairly conventional, four-character fictional play. Asked what he thinks of the techniques of Anna Deavere Smith, who uses interview material verbatim in her plays on topics from race riots to Presidential politics, or of David Hare's documentary approach in "Stuff Happens," his play about the Bush administration's decision to go to war in Iraq, Mr. Gordon was dismissive. These fact-based approaches don't exploit all the possibilities of theater, he said. Plus, they pose as nonfiction, when in fact the playwright has to edit or, in Mr. Hare's case, imagine whole chunks of the play. "Documentary theater has had its day," Mr. Gordon said.

By Kate Taylor | Sat, 26 Jan 2008 at 11:56 AM | Permalink

Divas on Divans Celebrate a New Novel Set in the Seraglio

The British novelist Katie Hickman was in town last night to promote her historical novel, "The Aviary Gate," which Bloomsbury is hoping will be one of the summer's bestsellers. The novel is set in 16th-century Constantinople, where a visiting British merchant learns that the woman he once loved, and believed had died in a shipwreck, was in fact captured by pirates and sold into the sultan's harem.

Style and strong drinks being more important than precise geography, the party was held in a private room at Ilili, a flashy new restaurant in the Flatiron district that is described as "Lebanese fusion." Editors and publicists from Bloomsbury lounged on divans with editors from O, Glamour, More, and Ladies Home Journal, among other magazines, as well as the odd book reviewer.

It took a moment for a new arrival to notice that the room — like the cloistered setting whose mystery and brutal rules fuel the novel's plot — was populated entirely by females. Occasionally, a eunuch entered the sanctum, bringing fresh supplies of the evening's featured drink, the Poison Sumac Margarita.

Ms. Hickman had the initial idea for the book when she visited Istanbul some years ago and learned of an Englishman who in the 16th century brought the sultan a gift of a mechanical organ. The organ was badly damaged on the voyage, so the Englishman had to spend some time inside the palace repairing it. At one point, a gate fortuitously opened, and he had a glimpse inside the harem. "And I thought, what if he saw somebody he knew?" Ms. Hickman said.

Bloomsbury sent the manuscript early on to Sessalee Hensley, the lead fiction buyer at Barnes & Noble. She reportedly loves it and has been closely involved in the positioning of the book, making recommendations on, among other things, the cover. (The image Bloomsbury chose shows a pale woman with dark hair, lounging on an ottoman and dressed in… um… something Ottoman.) The day before the party at Ilili, Ms. Hickman had lunch with Ms. Hensley and Ms. Hensley's boss — as Ms. Hickman put it, lunch "with God and God-calls-me-God."

Incidentally, publishing deities excepted, Ms. Hickman is an atheist. At least, one assumes so from the fact that she is married to the prominent British philosopher A.C. Grayling, who wears his atheism, or as he calls it, "naturalism," on his sleeve. Mr. Grayling is also in town this week to see previews of a play he co-wrote, "Grace," which concerns a clash between a mother, who is an academic and prominent atheist, and her son, who decides to become a priest. "Grace," which Mr. Grayling wrote with the British director Mick Gordon, opens February 11 at MCC Theater.

By Kate Taylor | Fri, 25 Jan 2008 at 5:52 PM | Permalink

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