Out & About
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A Prospect of Summer Fun
Local pride was fierce at the season opening of Celebrate Brooklyn!, the outdoor series of free performances at the Prospect Park Band Shell.
“It’s the greatest collection of free concerts, dance, and film citywide,” a money manager who has lived in Park Slope for 23 years, Daniel Wiener, said at Thursday’s gala dinner and concert by the Neville Brothers.
This summer’s talent roster includes a Brooklyn rock band, the Hold Steady, Frank London’s Yiddish Carnival, and the Brooklyn Philharmonic.
Mr. Wiener said the schedule “appeals to a range of people — young people who have recently moved here as well as old-line Brooklyn.”
His festival favorite? “The movies are a pisser,” he said, referring to screenings of silent films with live musical accompaniment.
The festival’s budget this year is $1.5 million and includes 25 performances over nine weeks, with an expected total of 250,000 attendees, drawn from all the boroughs, the director and producer of the festival, Jack Walsh, said.
“It’s an unbelievable experience. The crowd is alive,” an attorney and Park Slope resident, Karla Olivier, said. Ms. Olivier is a member of the board of the nonprofit that organizes the festival, BRIC (Brooklyn Information & Culture).
A teacher living in Park Slope, Bev Cheffo, said she is most excited about the American premiere of “RE:wind: A Cantata for Voice, Tape, and Testimony,” a co-commission of Celebrate Brooklyn! that will be performed Friday, July 6. The choral work by a South African composer, Philip Miller, incorporates recordings from testimony taken during South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation hearings.
A founder of the festival, Burl Hash, recalled its early days.
“I started doing theater. The parks department put me on salary of $150 a week to do more,” Mr. Hash, who now lives in Framingham, Mass., said. “They thought it would help clean up the park.”
“The festival started the year before I arrived,” the director of the Prospect Park Alliance, which administrates the park, Tupper Thomas, said. “We’ve both grown pretty dramatically over the years.”
