The Sartorial Riches of the Silent-Film Era
In today’s world of rumbling, thunderous Dolby surround sound, the concept of silent cinema can feel very distant. Sure, you can catch a replay of “Metropolis” or “City Lights” every now and then at Film Forum—and you can listen to Karina Longworth’s excellent podcast about Hollywood history, “You Must Remember This”—but there are notably few other opportunities to dip one’s toes into the era before talkies arrived. As such, “Goddesses in the Machine: Fashion in American Silent Film,” a new exhibition opening on Sept. 18, at the Bard Graduate Center, on the Upper West Side, is a welcome event.
The show surveys the many fashion designers, including Lady Duff-Gordon, Lilian St. Cyr, Natacha Rambova, Travis Banton, and Salvatore Ferragamo, who brought their sartorial talents to the silent screen. It includes showings of several serial dramas from the nineteen-tens, including “The Perils of Pauline,” from 1914; “The Whirl of Life,” from 1915; and “The Mysterious Airman,” from 1928, all with live accompaniment by the pianist Makia Matsumura. The costume designers for these movies made clothes that spoke loudly when leading ladies could not; there is a sumptuous drama to the pieces they created which echoes through time.—Rachel Syme
About Town
“What they don’t tell you about Nashville, Tennessee / Is heartbreak’s the only thing they hand out for free,” an aspiring country singer-songwriter wails in “Music City,” a toe-tappin’, hand-clappin’, tissue-dabbin’ humdinger of a show. If some of J. T. Harding’s tunes sound familiar, it’s because they were originally sung by the likes of Blake Shelton and Keith Urban. But they’ve been blessed with a book so smooth, by Peter Zinn, that they fit right into this story of three hardscrabble youngsters chasing country-music dreams at almost any cost. Clifton Chadick’s set plops you smack dab in the center of the action, at a table in a bar on open-mike night. With right fine actin’, singin’, playin’, or other carryin’ on by most everyone onstage.—Dan Stahl (St. Luke’s Theatre; through Sept. 19.)
The magician Jamie Allan’s “Amaze” is a show for kids—and for adults who’d unironically describe themselves as “kids at heart.” As a critic at heart, I tired of Allan’s eager-beaver affect, though it has the advantage of putting audience participants at ease. His artful tricks are organized around a narrative of his development as a magician, from the Fisher-Price magic kit he got as a boy to a hybrid analog-digital sleight of hand that landed him on BBC One. But the razzle-dazzle pairs oddly with his earnestness, as do the video projections with antique furnishings. And what would Freud make of his wife performing alongside him in the “glamorous assistant” role he originally promised his mother?—D.S. (New World Stages; open run.)
Long before “woke” was co-opted and turned into a dog whistle, it operated as a perfect word to describe the music and artistry of Erykah Badu. “I stay woke,” she sang on the 2008 song “Master Teacher,” using a term originally meant to characterize not just a greater level of social awareness but a state of being, as she put it, in alignment with nature. Both are core ideals for the neo-soul movement, of which she is a pioneer, whose sound is as earthy and robust as it is conscious. A well-known sage of modern blues and psychedelic R. & B., Badu continues her eternal vision quest on a new album with the prolific beat-making heavyweight the Alchemist, and both are joined in concert by the similarly woke-minded hip-hop group De La Soul.—Sheldon Pearce (Forest Hills Stadium; Sept. 18.)
Erasing Borders Dance Festival encompasses a wide palette of Indian classical dance—officially, there are eight forms, but in reality there are many more. Kuchipudi—light, airy, rhythmic—originated in Andhra Pradesh, where it was performed by men, as part of mythological dance dramas. Now it is mainly performed by women. Here, a kuchipudi solo by Sreelakshmy Kallungal Govardhanan, who moves with an almost feral power, displays dramatic abilities—central to kuchipudi—that transcend linguistic barriers. A trio led by Shila Mehta performs kathak, a more abstract dance style from the north; others perform odissi (from Odisha) and the swaying mohiniyattam (Kerala). There will even be a bit of contemporary dance, still based in South Asian technique, performed by Preeti Vasudevan.—Marina Harss (Kaye Playhouse; Sept. 19-20.)
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This year’s iteration of City Center’s popular Fall for Dance Festival offers the standard mix of the promising and the poorly chosen, the not-so-familiar and the all-too. The most intriguing première comes from Robbie Fairchild, a former New York City Ballet star who has found success on Broadway and on the West End. His piece “Lord Chamberlain’s Men” finds an emotional backstory for the forbidden-love theme of “Romeo and Juliet” in the amatory sonnets that Shakespeare wrote to a young man. Other festival highlights include Juan Tomás de la Molía, an on-the-rise flamenco dancer of fresh musicality, and Miami City Ballet, with a new Alexei Ratmansky piece set to Strauss waltzes.—Brian Seibert (New York City Center; Sept. 22-Oct. 3.)
Following the method of his HBO series “How To with John Wilson,” the Queens-based local explorer offers his first feature film, “The History of Concrete,” a warmhearted, wide-rangingly inquisitive documentary about the peculiar implications of the ubiquitous substance. It involves literal cinematic shoegaze—an encounter with a New York contractor who blasts away chewing-gum stains on a sidewalk—and takes Wilson to a primordial concrete road in small-town Ohio, a concrete convention in Las Vegas, and even the concrete-domed Pantheon in Rome. He ponders his own method, because his central theme is the emotional side of the material city, where a tight-knit group of runners pounds the pavement and a do-it-yourself repair job reminds him that even the intimacy of home involves a throng of connections.—Richard Brody (Opening Sept. 18.)
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Bar Tab
Taran Dugal finds a confessional in a Chinatown paradise.
The climb from Hell to Heaven can be long and arduous. Take Dante’s, for instance. The man persevered through nine circles of inferno, sans electrolytes, only to find himself staring up at the mountain of Purgatory. Merda! And you thought your walkup was a trek. Luckily for those partygoers with forbidden-fruit predilections, Gosh, a new guest-list-only Chinatown club (accessible via e-mail), allows patrons a quicker ascent to Paradise, if they can stomach the snooty vibe. On a recent weekend, a group of friends congregated in the venue’s basement, a narrow room with black leather couches and steel tables. Red neon tubes illuminated art works ranging from the disturbing (a black-and-white photograph of a person stuffing sausages in their mouth) to the mundane (a pastoral painting of a snowshoe-wearing rifleman). The friends ranked their drinks. The Sadomaso, a sharp fusion of Amaro Montenegro, mezcal, lemon, and sotol, placed last—far too bitter. Then came the Mirafiori, a golden, overly sweet mix of mezcal, crème de litchi, lime, and nasturtium. The Gin Basil Smash, an addictive blend of gin, lemon, sugar, and basil, topped the list. Simplicity was proportionate to success: the bar had a formidable Guinness on tap. Pints in hand, the group ascended to the ground level—an elegant Japanese-style parlor dotted with toadstool seats—but didn’t stay in that purgatory long, instead heading to the top floor, a tentlike lounge enclosed by velvet curtains printed with a psychedelic pattern of dinosaurs, naked gnomes, and Babelian monoliths. Two members of the group stumbled through a nondescript door nearby, and found a wood-panelled confessional, where an empty beer glass sat beside the divider. In this version of paradise, even angels have secrets, divulged, apparently, over a cold Irish stout.
P.S. Good stuff on the internet: