Music, Dolls, Clowns, Art

I've neglected to post about entertainment sources I've enjoyed over the past month. Here are some highlights.


In January I went to the Big Apple Circus. It's a small circus, but has acrobats, jugglers (twin jugglers!), clowns (of course), horses, trained dogs, trapeze artists, and a man who pretends to be a music box figurine. It's a shame there weren't any elephants or fire-breathers or clowns being shot from cannons. However, it was an entertaining show anyways, and since it travels around the U.S., you can potentially see it yourself even if you're not in NYC.


Music in the Air, a musical from the 1930s that was revived at the City Center in NYC, ran for a very short time in early February, but a friend and I managed to see it. Here is the official site. It's a shame the musical is not staged more often today, as the plot was cute with witty dialogue, the costumes and scenery were bright and vivid, and the music was jovial and well-sung. Kristin Chenoweth, Douglas Sills, and Marni Nixon (who dubbed the singing voices of the actresses starring in My Fair Lady, The King and I, and West Side Story) were among the major stars.


A friend and I went to see these guys do standup/improv comedy at the PIT: "Dave and Ethan." Their comedy is built around their double dating episodes (which they film and post on YouTube). They both played up their disparate personalities -- as one's an aggressive dater and one's more of a gentleman -- and sang to the audience, and it was a fun show.


At the Morgan Library, one of the current exhibitions (through May 24) is called "On the Money: Cartoons from the New Yorker." There are dozens of cartoons displayed (all relating to money) from the earliest years of the magazine through the present day. It's a pleasure to see how each cartoon (and caption) reflects the attitudes and concerns of the particular time period in which it was drawn. Overall, our cultural attitude hasn't shifted that much -- money always was and continues to be important to our society. But the particular scenes chosen by the artist and the particular jokes evoked from the scenes are interesting because when matched to their date of execution, they shed light upon our nation's collective conscious and its nuanced variations over the decades.


Just recently I went to the Ziegfeld Theater on 54th St. to see Coraline 3D. (The Ziegfeld is a luxurious, single-screen movie house that fits 1,200 people. Although it was opened in 1969, its grandiosity and decor makes me think of movie houses even before that date. It's named for Florenz Ziegfeld, famous for his Ziegfeld Follies on Broadway.)
You can see the film without it being in 3D, but if your local theater offers it in 3D, you should take advantage of it because the extra dimension really enhances the film. I hadn't seen any films in 3D since I was around 10 or 12. There weren't a great deal of objects suddenly catapulting from the screen towards you, like in an action/adventure movie involving falling boulders and venomous snakes, but the 3D was a great choice for this particular film anyway because it was animated (the characters were all puppets) -- so the characters appeared more alive and 'real.'