Saturday Night in Prospect Park: Kailash Kher (plus Electro Morocco and bhangra dance lesson)

We were tired after spending much of the afternoon in Astoria Park for the Astoria Music Now! festival, but around 7:20 p.m. we roused ourselves and took the G train in the opposite direction because we wanted to catch South Asian superstar, Bollywood icon, and judge of TV's Indian Idol, Kailash Kher, at Celebrate Brooklyn! in Prospect Park. We're glad we did.

Although we arrived well after 8 p.m., we still managed to find empty seats in the fourth row, though all the way to the left of the stage. This is around where we usually sit at Celebrate Brooklyn! events and we wonder if everyone tries to sit in the same place or we are just OCD.

Electro Morocco, a Brooklyn-based group, was already in the midst of its set. As the press stuff said, "syncs flashy visuals with electroclash synths, throbbing surf guitars, and a seductive vocalist." More press release:

Seasoned Israeli musicians Assaf Spector and Roy Gurel, together with Zoe Kiefl, Taylor Galassi and Yuval Lion mix everything from Retro rock and Middle Eastern folk, to warped Electro in a fierce, high energy performance. French Pop/R&B sensation Stella will also be featured with the band.

URB Magazine said, "Ever since electronic music took over, poor old guitars have been short of work. Electro Morocco is dusting off those axes and yanking them out of the unemployment line and giving them enough amplitude to compete with their buzzing synths. ... So it looks like you'll just have to peep these kids on a dance floor near you."

That pretty much gets it right: they're bouncy and fun (was that in Ladino?) and the crowd was pretty receptive, considering that most had come to see Kailash Kher (there was a much larger than usual contingent of people of South Asian descent, including a Sikh little boy and girl in front of us, obviously brother and sister, who kept playfully hitting and choking each other during the evening as the older adults in the family kept telling them to quit it).

After a shorter than usual intermission, Jack and Rachel brought out the wonderful Terrance McKnight (looking natty in a dashiki) whose WNYC show Evening Music is often heard on at Dumbo Books HQ
on weeknights starting at 7 p.m. We bet he'll be moving to WQXR come fall, though he didn't say that.

Then four very talented dancers in traditional bright Punjabi dance garb (OK, we assume - the Punjabis we're friends with tend to wear stylish regular clothes) for a Bhanghra dance lesson, to which the crowd responded enthusiastically, standing up, raising their hands, moving their arms, shuffling their feet, and making that cool bhangra sound we can't figure out how to commit to writing.

Then the lesson ended, and the four dancers showed us how it's really done. Nobody gave their names or we'd give them credit. (We've gone to a number of things lately, like Friday night's wonderful Essential Shakespeare in Von King Park, where nobody tells the audience who the individuals performing are and this info doesn't seem to be online.)

Then, slowly, with a big buildup, starting with his first band members coming on stage, Kailash Kher appeared. The South Asians, and probably others in the audience, went wild. Our cell phone pics in the dark are even worse than the usual terrible, and if we post more than a few, it will just diminish Khalish Kher and the impact of his performance. (Though as a short person, we did like him even better for being so compact as to be environmentally correct.)

He's got a very good voice, and they don't call him a superstar for nothing; he's probably one of the biggest names worldwide that Celebrate Brooklyn! could get in any year, even if most Americans don't know who he is. His music is suffused with Sufi rhythms that we find hypnotic.

The crowd seemed to applaud the songs at the first bars of music, so obviously a huge proportion of the audience was totally familiar with his work, which we are not. The closest we get is that we once bought a Panjabi MC album (the one where he does "Beware of the Boys" with Jay-Z).

Anyway, who can't love Kailash Kher's Bollywood stuff? Tauba tauba! (See: Urdu/Punjabi for OMG)

"Hello Brooklyn!" Kailash shouted out after his first song. The charming, flashy sanger got lots of love from the crowd throughout his performance, and people were dancing in the aisles (so much so that audience members, whose views they were blocking, kept yelling at them to sit down).

Around 9:30 p.m., our 58yo body started to shut down (the legs and arms go first), a sign that we shouldn't run around all day on less than four hours' sleep, so we reluctantly left before we collapsed. A prompt and quick G train got us home in about 38 minutes and then we went to bed after writing the first paragraph above. (It's now Sunday morning, complacencies of the peignoir and all that.)

We've posted some videos so you can get a better idea of the work of exemplary musicians' work than our weak, ill-informed observations can offer. But in person is always better for us. There's something about sharing music on a summer night with a crowd that makes people happy and which always has since the days when Dionysius was worshipped. For a lot of people, Khailash Kher is a perfect replacement for the Greek god.

Saturday Afternoon in Astoria: Second Annual Astoria Music Now! festival at Astoria Park

This afternoon we took the G, 7 and N trains and then walked longer than we expected to the lovely Astoria Park, on the water between the RFK/Triboro and Hell Gate bridges, for Astoria Music Now!, the second annual festival sponsored by Astoria Music & Arts. We stayed a few hours and had a good time.

Justin Finley, the festival founder and creative director, said that its intent is to celebrate and maybe give a much-needed leg up to Astoria's energetic music scene.

"There are tons of musicians living in Astoria," Finley told the Daily News. "But the model has always been that you have to go into Manhattan or Brooklyn to play. We and a bunch of other people are trying to celebrate our own local music scene."

There were four stages for bands from noon going till 9 p.m., arts and crafts vendors, a young woman ("Love Girl") in a weird but fetching outfit selling smoothies, an art wall featuring work by Ben Louria, Jenna Newton, Vicky Barranguet, Betty T. Kao, and a bunch of other stuff.

Astoria Park is really gorgeous; this was our first time there, and the big surprise was how big it is. And to those of us from Williamsburg, another big surprise is that their pool actually contains some water - and lots of happy people cooling off.

At the Hell Gate Social Stage under the Hell Gate Bridge, we saw Bob Muir and the Enemy Below, who play the kind of depressing ballads that make those men so inclined (definitely not us) want to kill themselves when they hear them at 2 a.m. when they're driving home from a bar after striking out again with some women.

Their songs are whimsical and we liked the band's lack of pretension.

At the Quays Shore Stage we saw Matthew Snow & The Way It Was Is A Dream. Matthew is from Akron and pays too much for his apartment in Astoria.

Here he is with "Missing" at the Bowery Poetry Club a couple of months ago:

Following them we caught Stone Robot, an indie/garage/alternative rock band influenced by space, nature and robots.

We were most impressed with Lisa Bianco, who also was working like a mofo in the role of stage organizer, not for organizing skills, but for her exceptionally fine music. The Village Voice called her work "galvanizing" and the East Coast Rocker called it "an interesting blend of alternative, guitar rock, and pure punk aggression."

We were actually headed in the other direction when we heard her first song, which was so mesmerizing that we turned on our heels (well, as best we could with plantar fasciitis) and went over to hear her whole set up close at the acoustic General Slocum stage.

"Postdata," from the album by the same name, was especially fine.

We saw some other good local bands and solo players and listened to pretty good DJs at the Lucky Mojo's Triboro stage by 19th Street before we walked down a block to catch the Q69 bus down 21st Street to the last stop by the Court Square G train terminus.

Astoria Arts & Music did a great job on the festival, and you know, Astoria Park and the whole wonderful neighborhood (when we were growing up in the '50s and '60s, it was as close to Greece as we ever got) is really not very far from Greenpoint and Williamsburg. We go there once in a while, but not as often as we should.

Friday Night in Bed-Stuy: Continuum Company presents "A Midsummer Night's Dream" at Von King Park

We were back in Herbert Von King Park in Bed-Stuy tonight for a brisk and funny CityParks Theater production of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Edited down to eighty-five minutes and with five actors playing all twelve roles, the Continuum Company of NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts' Theater in a Box: Essential Shakespeare adaptation, I Dream A Little Dream, proved both ingeniously innovative and enormously entertaining.

The Continuum Company is a repertory company drawn from the prestigious alumni population trained through the Tisch School’s Graduate Acting and Design for Stage & Film Departments. The Company’s mission is to empower actors and designers, who share a common artistic training, to work in vehement collaboration with each other in the creation of both new work and staging of the classics. The model harks back to the methods of Shakespeare and Molière when there were actor/artists who simply acted, directed, wrote, and designed all at the same time without anyone noting that they belonged to a different union or guild.

The amphitheater at Von King Park served as a great setting for the production, which didn't dumb down Shakespeare's enchanted comedy but smartened it up, leaving in the poetry and all important plot deals, and adding some contemporary music and dance commenting on and highlighting the details of the story so that it could be resonant among all age groups (there were a lot of little kids, many seated in chairs up front) and across cultures.

Directed by the well-regarded Jim Calder, who probably taught some of the quintet of talented cast members at NYU, this "Little Dream" seemed to work exceptionally well. A pair of musicians off to the right of the stage chimed in at the right moments, the actors were clear and distinct at all times - even over the cries of babies - (the amplification seemed to work flawlessly) - and a simple, basic set provided an ideal setting for the midsummer madness of one of Shakespeare's most playful and romantic comedies.

The five actors were outstanding. Again, we wish we had names, but we had wondered how five performers could tackle the dozen roles in this play. One actress played Puck, and the others the four young lovers: Lysander, Hermia, Helena and Demetrius.

These four also played the rustic acting company putting on the funnily abysmal production of "Pyramis and Thisbe" before the Duke, Thesus, and his Amazon queen Hippolyte, played by the same actress who was Puck, wearing men's garments on one side and female clothing on the other. (The costumes worked extremely well.)

Oberon, king of the fairies, was played by both male actors wearing sunglasses, or only one of them, if the other was needed to play someone else. At one point, Oberon's errant and willful queen, Titania, was played by all three female performers, but then that would drop back if the other actresses were needed for the scene.

This was so ingenious that it was always clear which character was speaking or reacting at any time. A lot of this, of course, can be attributed to the dexterity and versatility of the actors, whose voices dropped or raised in register or who adopted other tricks (like a stooped posture for Hermia's old father Egeus by a talented actor who also played Lysander, Nick Bottom and half of Oberon).

The musical numbers never seemed to detract from the action or language of the play; rather, they enhanced it - none more so for us than a plaintive solo by Puck when he makes things right again for the mortal lovers. All of the players have good singing voices and are marvelously adept at physical comedy. But the romance and the magic of A Midsummer Night's Dream are very much in evidence. It was an enjoyable evening.

As we said last year, when we saw the Piper Theater perform this play at Washington (then J.J. Byrne Park), we first saw a Brooklyn park production of Midsummer Night's Dream on Thursday evening, July 23, 1970 [this is why you should keep a diary too] put on by BACA Repertory in Prospect Park at Wollman Rink.

Thirty-nine years and a day later, we still remember that production fondly. If we should live to 97 and have all our marbles (not a good bet, given Alzheimer's in our family), we'd will have fond memories of the Continuum Company's excellent Dream at Von King Park tonight. On the G train going home, we spoke to a couple of enthusiastic cast members, so we know we're not alone in this.

You can catch this production tomorrow, Saturday, at Von King Park again; next Friday and Saturday, July 31 and August 1, at Marcus Garvey Park in Harlem; or on Tuesday, August 4, at East River Park on the Lower East Side. Even if it weren't (incredibly) free, it would be worth seeing for all mortals who don't fall into the fool category - and probably for some who do.

Friday Morning in Brooklyn Bridge Park: White Bird Puppetry presents "It Wasn't Always This Way" by & for kids

Late this morning we were in Brooklyn Bridge Park with a bunch of kids watching other kids perform "It Wasn't Always This Way," a charming thirty-minute puppet show, produced by White Bird Productions, about the natural and man-made environment of New York City.

Large puppets marked the history and geography of our urban environment: the island of Manhattan forming, birds flying, buildings being built, subways moving and much more. It was a delightful half-hour, with terrific music supplied by adults, from tom-toms to "The Sidewalks of New York," and you could tell it grabbed the attention of the very young audience by the lack of a single crying child during the entire performance.

According to its website,

For over 18 years, White Bird Productions has been producing plays, commissioning new work, collaborating with musicians and choreographers and, through Creative Theatrics, offering children’s theater classes in Brooklyn. Based in the Alliance of Resident Theatres/New York’s South Oxford Space in Fort Greene, Brooklyn, White Bird Productions has a particular interest in the urban landscape, and how the residents and the natural environment of New York complement and collide with one another.

Earlier work exploring these issues includes Villagers (John Istel) at St. Mark’s Church in the Bouwerie, COMBUSTION: The Politics of Trash at BAM (Kathryn Dickinson), and Islands: An Urban Archipelago (David Pleasant and Dickinson) at Blue Heron Arts Centre. White Bird has also developed and produced Boro Tales: Brooklyn at the Blue Heron Arts Centre and BRIC Studio in downtown Brooklyn and Boro Tales: Manhattan at HERE Arts Centre, with three boroughs to come in this five-borough project that seeks to celebrate our urban environment through the lens of well-known NYC playwrights.

This show began with a look, not 400 years ago, in 1609, when Hudson first sailed here, but 400 years in the future:




This wasn't history by Mike Wallace or Russell Shorto, but it was visual, musical and understandable, aimed at little kids. The new book Mannahatta, from the Wildlife Conservation Society, after all, details the streams that once ran through Manhattan.

A turtle, or perhaps a tortoise, roams.

A forest on a hill.

A beaver blissfully frolics in the water before the Astor family turns it into someone's chapeau.

The native people have their canoes.


What is this big ship? Rather than a Cunard liner, it looks like the Half Moon to us.

The Dutch build their houses, like the one in the neighborhood where we grew up.

The pigs are coming, or maybe they're real estate developers.

The houses seem a little skittish at the arrival of the pigs. But then the houses throw out scraps. . .

. . . and the pigs gobble them up. They're the sanitation department, only with shorter work breaks.

New multistory houses push aside the farmhouses and trees.

The Statue of Liberty brings new New Yorkers to their homes.

The first street musicians.

The first highrises.

Eventually skyscrapers, subways and high-flying planes become part of NYC's daily environment.



And the show ends in 2009, with a parade of all the actors in the natural history of New York, reminding us that it wasn't always this way. . .

. . . and getting applause and love from the audience. The kids, and the adults behind the show, did a magnificent job. It was a beautiful morning - now time to walk down Main Street for iced tea at Starbucks. Yeah, chain stores are part of NYC's environment, too.