Think of it as an end-of-the season rally – a final burst of song and dance before spring fever yields to the lazy days of summer.
Whatever the reason, this is the week for family entertainment. We’re talking about “Peter and the Wolf” at Carnegie Hall, a celebration of all things Russian at Battery Park, tap-dancers at Lincoln Center … even a ballet based on “Alice in Wonderland.”
Let’s take it one day at a time.
Today at 2 p.m., the New York Pops winds up this year’s family concerts with “A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Orchestra.” How funny? Imagine an orchestra imitating a train, a bee and a typewriter. The Pops will do just that, performing such pieces as “Train Time,” “The Waltzing Cat,” “The Flight of the Bumblebee” and “The Typewriter.”
The last and longest piece on the program – and the one most concertgoers know and love – is “Peter and the Wolf.”
This time, Pops conductor Skitch Henderson – who says he’s conducted “Peter” more times than he can count – insists the performance will be different: This time, students from the Manhattan school MS 44 (Broadway Center for the Arts and Academics) will help him act out scenes from Prokofiev’s excellent adventure. He calls it “a story with visual aids.”
“The reason everyone loves ‘Peter and the Wolf’ is because it’s not really about Peter and a wolf, but about our lives and times,” Henderson says. “We all have fears, likes and dislikes – and everything turns out wonderfully if you have faith.”
The concert starts at 2, but it’s best to get to the hall by 1 p.m. for storytelling and small-group sessions that let you get up close and personal with the musicians. For tickets – $5 – visit the Carnegie Hall Box Office, 154 W. 57th St., or call CarnegieCharge at (212) 247-7800.
“Break a leg” may bring you good luck at Carnegie Hall and on Broadway, but it’s no way to greet a tap-dancer.
“What we say is ‘Keep your screws in,'” says tapper Tony Waag. “That’s because each tap is fastened on by three screws, and there are two taps per shoe, or 12 screws per tap dancer. That gives you a lot of opportunities to lose things!”
With any luck, Waag (which is pronounced “Vag,” with a V) won’t lose anything when he and his fellow hoofers perform Sunday. Their show – the last one of the season in Lincoln Center’s “Reel to Real” program – is called “The Last Song and Dance Men: Donald O’Connor and Ray Bolger.”
If you’ve ever seen “Singin’ in the Rain” and “The Wizard of Oz,” you’ll know who we’re talking about.
“Ray Bolger was one of my favorite dancers,” Waag says of the star who played the Scarecrow. “He was the king of soft-shoe, which is kind of the epitome about what everyone loves about tap dance.
“It gives the illusion that it’s very easy to do, that it’s a piece of cake. But the truth is, tap is very difficult – you have to be a musician as well as a dancer. And it’s just as hard to dance slow as to dance fast.”
Waag, who grew up in Colorado, didn’t start dancing until he was in high school, when he signed up for a folk-dancing class at a local college.
“It was great training ’cause we’d do a Scottish thing, a Turkish thing, an Israeli thing and a square dance,” he says. “Each had its own tradition and technique.”
At Sunday’s shows, Waag and his fellow tapper, Rod Ferrone, will perform their own version of “Make ‘Em Laugh,” from “Singin’ in the Rain.” At the end, they and the show’s other dancers, David Rider and Brenda Bufalino, will get kids from the audience up on stage to teach them a few things.
Shows are at 11:30 a.m. and 2 p.m. Sunday in the Walter Reade Theater, 165 W. 65th St. at Broadway. For tickets – $7.50 for children, $15 for adults – visit or call the box office at (212) 875-5601 or call (212) 496-3809 (there’ll be a $1 ticket surcharge).
There’ll be a lot of dancing feet Sunday at Battery Park in Lower Manhattan, home of the fourth Annual NYANA (New York Association for New Americans) Festival. From 11 a.m. to 6 p.m., the Russian American Arts Foundation is pulling out all the stops – and making a lot of blintzes – to celebrate the children of the Jewish emigre community from the former Soviet Union. And all the entertainment’s free!
Come see members of the Children’s Dance Academy – prize-winning ballroom dancers all – perform waltzes, two-steps and tangos on one of the festival’s stages. Elsewhere you can catch snippets of “Nutcracker Suite” danced by the Brighton Ballet Theatre; catch the pantomiming players – all of them deaf – from the famous Toys Theater; and see the children’s folk group, The Golden Rooster, perform songs in traditional costumes. They’ll even teach you some old-fashioned Russian games, BGB – Before Game Boy – when kids used to play with spoons and dolls made out of bread.
You can even buy a clay doll and learn how to paint it the Russian way at one of the arts-and-crafts booths. Hungry? There’ll be borsht, blintzes and shish kebab for sale all over the park. For more information, call (212) 687-6118.
There’ll be another kind of party beginning Friday – a mad tea party. It’s “The Alice in Wonderland Follies,” the New York Theatre Ballet’s brand-new ballet based on Lewis Carroll’s fairy tale.
In this case, Alice’s adventures with the White Rabbit, Cheshire Cat and the rest are presented as a vaudeville act. The action is set in 1913, and the dancing incorporates everything from ballroom steps to burlesque and ballet styles. The music is drawn from the turn-of-the-century’s best, with toe-tapping numbers by John Philip Sousa and Scott Joplin, with a little Felix Mendelssohn thrown in.
Performances start Friday at Florence Gould Hall, 55 E. 59th St., between Madison and Park avenues, and run through June 17, Father’s Day (when dads get in free at the door). For tickets – $20 for kids 12 and under, $25 for adults – call the box office at (212) 355-6160 or Ticketmaster at (212) 307-4100.
