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    How Chris Perfetti of ‘Abbott Elementary’ Spends His Sundays

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    On his weeks off from shooting the ABC sitcom, the actor unwinds by whipping up “the biggest salad ever” and seeking out a Sunday-night show.For the actor Chris Perfetti, who lives in a fifth-floor walk-up in Brooklyn Heights, every day is leg day.“It’s worth it for the view,” said Mr. Perfetti, 35, who portrays the sixth-grade teacher Jacob Hill on “Abbott Elementary,” Quinta Brunson’s public school mockumentary set in Philadelphia. The fourth season premiered this month.Mr. Perfetti, a longtime New York theater actor who broke out on the show in 2021, still considers Brooklyn home, though he is also in Los Angeles six months of the year shooting “Abbott.” (He recently bought a 100-year-old cottage in the woods in Los Angeles’s Laurel Canyon neighborhood, though he said he has no plans to give up his Brooklyn one-bedroom, where he lives on the building’s top floor.)“I definitely miss New York when I’m in L.A. more than I miss L.A. when I’m in New York,” said Mr. Perfetti, who was born in Rochester, N.Y.He studied drama at the State University of New York at Purchase in Westchester County and spent his weekends taking Metro-North trains into Manhattan to see shows.“I pretty much jet back here as soon as they call cut on ‘Abbott,’” he said.LATE START I wake up before noon, but not by much. “Abbott” requires me to wake up in the wee, wee dark hours of the morning — I’m usually up at 4:30 or 5:30 a.m. to be on set. That requires an alarm every day, so on the days when I’m not shooting, I let my body get as much sleep as I can.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Tim Berne, a D.I.Y. Jazz Institution

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      The saxophonist and composer has spent 50 years in the New York scene. As he turns 70, he’s commanding gigs at a Brooklyn bar and continuing to inspire.For the saxophonist and composer Tim Berne, the Brooklyn bar Lowlands is a favorite neighborhood hangout. Lately, it has also become his musical laboratory.During the past two years, Berne has regularly walked the block and a half from his Gowanus home to the cozy establishment on a sleepy stretch of Third Avenue. Tall, with a moseying gait and a mop of gray hair, he blends in easily. There is no stage, so he and his bandmates, a rotating cast of newer and longtime associates, set up on the floor, amid purple Christmas lights and an illuminated Miller High Life sign.Passers-by might expect a classic-rock covers gig, but that changes when Berne begins warming up. His alto sound, chiseled and neon-bright, cuts through the space like a laser beam. It’s an instant reminder that one of the true thought leaders in progressive jazz — an unassuming yet undeniable force in the music for more than four decades — is still operating at peak strength as he approaches his 70th birthday on Wednesday. (He returns to Lowlands on Oct. 22.)“That Lowlands gig, he takes it as seriously as if he was going to be playing at Carnegie Hall,” the guitarist Bill Frisell, a frequent Berne collaborator in the ’80s who has re-entered his orbit, said in a video interview. “It’s like his life is on the line.”Frisell said that after their early work together, he didn’t keep close tabs on Berne’s music. “I heard him again, and it was like, ‘Man alive,’” he said, going on to describe “how these germs of ideas that were there at the beginning had blossomed and expanded, and his sense of all the parts — the melody, the rhythm, the harmony, the counterpoint — all of that had just kept on getting richer and richer.”“I’m not an artist; I’m just playing music,” Berne said.Malike Sidibe for The New York TimesWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Ka, Lone Soldier of New York’s Underground Rap Scene, Dies at 52

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      The rapper, whose name was Kaseem Ryan, was known for self-producing 11 albums while also a maintaining a career with the New York Fire Department.Kaseem Ryan, who built a small but fervent following as an underground Brooklyn rapper known as Ka while maintaining a career as a New York City firefighter, died in the city on Saturday. He was 52.His death was announced by his wife, Mimi Valdés, on Instagram, as well as in a statement posted on his Instagram page. No cause was given, though the statement said that he had “died unexpectedly.”First with the mid-1990s underground group Natural Elements, and then on 11 solo albums he produced himself and released over nearly two decades, Ka gripped hard-core hip-hop listeners with gloomy beats and vivid descriptions of street life and struggle.In a 2012 review of his second album “Grief Pedigree”, The New York Times pop music critic Jon Caramanica described Ka as “a striking rapper largely for what he forgoes: flash, filigree, any sense that the hard work is already done.”Kaseem Ryan was born in 1972 and raised in the Brownsville neighborhood of Brooklyn in New York. During his teen years, he dealt crack and sold firearms.He spent much of the 1990s trying to make a name for himself as a rapper, but then quit music altogether, only to come back a decade later.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 113 Shares149 Views

      in Movies

      How Dr. Alex Arroyo Spends His Sundays (in Costume)

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      Dr. Alex Arroyo, a director of pediatric medicine in Brooklyn, gets to live out his “Star Wars” dreams, practice jujitsu and make a big mess while cooking for his family.“Hey, buddy, how are you doing?” a man wearing a Boba Fett costume said as he leaned over the bed of a young boy in a hospital gown.It was a Sunday afternoon in the emergency room at Maimonides Medical Center in Brooklyn, where Dr. Alex Arroyo, the hospital’s director of pediatric emergency medicine, often dons one of more than 20 costumes when he visits patients. His favorite is Boba Fett, the famed bounty hunter from the “Star Wars” films.“I love what I do, but it’s sure hot in there!” said Dr. Arroyo, 48, who has worked at the hospital since 2006. He started wearing costumes in 2021.A die-hard “Star Wars” fan who grew up watching the original trilogy with his parents, Dr. Arroyo has passed that love on to his two youngest children, Grayson, 8, and Karra, 6. For New York Comic Con each year, the whole family dresses up, including his wife, Dr. Sharon Yellin, 44, a fellow pediatric emergency medicine physician who works at NewYork-Presbyterian Brooklyn Methodist Hospital. One year they went as the family from “Encanto.”“I was the big, strong sister with the donkey,” Dr. Arroyo said, referring to the character Luisa.Dr. Arroyo, who also has a 21-year-old son, Colin, from a previous marriage, was born in the Borough Park neighborhood of South Brooklyn — at Maimonides, in fact. Now he lives less than a mile from the house where he grew up, in a four-bedroom, three-story 1920s brownstone. He uses one of the spare bedrooms as his office and rents out the third floor.“It’s a frightening place to be inside of because I’m also an active-duty comic collector,” he said of his office. “It’s filled wall to wall with toys. It’s my sanctuary away from the world.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      in Theater

      BAM Announces Artistic Director and Fall Season Lineup

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      BAM, which has faced cutbacks in recent years, unveiled a reorganization as it announced its Next Wave Festival for the fall.The Brooklyn Academy of Music, a haven for international artists and the avant-garde that has been forced to reduce its programming and lay off workers in recent years, unveiled plans for a reorganization on Thursday as it announced its fall season.The institution said that Amy Cassello, who has been with BAM for more than a decade, would officially become its artistic director, a position she had been holding on an interim basis. And it announced a new strategic plan that calls for programming more works that are still in development, establishing more partnerships with other presenting institutions and hiring a new community-focused “resident curator.”BAM executives said they hoped that the plan would help usher in a new era for the institution after an exceptionally difficult period.Like many nonprofit arts organizations, BAM has struggled financially since the pandemic, and its annual operating budget dropped. It has also been buffeted by leadership churn in recent years after decades of stability in its senior leadership ranks.“I’m feeling really confident about our future,” said Gina Duncan, BAM’s president since 2022. “We were able to gain alignment across all of BAM’s communities and really arrive at a point in which we had a shared understanding of our history and what the future holds for us.”The upcoming Next Wave Festival in the fall will have 11 events, up from eight in 2023, a difficult year when BAM laid off 13 percent of its staff to help fill what officials called a “sizable structural deficit.” But it will still not be as robust as it was in earlier eras, when the festival regularly staged many more programs.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      ‘The Miser’ Review: Updating Molière, but Missing a Key Ingredient

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      This Molière in the Park production doesn’t have the sharp satirical bite of the original.The support beam of theater in France, Molière is nowhere near as famous in the United States. Yet the comic high jinks, star-crossed lovers and long-lost relatives that pop up in his play “The Miser,” first produced in 1668, will be instantly familiar to anybody who has ever seen a Shakespeare comedy.Where Molière stands out, however, is as a sharp social satirist whose denouncing of the vain, the hypocritical and the simply deluded have not aged — once timely, they are now timeless. Unfortunately it is precisely that element that is missing from the Molière in the Park production of “The Miser” at the LeFrak Center in Prospect Park, Brooklyn.The title character, Harpagon (Francesca Faridany), is a curdled, choleric, elderly man consumed by greed. It’s not even that he wants money to live in luxury: Harpagon just wants to possess it.The play relentlessly ridicules Harpagon and his pathological greed, along with his tyrannical ways at home, where he lords it over his two daughters, the flighty Elise (Ismenia Mendes) and the flashy Cleante (Alana Raquel Bowers). Complicating matters, Elise is in love with her father’s steward, Valere (Calvin Leon Smith, fresh from a terrific turn as the closeted Larry in “Fat Ham”), while Harpagon and Cleante both covet the fetching Marianne (MaYaa Boateng, from “Fairview”).That women are playing Cleante (a man in the original) and Harpagon indicates that the director Lucie Tiberghien, who is also the artistic director of Molière in the Park, is not stuck in tradition. Although it doesn’t gum up the works, why keep Harpagon as a male character, for example, and make Cleante a female one? This is where Molière’s relative obscurity in the United States becomes an asset since many audience members would not even be aware of the difference, as everything is played matter-of-factly.Trickier is Faridany as Harpagon. An essential part of the play is that the character covets the same woman as his son (OK, daughter), so his being an elderly man adds an element of discomfort. This does not hit as hard when he is played by a woman who is far from “over 70,” Harpagon’s intended age.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 125 Shares139 Views

      in Music

      Review: Swizz Beatz and Alicia Keys Show ‘Giants’ in Brooklyn

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      Right in the middle of the exhibition “Giants: Art from the Dean Collection of Swizz Beatz and Alicia Keys,” which opens Saturday at the Brooklyn Museum, is Kehinde Wiley’s 25-foot-long 2008 painting “Femme Piquée par un Serpent.” Showing a Black man in snappy but casual dress reclined in a distinctively twisted position, with a background of Wiley’s signature flowers, it borrows both title and pose from an 1847 marble sculpture by Auguste Clésinger. What you think of it really depends on what you’re asking for.If you view the painting as a Venti-size iteration of Wiley’s ongoing project, his decades-long attack on the paucity of Black faces in Western museums and art history, it’s one-note but hard to argue with. Brightly colored and thoughtfully composed, it’s visually appealing, and even today, when it’s no longer so uncommon to see Black figures on museum walls, catching sight of one this big still elicits a thrill.On the other hand, considered strictly as a painting, “Femme Piquée par un Serpent” (“Woman Bitten by a Serpent”) doesn’t offer that much. There are no details that you’d miss in a jpeg reproduction, no visible evidence of human hands at play, no sensual pleasure to be found in the surface, nothing surprising, mysterious or engrossing. It’s simply the adept illustration of an idea.Of course, you could also ask for both — for a clear conceptual work about painting (and the historical exclusion of Black subjects and artists) that is also a good painting. If you do, you’re likely to respond to “Femme Piquée par un Serpent” with ambivalence and frustration.Swizz Beatz, in turquoise at left, and Alicia Keys, at right, greet guests at the opening of “Giants,” in front of Kehinde Wiley’s 25-foot-long “Femme Piquée par un Serpent,” from 2008.Rebecca Smeyne for The New York TimesI was thinking about this — about artistic endeavors that succeed and fail at the same time — as I walked through “Giants,” the latest celebrity tie-in exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum. (“Spike Lee: Creative Sources” closes on Sunday; a show of photographs by Paul McCartney opens in May.) “Giants” draws on the extensive art collection of the married musical superstars Keys and Beatz (Kasseem Dean), bringing together 98 works — many oversized and of recent vintage — by 37 artists. Most of them are American, but they also come from several countries in Europe and half a dozen in Africa, and they range in generation from Ernie Barnes, who died at 70 in 2009, to Qualeasha Wood, born in 1996.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 163 Shares129 Views

      in Theater

      Curtains Down, Bottoms Up: When the Show Ends, the Night’s Just Getting Started

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      “Dead Letter No. 9,” “Cocktail Magique” and “Hypnotique” are offering theatergoers a taste of nightlife.A funny thing happened at Dead Letter No. 9, a new performance space in Brooklyn. It was just after 10 p.m. on a Saturday in late October. The evening’s show had finished, but the audience wouldn’t leave — crowding instead into the adjoining bar for cocktails, mocktails and flatbreads.Though New York City has its cabaret spaces and piano bars, theater and nightlife mostly occupy separate addresses. Blame temperament or real estate or the lingering effects of cabaret laws (finally repealed in 2017), which required a license to allow patrons to dance, but in general those who long for a drink and a show at the same time have had to settle for overpriced chardonnay in sippy cups. Ah, the glamour.New shows and new venues are blurring those lines. Though I am a lady with a hilariously low tolerance for alcohol who likes to be in bed just as the cable TV shows are getting good, I attended three of these performances over the last few weeks, trading a good night’s sleep for this superabundant approach (drinks, snacks, dance, card tricks, elaborate lingerie) to evening entertainment.Audience members sit facing the stage at “Cocktail Magique.”Justin J Wee for The New York TimesStrong cocktails complement the dance routines at the show.Justin J Wee for The New York TimesWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.We are confirming your access to this article, this will take just a moment. However, if you are using Reader mode please log in, subscribe, or exit Reader mode since we are unable to verify access in that state.Confirming article access.If you are a subscriber, please  More

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      A Spike Lee Joint via Movie Posters and Sports Jerseys

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      Lee, the director of “Do the Right Thing” and “Malcolm X,” donated more than 400 items for a Brooklyn Museum exhibition.The first image to catch your eye in the Brooklyn Museum’s new exhibition about the director Spike Lee could be a wall projection of “Malcolm X,” the 1992 movie staring Denzel Washington. Nearby hang artworks of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Trayvon Martin, whose killing inspired the Black Lives Matter Movement.Elsewhere, a sign from the segregation era reads “Colored Waiting Room.”The Black History and Culture section is a jarring opening to an exhibition that guides visitors through themes, concepts and objects that inspired Lee, 66, as he became a defining figure in the Black community. He donated more than 400 items for the show, “Spike Lee: Creative Sources,” which opens on Saturday and runs through Feb. 4, 2024.Lee’s “Malcolm X,” from 1992, starred Denzel Washington. Amir Hamja/The New York Times“You don’t have to really be an art aficionado to appreciate so much of this exhibition, because Spike is not only one of those but he’s a bibliophile, he’s a sports fan, he’s a lover of history,” Kimberli Gant, the exhibition’s curator, said.Lee has been nominated for five Academy Awards, winning the best adapted screenplay Oscar for “BlacKkKlansman” (2018). In addition to his popular films — he labels them “joints” — such as “Do the Right Thing” and “Inside Man,” Lee has become a staple in the courtside seats at Madison Square Garden for New York Knicks games.At the Brooklyn Museum, walls splashed in eye-popping bold colors contrast with the wood accents and paneling that turn gallery spaces into what resembles a movie set. Visitors can walk through seven sections divided into categories such as music and sports that Gant said she hoped would appeal to a broad group of people.“I don’t want this show to be so heavy that you’re leaving depressed,” Gant said. “There’s a lot of heavy material, but there’s joy here, too.”New YorkA Brooklyn section of the exhibition includes the Dodgers jersey that Lee wore as the character Mookie in “Do the Right Thing.”Amir Hamja/The New York TimesAn 8-year-old Lee on the cover of New York magazine.Amir Hamja/The New York TimesLee, who was born in Atlanta but raised in Brooklyn, has set many of his movies in New York’s boroughs. One section of the exhibition features news articles about Lee in The Daily News and The New York Times, as well as a photograph of him as a child on the cover of New York magazine.The room emphasizes “Do the Right Thing,” the 1989 film that examines racial tension between Black people and Italian Americans in the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood. Memorabilia from the movie, which was nominated for two Academy Awards and has been preserved by the National Film Registry, includes the Brooklyn Dodgers jersey that Lee wore as the character Mookie.MoviesThe exhibition’s walls are splashed in eye-popping bold colors.Amir Hamja/The New York TimesLee has an Oscar for best adapted screenplay, for “BlacKkKlansman,” as well as a lifetime achievement award.Amir Hamja/The New York TimesLarge film posters greet visitors in the section dedicated to movies and cinema, where Lee’s Oscar trophy for “BlacKkKlansman,” as well as the honorary one he received in 2015 for lifetime achievement, can be found in a glass case mounted on the wall.Also on display are gifts from other celebrities, including signed posters by the “Jurassic Park” director Steven Spielberg and the “Boyz N the Hood” director John Singleton. An adjacent room focused on photography has a letter written by former President Barack Obama.SportsOne room is devoted to New York Knicks memorabilia, including a net from the 1970 N.B.A. finals, when the team won its first title.Amir Hamja/The New York TimesMichael Jordan autographed a pair of sneakers he wore during the “flu game” in the 1997 N.B.A. finals. Amir Hamja/The New York TimesThe largest section in “Spike Lee: Creative Sources” is reserved for sports, with a small room solely for Knicks memorabilia. Those souvenirs include a jersey signed by Carmelo Anthony and a net from the 1970 N.B.A. finals, when the Knicks won their first title by defeating the Los Angeles Lakers in seven games.A larger room holds autographed items from LeBron James, Serena Williams, Jim Brown and Michael Jordan, as well as news articles signed by Stephen Curry after he broke the N.B.A. record for most career 3-pointers, a 2021 game that Lee attended at the Garden.Aligning with the social justice theme of the exhibition’s entrance, large portions are dedicated to Jackie Robinson, the first Black player in Major League Baseball, and the boxer and activist Muhammad Ali. Near the exit is a signed jersey of Colin Kaepernick, the quarterback who in 2016 ignited a fierce debate on athletes’ rights to protest by kneeling during the national anthem. More