It’s a perfect match, really. An artist who’s made a career out of refashioning musical kitsch to his own inscrutable ends plays a venue refashioned out of a massive, gold-encrusted, Art-Deco movie-palace and former televangelism center in Washington Heights. It’s Beck at the United Palace Theatre!
The pop mystic seems to be out of a record deal as his latest album, Modern Guilt, concludes his contract with DGC Records. Of course, Beck is totally chill about it. "I haven’t bothered to plan anything," he told the Times Dave Itzkoff earlier this month. "I don’t know where the record business is going to be in six months. Or three months." Well, at least we knew where he’ll be in three months—playing the United Palace with MGMT on Oct. 9. [Music Hall of Williamsburg and Bowery Ballroom dates]
Wolf Parade’s show tonight at Terminal 5 may be sold out, but tickets to their second performance on Friday are still up for grabs. Could bandleaders Spencer Krug and Dan Boeckner be the Lennon and McCartney of indie rock? Is that a stupid question? Their partnership on last month’s At Mount Zoomer—sometimes combative, always inventive—suggest it might not be. [On sale: Friday, August 1 at 10 a.m.]
THEATER
Clowns are funny. Clowns’ breasts are funnier. Postpartum clowns squirting breast milk are funnier still, right? This is the contention of Clowns Ex Machina, an all-female troupe founded by Kendall Cornell in 2005. The breast-milk business occurs during a skit in which a group of clowns throws an invisible baby-sized coffin over an imaginary cliff. As the women mourn they shoot breast milk over the "cliff." As the Times‘ April Dembosky describes it, Machina "depends on an all-female environment to transform the taboo into the funny, the sexual into the silly." Catch these women in all their red-nosed glory in Clown Axioms, a new production replete with "tales of gothic romance and gory fairy tales" at Manhattan Children’s Theatre in Tribeca. The first of just three performances begins tonight. [On sale now]
In troubling financial times such as these, we tend to ignore our cultural appetites. Well, hunger no more—The New York Classical Theatre is giving the stuff away for free. Each of their performances are open to the public. Tonight begins a month-long run of George Bernard Shaw’s Misalliance in Central Park (West 103rd and Central Park West). [More information here]
