Get your political fix at the theater this weekend. Two productions being staged over the weekend explore bygone eras. There’s also a new brewery in town and it’s the last weekend to see the spectacular work of artist Christian Marclay.
Christian Marclay: Video Quartet @ GRAM
(All Weekend)
It’s the last weekend you can view the Christian Marclay: Video Quartet exhibit at the Grand Rapids Art Museum. On display since the end of October, “Video Quartet” is made up of more than 700 individual fragments of film and sound from popular movies in which characters play instruments, sing or make noise in one way or another.
Marclay reorganized the clips on a home computer into a new unified composition in which the performers seem to improvise together free of their original context. The clips included in “Video Quartet” are primarily taken from Hollywood feature films dating from the 1920s to the early twenty-first century.
The work opens with scenes of an orchestra tuning up, followed by clips in which characters play instruments or sing, interspersed with scenes featuring shouts, screams, and close-ups of various noise-making objects.
The Whitney Museum of American Art in New York organized the exhibit.
GRCC Players Present “This is Our Youth”
(Thursday – Saturday)
The GRCC Players will re-create the Reagan era this weekend with a production of “This Is Our Youth” by Kenneth Lonergan. The play follows 48 hours in the lives of three young people living on Manhattan’s Upper West Side at the dawn of the Reagan era.
“This is Our Youth” will be presented at 8 p.m. Jan. 11 – 13 in the lab space (room 201) of Spectrum Theater, 160 Fountain St. NE. GRCC students David Dekens, Anthony Snead and Hope Swanson make up the cast, and Joni Hodsdon serves as production stage manager.
In addition to the performances on Jan. 11 – 13, the final dress rehearsal will be open to the public at 8 p.m. Jan. 10. Tickets for all the shows are $5 for GRCC students, $8 for other area students and GRCC faculty and staff, and $12 for the public. The play contains graphic language and strong content. Call (616) 234-3946 for tickets and more information.
Tchaikovsky and more Tchaikovsky with Grand Rapids Symphony
(Friday & Saturday)
Music director Marcelo Lehninger leads the Grand Rapids Symphony’s All-Tchaikovsky program in the “Polonaise” from his opera “Eugene Onegin” and Symphony No. 5
Venezuelan pianist Gabriela Montero is the soloist in Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto No. 1, one of the most famous piano concertos of all time. Pianist Van Cliburn’s 1958 recording of the Tchaikovsky plus Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto No. 3 became the very first classical music album to sell one million copies.
Performances will be held at 8 p.m. Friday and Saturday, Jan. 12 & 13 at DeVos Performance Hall.
Brass Ring Brewing Celebrates with Grand Opening
(Thursday)
https://www.instagram.com/p/BdoPln0lGT0/?taken-at=1063613067080910There is a new brewery in Beer City. Brass Ring Brewing, 2404 Eastern Ave. SE, celebrates its grand opening today at 4 p.m. so head on over and check it out.
Located in the Alger Heights neighborhood, Brass Ring Brewing offers small-batch pub-style ales, porters and stouts. It also has a sharing menu featuring charcuterie boards, sandwiches and comfort soups with crusty bread.
Grand Rapids Civic Theater Presents “All the Way”
(All Weekend)
November, 1963. An assassin’s bullet catapults Lyndon Baines Johnson into the presidency. A Shakespearean figure of towering ambition and appetite, this charismatic, conflicted Texan hurls himself into the passage of the Civil Rights Act—a tinderbox issue emblematic of a divided America—even as he campaigns for re-election in his own right, and the recognition he so desperately wants.
Grand Rapids Civic Theatre’s production of “All the Way,” by playwright Robert Schenkkan, is sure to transport audiences back in time to that fateful era. The show opens on Jan. 12 and runs through Jan. 28. Tickets are $16-28.
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