Results tagged “delacortetheater”

TOMORROW!: (Due to expected rain, this event will take place tomorrow.) It's that time again...Shakespeare in the Park is back and kicking off its season tonight. Want to add some tragedy to your summer sunset this evening? Then head over to get tickets starting at 1pm today for Romeo and Juliet.

THEATER: The two most dreaded words in theater, "staged reading", get a shot at redemption with tonight's free reading of Stuff Happens. The show has cut and run from the Public Theater, so this is your last chance to catch David Hare's satire about the ramp-up to Operation Iraqi Freedom. In an interview with NPR, Hare described it as "a play about how a supposedly stupid man, George W. Bush, gets everything he wants..." Laugh the pain away. - John Del Signore

The NY Sun has a great article about a few of NYC's open performances spaces by critic Francis Morrone. Most people love outdoor venues unconditionally, but the article is thought-provoking in terms of how these spaces should work with their environments. Various bandshells are mentioned, such as Seuffert Bandshell in Queens and the Prospect Park Bandshell in Brooklyn, but one Central Park institution gets a serious dressing-down.

The problem with many of our city's outdoor performance venues is that they've been dumped into inappropriate settings — and have been designed with little or no sensitivity to those settings. A prime example is the Delacorte Theater in Central Park, which is home to "Shakespeare in the Park." Originally, this series was begun by Joseph Papp, not in Central Park, but in East River Park on the Lower East Side. Like Naumburg, the book publisher George T. Delacorte thought he was doing something good for the city he loved when he made a series of benefactions to Central Park: the Delacorte Clock, the Alice in Wonderland sculpture, and the Delacorte Theater. Fine though each of these is individually, none has anything to do with the park. The theater was built in 1962, and was intended to be temporary, but instead was renovated in 1976. It is unfortunately infelicitous in its setting. Who thought that a modern theater could play nice with Vaux's enchanting Belvedere Castle? No one thought about that.The park was viewed as a big empty place just crying to have things like bandshells and theaters dumped in it. That such things are popular cannot be denied. A city, after all, gets what it deserves.

Wi-Fi Salon is installing Wi-Fi into 10 city parks over the next few months. Central Park will have eight hot spots (including the zoo, Delacorte Theater, and Boathouse), as will Orchard Beach, Flushing Meadows, Van Cortlandt, Pelham Bay, Prospect, Riverside, Union Square, and Washington Square Parks. The Daily News says that Battery Park's hotspot, near Battery Gardens, is already running and that Wi-Fi Salon is paying the Parks Department for the right to install the network, hoping to encourage people to join its IP phone service. Whatever the reason, Gothamist can only say hurrah, because if there's one blogging goal we have, it's to live-blog monkeys throwing poo at us from the Central Park Zoo.

Help me settle an argument. My friend claims there are no statues of women in Central Park. I swear I've seen a couple. Am I wrong? She could list a bunch of statues of men like Alexander Hamilton and Hans Christian Andersen, but I was having trouble coming up with even one female statue.

Did you ever wonder where in Central Park the current weather conditions were being observed? Most National Weather Service measurements are made at airports or universities, but here in New York the observations are taken at a castle! Belvedere Castle, which is just south of the Great Lawn near the Delacorte Theater, has been an official observing station since 1920. Wind speed and direction are taken from the roof of the castle. Other measurements are taken at a fenced-in area just south of the castle. While there on Saturday Gothamist was excited to see an aspirated hygrothermometer, a precipitation identification sensor, a cloud height laser ceilometer, a visibility sensor, and a tipping bucket rain gauge. Measurements from those instruments are sent to the NWS forecast office at Brookhaven National Laboratory on Long Island, and transmitted back to the castle, where you can see the current conditions via an amber monochrome monitor, the likes of which Gothamist hasn’t used since Ed Koch was mayor.