![]() It will all happen in The McCourt, with its movable shell, which is located just where the High Line ends. At the far end, Poots is in conference with the “way finders.” The 17,000-square-foot adjoining hall (it’s called “The McCourt”) is usually exposed to the skies when its outer layer is nested into the fixed building, but at the moment, it’s covered by The Shed’s most distinguishing feature: a telescoping shell made of steel and a clear, lightweight polymer that moves out (and back) on gigantic rail tracks, turning it from an outside plaza to a large-scale performance space for 1,250 seated or 2,700 standing. We go in a side door, put on hard hats, and walk up to the second level-a vast, 12,500-square-foot, column-free gallery-moving gingerly to avoid electrical cables and other obstacles. She’s a vivid, effervescent beauty in a colorful sleeveless Missoni shift and sneakers without laces. “Alex is inside with the graphics team, talking about signage and ‘way finding,’ ” Spellman says, laughing. It’s Kathryn Spellman, a sociologist and visting professor for Islamic Studies at Columbia University and the wife of Alex Poots, The Shed’s founding artistic director and CEO. But then, hooray, halfway down the block I see a blonde woman waving both arms, and I breathe a sigh of relief. There are no signs, though-this is Hudson Yards, where one of the biggest urban-renewal projects in New York City is in full swing, and the landmark I’d been given, a pizza parlor, refuses to reveal itself. Scheduled to open this spring but still under construction, The Shed is New York’s keenly anticipated new year-round, all-purpose cultural emporium for music, dance, theater, and visual arts. And in live theater, alas, there is no fast forward.On a sweltering afternoon in mid-July, I’m on West Thirtieth Street in Manhattan, looking for the entrance to The Shed. In the end, “Dragon Spring Phoenix Rise” plays like the director’s cut of a badly dubbed Hong Kong kung fu movie, where the story is unintelligible and there are long lulls between the scenes with genuine action and visual appeal. You’ll also be disappointed by the choreography, which comes in two flavors: martial arts (conceived by Zhang Jun), which is occasionally engaging even though none of the punches or kicks ever actually land and there are no aerial effects to send any of the fighters truly flying and movement (by Akram Khan), which ranges from lackluster to virtually nonexistent in multiple disco-set scenes where the ensemble seems to be enacting the truly random dance moves of a crowd of strangers. And if you were expecting the performers to be swinging from a chandelier in a Pink-like nod to Sia’s biggest chart-topper, you’ll be sadly disappointed. ![]() None of the tunes actually advance the plot or deepen our understanding of the stick-figure characters. There’s also a score by Sia - or at least a mish-mash of the pop star’s anthemlike ballads, many of which are piped in over loudspeakers rather than sung by the cast, which is probably just as well since their vocal talent, sadly, seldom matches their athleticism in the kung fu/dance routines. The mythology here is about as thin as the fabric panels that keep dropping from the ceiling to hide wired-up performers.Īlso Read: 'We're Only Alive for a Short Amount of Time' Theater Review: Memoir as Therapy There’s talk of a prophesy involving two twins, whom we first see as dolls with glowing plastic globe heads (one pink and one blue) and later as 18-year-old separated-at-birth twins (Jasmine Chiu and Ji Tuo) destined to either battle each other to the death or unite to restore balance to the universe. The problem starts with the wisp of a story (by “Kung Fu Panda” writers Jonathan Aibel and Glenn Berger), about two battling kung fu factions in that renowned center of the martial arts, Flushing, Queens. Rylander) and “The Matrix”-meets-Studio 54 costumes (by Montana Levi Blanco) and aerial effects that are cool enough but seem like a regional-theater version of Cirque du Soleil.ĭirector Chen Shi-Zheng has conceived this nearly two-hour production as a spectacle, but the show moves turgidly between set-pieces without ever gathering any visual or narrative momentum. There are seizure-inducing lighting effects (by Tobias G. There’s a $650,000 stage (designed by Mikiko Suzuki MacAdams) whose center recedes to become a shallow pool of water for no good reason whatsoever. A lot of expense and effort have gone into “Dragon Spring Phoenix Rise,” the plus-size kung fu musical that opened Thursday at the very plus-size 120-foot-tall McCourt venue at The Shed in Manhattan’s Hudson Yards.
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