Holiday stories pile up faster than I can cope with them. This one is no longer hot news, but I’m charmed by the performance it describes. From a recent New Yorker “Goings on about town”, in the Dance category, on Peter and the Wolf at the Guggenheim Museum, December 6 – 14:
This charming, child-friendly entertainment by Prokofiev, created, in 1936, for the Moscow Children’s Theatre, tells of the adventures of a young boy. Isaac Mizrahi is the avuncular narrator and the brain behind this pleasingly homespun staging, which moves the action to New York’s Central Park. The characters’ musical motifs have been developed by the young choreographer John Heginbotham into witty little dance numbers. The thirty-minute piece will be played live by the Ensemble Signal.
The flamoyant Mizrahi strikes me as an inspired choice for a New York audience. In fact, he’s been overseeing holiday performances of Peter and the Wolf for some years now; the choreography was added in 2013.
Basic facts from Wikipedia:
Isaac Mizrahi (born October 14, 1961) is an American fashion designer, TV presenter, and creative director of Xcel Brands. He is best known for his eponymous fashion lines.
Mizrahi was born in Brooklyn, New York, to an observant Jewish family that originated in Syria. His father gave him a sewing machine at the age of ten. At 15, he launched his own label, IS New York, with the help of a family friend. He attended Yeshivah of Flatbush, High School of Performing Arts, and the Parsons School of Design.
It will come as no surprise that a fashion designer is gay, and Mizrahi has apparently always been visibly, happily out. And now married: he married his partner of six years, Arnold Germer, in a civil ceremony in New York City Hall on November 30, 2011.
You can watch him do a TED talk on fashion and creativity here.
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