Latest news with #TaylorMac
Time Out
31-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Time Out
This beloved NYC waterfront park just got a $1.7 billion makeover
Wagner Park is back—and it's not just better, it's climate-proof. After an 18-month closure and a $1.7 billion upgrade as part of the South Battery Park City Resiliency Project, the 3.5-acre Robert F. Wagner, Jr. Park reopened on Tuesday with a bang: a one-night-only performance by genre-bending artist Taylor Mac. But the real showstopper was the park itself, transformed into a resilient, ecological marvel that's equal parts public oasis and storm-surge shield. Located at the southern tip of Battery Park City, the reimagined Wagner Park now conceals a 63,000-gallon cistern beneath its lush lawns to recycle rainwater, a buried floodwall to fend off the next Superstorm Sandy and gardens teeming with native, salt-tolerant flora that will thrive even as tides rise. It's all part of New York's ambitious Lower Manhattan Coastal Resiliency initiative—proof that climate adaptation can be both functional and fabulous. Designed by Thomas Phifer and Partners and landscape architects at AECOM, the park's new Pavilion is fully electrified and pursuing zero-carbon certification. A rooftop with Statue of Liberty views opens soon, with classrooms and dining spaces to follow. Wagner's comeback is a masterclass in future-facing design. Integrated flood barriers, dark-sky-compliant lighting, solar-reflective paving and even an educational marine habitat at Pier A all showcase how infrastructure and aesthetics can coexist. It's also the first Battery Park City space to achieve WEDG verification, the waterfront design world's gold standard. And it's still the park locals love. The sweeping lawn is back, so are the skyline views and sculptures, including Louise Bourgeois's Eyes and the Tony Cragg Resonating Bodies. Add in a stacked lineup of free programming this season (think the Klezmatics, Bilal and Flor de Toloache), and you've got a public space that's ready for anything—rain or shine, flood or festival. 'This park has always been a sanctuary,' said Council Member Christopher Marte. 'Now it's also a critical line of defense against the climate crisis.'
Time Out
22-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Time Out
Taylor Mac has NY-inspired sea shanties for the (free!) re-opening of this Battery Park City park
The genre-defying theater artist Taylor Mac will celebrate the re-opening of the Robert F. Wagner Jr. Park in Battery Park City with an intimate evening of music on Tuesday, July 29. Taylor Mac: In Concert will feature songs from their hit shows, including the marathon 24-Decade History of Popular Music, as well as new sea shanties honoring downtown New York's nautical past. The performance will be free and open to the public, though admission is first-come, first-served. RSVPs are available and encouraged but don't guarantee entry, and walk-ins are welcome. Be sure to bring your comfiest blanket or chair and arrive early! Located near Manhattan's southern tip, the park was closed for a two-year pause in a coastal resiliency effort to protect lower Manhattan from storm surges and sea level rise. A series of programs this summer, including the 44th edition of the Battery Dance Festival, will also take place at the park. Mac—who Time Out's Adam Feldman earlier this year praised as 'a Fabergé radical: beautiful, ridiculous and full of hidden tricks'—is fresh from the success of 'Prosperous Fools,' a dazzling new satire of the art world which premiered at Theater for a New Audience last month. Feldman, in his adoring review of that show, went on: 'The writer-performer—whose pronoun of choice is the puckish judy—pilots audiences through fantastical journeys, guided by the compass of a magnetic individuality.' With modern sea shanties, expectedly fabulous outfits and headpieces, and a backing band comprising Matthew Dean Marsh and long-time collaborators Danton Boller, Viva DeConcini and Joel E. Mateo, the concert will surely continue in that legacy. A multitalented performer, writer and all-around creative, Mac is a MacArthur fellow, Pulitzer Prize finalist, Tony nominee and a recipient of the International Ibsen Award. is hosted by the LMCC (formerly known as the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council), which serves, connects, and makes space for artists and community in Lower Manhattan. website.
Time Out
26-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Time Out
Prosperous Fools
Taylor Mac is a Fabergé radical: beautiful, ridiculous and full of hidden tricks. In both cabaret-style performances and more formal plays, the writer-performer—whose pronoun of choice is the puckish judy —pilots audiences through fantastical journeys, guided by the compass of a magnetic individuality. This latest work, very loosely inspired by Molière's The Bourgeois Gentleman, sends up the plight of artists who must prostrate themselves before powerful sources of funding. Mac's character is the choreographer of a ballet about Prometheus and gets ;the play's most outrageously funny running joke, which involves the cuddly character actor and savage playwright Wallace Shawn. But Mac and director Darko Tresnjak generously parcel out the biggest comic scenes to other others: Jason O'Connell as a monstrously rich manchild with an unspeakably terrible name; Sierra Boggess as a glorious beacon of celebrity virtue whose name can only be sung in wonder; and Jennifer Regan as a pitifully abject artistic director. Bedecked in Anita Yavich's witty costumes, they're delightfully larger-than-life. The overall spirit is merrily pedagogical, and as always, Mac provides philophical food for thought; judy bites the hand that feeds judy, then spits the flesh in the audience's mouth like a playfully angry mother bird.
Toronto Star
23-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Toronto Star
Taylor Mac's ‘Prosperous Fools' skewers wealthy philanthropists in a biting satire
NEW YORK (AP) — Taylor Mac does not set out to bite the hand that feeds in a new play satirizing cultural philanthropy. The MacArthur 'genius grant' recipient claims to be 'just trying to get some lipstick on it.' Set at a not-for-profit dance company's gala, 'Prosperous Fools' invites questions about the moral value of philanthropy in a society denounced by the comedy as 'feudal.' A boorish patron goes mad trying vainly to wield his lacking creative capital and thus confirms the choreographer's fears of selling out to a sleazy oligarch who represents everything his art opposes. The show, written by Mac and directed by Darko Tresnjak, runs through June 29 at Brooklyn's Polonsky Shakespeare Center.
Toronto Star
23-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Toronto Star
A MacArthur ‘genius' skewers philanthropy in a farcical play tackling oligarchy and arts funding
NEW YORK (AP) — Taylor Mac does not set out to bite the hand that feeds in a new play satirizing cultural philanthropy. The MacArthur 'genius grant' recipient claims to be 'just trying to get some lipstick on it.' Set at a not-for-profit dance company's gala, 'Prosperous Fools' invites questions about the moral value of philanthropy in a society denounced by the comedy as 'feudal.' A boorish patron goes mad trying vainly to wield his lacking creative capital and thus confirms the choreographer's fears of selling out to a sleazy oligarch who represents everything his art opposes. The show, written by Mac and directed by Darko Tresnjak, runs through June 29 at Brooklyn's Polonsky Shakespeare Center.
