Concerts in Brooklyn

Each day during the Story Improv workshop, students ages 5–8 will enact the adventures of a children's storybook. The On the Spot: Improvisation session, best for students 8–14, will have students acting without scripts in order to build their quick wit and confidence. During the intensive two-week Piece Makers class, budding actors, playwrights, and directors ages 8–14 will create and perform their own original piece of theater. After learning many of the exercises and games used by the Irondale Theater Company, the class will become its own acting troupe and debut their show. This workshop includes pizza dinner for the players followed by post-performance refreshments for all.

As a native of the Dominican Republic, Claudette Munné loves merengue beats—but as classical pianists, she and her husband Massimiliano Facchini also cherish traditional piano pieces by European composers. To celebrate these dual passions, the pair arranged a series of fresh, merengue takes on old classics, a project that resulted in a sold-out two-piano show at Carnegie Hall and an interview with NBC. Revamping traditional piano music isn't the couple's only collaboration, however. They also worked together to found Belle Arti Center for the Arts, a music school that caters mainly to children. Their toddler classes focus on training young ears and building a sense of rhythm that moves beyond freestyle clapping. During private lessons, they train students on instruments from the guitar and violin to woodwinds. Their classes follow a semester schedule, with each semester session culminating in a recital for family and friends.

Raindance began as a thought experiment: can you make a movie with no money or experience, and without going to film school? 22 years, later Raindance now has 12 film networking and training hubs worldwide, and runs the largest indie film festival in Europe, the Raindance Film Festival. They provide hands on training, networking events, financing opportunities, and an innovative Membership program to help new and emerging filmmakers get their projects made. Raindance's practical filmmaking and writing workshops break the daunting cinema-creation process into digestible workshops as industry professionals help to elevate the aptitude of independent filmmakers. Students can select courses that teach film industry basics including how to build a budget, choose a camera, and promote themselves. As a non-profit training and networking organization that works to promote and support filmmaking throughout the world, many classes conclude with networking sessions at local bars where participants can trade business cards to further their cinematic pursuits.

At the intersection of St. Marks Place and Second Avenue in the East Village, the 299-seat Orpheum Theatre has been staging performances and projecting films behind its red-brick, neo-classical façade for more than a century. What the interior lacks in old world grandness, it more than makes up in intimacy, thanks to its two narrow levels, which makes every seat in the house a good one. Achieving greater notoriety in the 1980s for premiering the musical Little Shop of Horrors, the theater went on to become the home of the percussive Stomp, which has lived here since 1994. Since then, the walls have gradually filled with a mélange of street-life ephemera related to the show; subway signs, motorcycle parts, chains and metal scaffolding all give the room a theatrically urban ambiance.

Before the Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts was even built, the idea for its Chamber Music Society was born. American composer and Lincoln Center President William Schuman helped specially design a recital hall in which the chamber group could play more than three centuries worth of musical compositions. But the Chamber Music Society didn't stay contained within its venue. Throughout the following half century, its musicians collaborated with dance companies, jazz projects, and festivals, helping to spread awareness and appreciation of their craft throughout the city.

One of Russia's most popular singers, Nikolai Baskov, uses his majestically reverberating tenor to breathe life into arrangements of classic operatic works as well as musical-theater compositions and beloved pop tunes. Baskov is currently touring in support of his recent album Romantic Journey, flooding ear canals with songs from such famed operas as Tosca and La Boheme, in addition to melodies from Phantom of the Opera that—like a pied keytarist—have a more modern following. Originally opened in 1923, the art-deco Beacon Theatre umbrellas the euphonies under stately chandeliers casting light upon ornately filigreed walls. The auditorium's crystalline acoustics ensure a sonic clarity impossible to reproduce during concerts in arenas or abandoned jetways.