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.

An almost sixteen million dollar renovation in late 2008 restored the Beacon Theater, an Upper West Side vintage movie palace, to its former glory. Built in 1928 to feature both films and vaudeville acts managed by Samuel L. Rothafel (the impresario behind Radio City Music Hall) the Beacon Theater drips with neoclassical, rococo and Orientalist design elements. The freshly remodeled house now seats nearly 3,000 patrons across three different levels, each with great views of the action before them. What’s more, the acoustics at the Beacon Theater are excellent, making the sonic space a draw for traveling musicians. Some of the stage’s most famous performers have included Paul Simon, the Grateful Dead, the Pet Shop Boys and the Rolling Stones, though new acts arrive weekly, looking to fill the room with adoring fans.

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.

Selected by Nightclub & Bar magazine as the Nightclub of the Year in 2011 and designated a city landmark in 2008, Webster Hall's four floors hold more than 125 years of history, from the Grand Ballroom to the Balcony Lounge. The building’s iconic framework has hosted such major acts as Prince and Mick Jagger, and served as a speakeasy, a lecture hall, and a mentor to troubled teenage buildings since its construction in 1886.