GO SEE IT!: STILL MAD
‘It’s a Mad Mad Mad Mad World’’ (1963) was director Stanley Kramer’s attempt to make “a comedy to end all comedies.’’ For this epically scaled cross-country chase after $350,000 in buried treasure, Kramer recruited a massive cast including Spencer Tracy and such legendary laugh-getters as Milton Berle, Sid Caesar, Jonathan Winters, Mickey Rooney and Buddy Hackett; there are also cameos by the likes of Jack Benny, Jerry Lewis, Buster Keaton and the Three Stooges.
A new 70mm print of the 154-minute version (the original road show edition ran over three hours) is showing tonight at 6 p.m. at the Film Society of Lincoln Center’s Walter Reade Theater, 65th Street between Broadway and Amsterdam Avenue; filmlinc.com.
— Lou Lumenick
Everett Collection / Everett Col
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LAST CHANCE!: FINAL DAYS Of ‘CHRISTMAS’
“A Christmas Story, the Musical” is a rare double whammy: a genuinely fun holiday treat and a successful stage adaptation. The 1983 movie’s classic scenes are all there — the flag pole, “Fra-gee-lay!” — but there’s a new scene that’s been stopping the show. In “You’ll Shoot Your Eye Out,” Caroline O’Connor, as teacher Miss Shield, leads a gaggle of dancing kids, including 9-year-old hoofer Luke Spring. “He could tap the Morse Code, couldn’t he?” O’Connor marvels.
She admits she had to throw caution to the wind when taking the part: “I’ve been warned a million times: Don’t work with children and animals.” Of course the musical has both, but O’Connor doesn’t mind.
“I just wish it could be Christmas 365 days a year so this fabulous show could keep running,” she says. Alas, the run ends Sunday. Lunt-Fontanne Theatre, 205 W. 46th St.; 800-745-3000.
— Elisabeth Vincentelli
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HEAR THIS!: A ‘HEAT WAVE’ IN DECEMBER
If you can’t wait till 2013 to be “Dancing in the Street,” get a head start with Martha Reeves and the Vandellas at B.B. King Blues Club Sunday night. The classic Motown vocal group and Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductees will be performing that classic alongside such hits as “Heat Wave,” “Jimmy Mack” and “Nowhere to Run.”
Like the Rolling Stones and the Beach Boys, the group is celebrating its 50th anniversary. “There’s not many of us left from the ’60s, and we’ll do the best we can to make them remember who we are,” says Reeves, speaking on the phone after a concert in England.
Accompanying the 71-year-old singer are her sisters Lois, who joined the group in 1968, and Delphine, who came aboard in the mid-’80s.
Reeves hopes to “keep the Christmas spirit going” with renditions of such Yuletide numbers as “Silent Night” and “O Holy Night.” But she promises to deliver the classics as well, noting that as time goes by, people’s attachment to their old material only grows.
“The older the music, the more it’s cherished by the fans,” she says. $30, 8 p.m., 237 W. 42nd St.; 212-997-4144.
— Frank Scheck
ASSOCIATED PRESS
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HAVE A LOOK!: BACK TO THE FUTURE
The future is the past! Or so it sometimes seems at the exhibit “Designing Tomorrow: America’s World’s Fairs of the 1930s” at the Museum of the City of New York, where visitors might be surprised at how many of yesteryear’s visions of tomorrow actually came true. The exhibit includes then-fantastic visions of nylon stockings, electric toasters and a car-centric society.
“It focuses on the design innovations of the 1930s that promised people a more hopeful world in the midst of the Great Depression,” says curator Jessica Lautin, noting “how prescient these fairs really were.”
Of course, it also includes some things that didn’t work out, such as Electro, the talking, smoking robot made by Westinghouse. “People still see it and are agog [just like the] people who saw it in 1939,” Lautin says. Through March 31, 1220 Fifth Ave. at 103rd Street. Open daily, 10 a.m. to 6 p.m.; mcny.org.
— Tim Donnelly
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LISTEN UP!: METING OUT METER, EN MASSE
On New Year’s Day, two things are inevitable: People will awaken with hangovers, and the St. Mark’s Poetry Project will hold its annual marathon poetry reading, as it has for the past 38 years. This year’s reading boasts 150 performers (40 of whom are new to the marathon), among them Secret Orchestra, Church of Betty and Tammy Faye Starlite. They’ll start at 2 p.m. and run past midnight, with beer from Brooklyn Brewery and food from Two Boots, S’MAC and others available to sustain you for the long haul.
It will give us Honey Boo Boo brainwashed philistines an opportunity to get cultured — and all in the name of charity: Proceeds fund the Poetry Project’s educational programs. $20, 2 p.m., St. Mark’s Church, 131 E. 10th St.; 212-674-0910, poetryproject.org.
— Doree Lewak
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