The Passion of Our Lord Jesus Christ (Gabriel Jackson)

Yale Institute of Sacred Music's Palm Sunday performance of Jackson's 2014 Passion was originally commissioned by Merton College at Oxford to celebrate its 750 anniversary. Its libretto weaves passages from all four Gospels as well as Latin hymn texts, Psalm 175, and lines from authors/poets associated with Merton College over the years.  As composed by Jackson, the soloists and the choir have equivalent roles, with the collective voices playing more than a supportive role for the individual, solo voices.

I would love to hear it again.

Highly recommended.

An Octoroon (Branden Jacobs-Jenkins)

An important exploration of race in the United States, this appropriation of Dion Boucicault's The Octoroon scandalous 19th-century play never lets the audience ease into high-minded superiority over our slave-owning ancestors (even if we don't have those ancestors).

Highly recommended.

Lives of the Saints (David Ives)

David Ives is one of our favorite playwrights, so it made perfect sense to head to Manhanttan for this series of short plays: "The Goodness of Your Heart," "Soap Opera," "Enigma Variations," "Life Signs," "It's All Good," and "Lives of the Saints." While these lighthearted and sweet comedies poke fun at human foibles, they also provoke our sympathies for characters much closer to us than might initially appear.

Highly recommended.

Forever (Dael Orlandersmith)

This solo work, written and performed by Dael Orlandersmith, provides an unrelenting encounter with the pains of abuse and the (surprisingly) redemptive power of rock n roll, especially the punk variety.  This power is surprising because Orlandersmith is an African-American women raised in Harlem where Jim Morrison and Patti Smith are white kids without the street cred of the neighborhood's soul brethren.  The narrative, however, revolves primarily around her relationship with her mother whose years of physically and verbally taunting her daughter culminate in her self-centered response to Dael's rape.

Recommend with caveats (because of graphic depictions of abuse and rape)

The Imitation Game (Morten Tyldum)

Our first film to see in 2015, The Imitation Game, was Morton Tyldum's highly fictionalized account of Alan Turing's contributions to deciphering Nazi code machine, Enigma.  Perhaps we were in the mood to view a somewhat sentimentalized account of misunderstood genius and were swept along with tripartite narrative, enough so that we didn't mind (too much) the obvious (even to us, the somewhat uninformed) historical inaccuracies (such as using correction fluid to change a typewritten document in 1951) or (even worse) Keira Knightley's presence in the film.  For useful accounts of the historical inaccuracies, see http://www.nybooks.com/blogs/nyrblog/2014/dec/19/poor-imitation-alan-turing/ and www.theguardian.com/film/2014/nov/20/the-imitation-game-invents-new-slander-to-insult-alan-turing-reel-history.

Recommend with caveats.

Now You See Me (Louis Leterrier)

A fun crime caper embedded in a 2-hour long magic show. Better than I expected. Recommend

Safety Last (silent, 1923)

Restored version of Harold Lloyd's delightful silent film with famous scene of him scaling building and hanging from clock arms.