Go See Spooky Nighttime Shows at Green-Wood Cemetery’s “Dark Wonderland” This Month
via Green-Wood.com
Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland turns 150 this year. To celebrate, on weekend nights this month, Brooklyn’s Green-Wood Cemetery will transform into a “Dark Wonderland,” turning its 438 acres of rolling hills, gravestones, and mausoleums into a theatrical backdrop for music, dance, and art performances, featuring characters as “mad” as those in Carroll’s fantasy classic.
With 560,000 people interred since opening in 1838–including some New York legends, like Jean-Michel Basquiat, William “Boss” Tweed, and Wizard of Oz actor Frank Morgan Wupperman–Green-Wood is already one of the most enchanting and haunted spots in Brooklyn (remember its clown invader last summer?). These variety shows will play that up, sure to delight the borough’s many former middle school goth chicks who wish they could still hold seances in their local graveyard: several performances are ghost-themed. This week, Vernon Reid–the Grammy Award-winning guitarist, founder of 80s funk-metal band Living Colour, and Staten Island resident–will play a solo guitar requiem for Eric Garner, who was strangled to death by a police officer who put him in an illegal chokehold last summer.
Green-Wood Cemetery by Grant Willing for BKMag
Later this month, performance artist Sacha Yanow, in character as “the Little Vamp,” will muse on “ghosts of things unseen, unheard or untended in family mythology and queer and feminist history,” according to Green-Wood’s site. The King and Queen of Coney Island’s 2015 Mermaid Parade, actor Mat Fraser and performance artist/dancer/burlesque star Julie Atlas Muz, will perform some “theatrical sorcery” among the tombs. Elfin choreographer Jill Sigman and DJ Joro Boro will offer a “movement ritual for the Dark City.” Also expect excerpts from Brer Rabbit The Opera: A Funky Meditation On Gentrification.
“Dark Wonderland” will be presented in conjunction with nonprofit performing arts organization MAPP International Productions. Check out the full lineup here.
Green-Wood Cemetery is located at 500 25th Street, at 5th Avenue, in South Slope, Brooklyn. Dark Wonderland performances start at 7:30 on Thursdays, Fridays, and Saturdays. Get tickets for $25 here.
