What was the best show former New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg saw this year? “Cats!” he told me during a very swank cocktail hour before PAC NYC’s inaugural Icons of Culture Festival gala on Tuesday night. “But not the regular Cats. The Cats that showed here. The Gay Cats!”
I knew exactly what he meant. Cats: The Jellicle Ball, which took the Broadway mainstay and updated it with doses of ball culture, was a runaway smash, with three extended runs from June through September. It was also a much-needed feather in the cap for this enormous new arts facility at the World Trade Center site, just a few steps from the Oculus transportation hub and the 9/11 Memorial & Museum. (When I pressed Bloomberg for his opinion of Skimbleshanks the Railway Cat, he said, “I have no idea what you are talking about.”)
During an election cycle, the acronym PAC can have heavy implications. But for theater lovers and concertgoers in New York City, PAC NYC now means the Perelman Performing Arts Center. Featuring three expandable and contractible theaters, a restaurant, a terrace, toilet stalls with green and red lights so you never have to touch the handle to discover a locked door, and a slick-looking lobby with regular free events, its first year boasted talks led by David Letterman, a new opera from Huang Ro and David Henry Hwang, and a one-man show from Laurence Fishburne as well as The Jellicle Ball.
Tuesday night, PAC NYC—which is chaired by Bloomberg, and whose name derives from patron Ronald Perelman—took a well-deserved victory lap for a debut year done right as it kicked off its first Icons of Culture Festival, a five-day celebration featuring talent like opera diva Renée Fleming, Questlove, Kathleen Turner, Instagram’s The Dogist, Alanis Morissette, tightrope walker Philippe Petit, Michael Imperioli, and others, including (what’s this?!) VF’s own Little Gold Men podcast, recording a live chat with John David “The Protagonist” Washington on Friday.
The gala also saw PAC NYC bestow its first annual Icon of Culture Award to Tom Freston, a cofounder of MTV, later co-president and co-COO of Viacom, then Bono’s recruit to become chair of his anti-poverty and AIDS charities One and (Red).
Many came out to sing his praises, in some cases literally. Christy Turlington explained that MTV was the reason the ’80s looked different from the ’90s, and said that in the early days of the network, you could tell a city that had MTV from one that didn’t based on how its people dressed. Fab 5 Freddy, host of Yo! MTV Raps, saluted Freston for bringing “hip-hop to the heartland” and also around the world. St. Vincent reminisced about how she was glued to MTV as a kid, especially 120 Minutes (hoping for another peek at Fiona Apple), before launching into a cover of George Michael’s “Faith”—though she added that the late pop star had “a much better ass than I do.”
Oprah Winfrey expressed her appreciation of Freston via video, as did Bono and The Edge, who covered David Bowie’s “Space Oddity”—the lyrics “ground control to Major Tom” lending themselves nicely to some tailor-made lines about Freston. Bono also gave shout-outs to “Rabbi Ronald Perelman” and “Lord Mayor Mike Bloomberg.”
Also on the program were The Jellicle Ball’s André De Shields, an Emmy, Grammy, and Tony Award winner who wore the most fabulous zebra-print suit I’d ever seen, and the show’s Chasity Moore, who sang “Memory.” Tony winner Alex Newell brought the house down with a fully show-stopping version of “I Wanna Dance With Somebody.” (Is it against the rules to say that Newell might have even sounded better than Whitney Houston?)
Will Arnett had a little Q&A with Freston about his unusual career path that started with him as a wandering early-’70s spirit who, thanks to a lucky spin of a roulette wheel in Yugoslavia (not joking), had a successful stint in the schmatte trade in Afghanistan before the Soviet invasion booted him out of the country. His love of music, along with his business smarts, can-do attitude, and connections, led to him getting hired to run MTV, despite having zero experience in television.
Arnett also told the story of when Freston locked horns with Viacom boss Sumner Redstone when Redstone wanted to buy MySpace. Freston knew it wasn’t a smart play, and later Rupert Murdoch bought the same company for $580 million—only to later sell it for $35 million. Arnett joked about it to an audience of corporate and showbiz insiders including Larry Silverstein, Mellody Hobson, Laura Lendrum, Jeffrey Katzenberg, Randall Poster, and Peter Shapiro.
Time and again, guests mentioned how Freston was inspired by his love of music. Arnett asked about the best show he ever saw, and Freston mentioned a private performance Baaba Maal gave in a studio in Senegal when he, Trey Anastasio from Phish, and Dave Matthews went there to shoot a film about Orchestra Baobab: “They played for hours, stopped to roast a goat, then kept playing.” This cued the legendary Afrobeat performer to emerge from the wings with four backing musicians to close out the night with a number of energetic songs.
After the event, another legend, Jellybean Benitez, spun records in the lobby as people ate pesto gnocchi, drank wine, and got in their Ubers to go home.
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