It’s safe to say that a majority of our readers are quite familiar with the musical history of Port Chester, New York’s Capitol Theatre. Built in 1926 and designed by the architect Thomas W. Lamb, who also designed the United Palace Theater in Upper Manhattan, the theater may be most famous for hosting the Grateful Dead an astonishing 18 times during an 11-month period, but also saw just about every major and influential music act grace its stage from Pink Floyd, Traffic, Joe Cocker and Janis Joplin (who played her next-to-last show there) in the early 1970’s to Phish, Blues Traveler, God Street Wine and Strangefolk in the 1990s. The 1,800-plus seat venue hasn’t hosted a rock show since 1997, but that is all about to change as it was announced that Pete Shapiro has struck a long term deal to present shows at the historic theater.
The Cap will undergo a four-month long, $2 million renovation that according to the New York Times “will include replacing carpets, repainting walls and upgrading bathrooms, as well as adding state-of-the-art light, sound and video systems,” with the Bowery Presents set to book a mix of rock, jazz, Latin and blues act, along with comedy shows. Maybe we’ll finally get that Trey show that was booked at the theater back in 2008, and then subsequently moved to the Roseland Ballroom.
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Finally, back in October we reported that the influential music site Pitchfork would be curating their first-ever multi-day festival in New York City, with the help of the fine folks at Bowery Presents, that they had dubbed FORMS. The fest, which was set to take place from February 1 to 4, and “celebrate the interconnected and growing worlds of independent music, art, and gaming” with somewhere between 50 to 75 acts performing at a variety of Bowery booked venues around the city. Well those that were expecting the announcement of more details, may have been in for a bit of disappointment when earlier this week Pitchfork posted the following message on the website about the status of the event…
Pitchfork, The Bowery Presents, and Killscreen are postponing FORMS, the NYC-based event series we collectively created as a way to celebrate the best of music, art, games, and the intersections in between. As the series took shape these past few months, we found it growing bigger and more complex in very exciting ways. We followed those threads, expanded the vision, and simply ran out of time. Pitchfork, Bowery Presents, and Killscreen have a history of throwing spectacular events and producing great content, and we have decided to give ourselves more time to ensure that FORMS is the best it can be. For now, we plan to take a brief pause and provide more information later.
We’ll keep our fingers crossed that this only a bump in the road for what sounded like an interesting venture, and we’ll keep you posted as more information on the status of FORMS as its revealed.
