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World premiere of Dave Chappelle’s vaccine: This time this venue reopened Radio City’s Saturday night Music Hall for the first time since the Covid hit.
“I am so sorry if I lost someone, or I lost something during this pandemic,” Chappelle said as he walked onto the stage when the movie ended.
“We did what we could,” he said.
One of the things he could have been a series of comedy shows in a neighbor’s cornfield that drew his friends and colleagues — from Jon Stewart, Chris Rock, Kevin Hart and Trevor Noah — and fans to the town he calls his home, Yellow Springs, Ohio.
The Closing Night Tribeca Film Festival was directed by Julia Reichert and Stephen Bognar, Neighbors of Chappelle, who won an Oscar for The American Factory. “I literally knocked on their door,” Chappelle said.
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“He’s a neighbor. We see him at the grocery store. I’m going to try something. A week of outdoor comedy shows. I have a friend who has room, and you have to document it,” Reichert told the audience.
“documentary film [and] comedy. You might think, very different. But it’s all about telling stories and trying to find the truth.” The film weaves in the challenges the city has faced during the pandemic and the sentiments of the Black Lives Matter movement that exploded after the murder of George Floyd.
Radio City (which seats more than 6,000 people) is a huge theater that isn’t easy to fill, Tribeca CEO Jane Rosenthal said in her introduction — “unless you’re Dave Chappelle.”
“I love NYC. I made my name in NYC. I met my wife in NYC. I had two of my three kids in NYC,” Chappelle said. “I am proud to be the opening night of Radio City.”
His remarks were followed by a concert featuring Q-Tip, De La Soul, Fat Joe, Redman and others that surprised the jubilant audience. He got their full attention as all the phones were put into Yondr bags, so they were disabled during the event.
Attendees included Tribeca judges Sharon Stone, Iabo Boyd, Judith Goodrich, Sabrina Schmidt Gordon, Delroy Lindo, Omar Metwally and Harry Nef, as well as Jesse Williams, Bob Saget, Del Moss, Zoe Kravitz and Anthony Anderson.
Tribeca, which concludes tomorrow, is the first in-person festival in North America since Covid closed live events in the spring of 2020. It has hosted 250 in-person events, many of them outdoors, with nearly 100,000 attendees across New York City’s five boroughs. New York and California officially lifted most pandemic restrictions five days ago.
The Tribeca Festival was launched after the September 11 attacks in 2001 to help revive the city, specifically Lower Manhattan. “We never imagined our 20th festival would face challenges like never before,” Rosenthal said.
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