On Wednesday, December 9th, 2015, guests were whisked away to the W Hotel Times Square’s newly renovated Living Room to celebrating the space and Alan Cumming-directed film, Ultimate Encore.
These days, it seems like everyone’s looking for a reason to throw a party. In part it is the reason for the season, but when Alan Cumming and the likes of Rose McGowan, Selita Ebanks, Cynthia Rowley, Bernadette Peters, and Phillip Bloch assemble, there’s reason to pay attention. For this, we slip away into the W Hotel Times Square’s newly (and luxuriou$$$ly) renovated Living Room, which is really a long bar, chic low seating and VIP cubbies occupied by plush sofas, and a DJ booth modeled after the NYE ball, which drops not far from the W’s central location. For this evening, the DJ booth was occupied by none other than Jake Shears of famed Scissor Sisters, spinning a tasteful but certainly slap-happy mix to soundtrack the celebration of the Alan Cumming-directed short film Ultimate Encore, which uses the space as the film’s backdrop.
The evening was clearly orchestrated by the hand of Alan, with New York performance artist Joey Arias taking Alan and the audience on a rendition of the Little Mermaid’s ‘Part of Your World’, as well as Alan’s small pup wondering about the party goers, enjoying specially crafted cocktails.
The room is spacious and stylish, inspired by old Times Square, even if a bit grittier than today’s clean capitalist canvas. The space is dark but accented by a fantastic neon work running the entire length of the bar.
Ultimate Encore, the film directed by Alan, is an ambitious and clever effort to stylistically connect the Living Room to its Times Square roots, which though is certainly dominated by tourists today, is still a major part of NYC history. The effort also raised money and awareness for cast member Bernadette Peter’s charity Broadway Barks.
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