Date: Sunday, May 19th | Doors: 6:00pm | Screening: 7:00pm | Talk Back: 8:10pm | $5 Tickets

This 1933 Marx Brothers classic follows Rufus T. Firefly as he’s named the dictator of bankrupt Freedonia and declares war on neighboring Sylvania over the love of his wealthy backer Mrs. Teasdale, contending with two inept spies who can’t seem to keep straight which side they’re on. Starring Groucho Marx, Harpo Marx, Chico Marx, and Zeppo Marx. Directed by Leo McCarey and written by Bert Kalmar, Harry Ruby, and Arthur Sheekman. The movie is 1 hour and 9 minutes, Not Rated, and will be screened on DCP.

With this special screening of Duck Soup we are proud to be a member of the 2024 Marxfest! We continue to honor our past as a vaudeville house with live entertainment before or after the main feature on the big screen. Stick around after the movie for a talk between The New Yorker staff writer Adam Gopnik and Marxian connoisseur Noah Diamond.

Duck Soup continues the Movies at the Palace Season of Friendship. We chose that theme after asking ourselves what we need most to get through 2024. Our supporters and fans helped us select the movies in the series, including:

• Duck Soup (1933): May 19  

• Hidden Figures (2016): June 19 

• Finding Nemo (2003): Date TBD 

• Thelma & Louise (1991): Date TBD 

• The Breakfast Club (1985): Date TBD 

• Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977): Date TBD  

• Little Women (2019): Date TBD

Please note: The Season of Friendship is a different series than Movies at the Palace with Lin-Manuel Miranda, who is not scheduled to be at this screening.

ADAM GOPNIK

Adam Gopnik is a staff writer at The New Yorker. His books include Paris to the Moon; Through the Children’s Gate: A Home in New York; The Table Comes First: Family, France, and the Meaning of Food; At the Strangers’ Gate: Arrivals in New York, A Thousand Small Sanities: The Moral Adventure of Liberalism and, most recently, The Real Work: On the Mystery of Mastery. Gopnik has won three National Magazine Awards, for essays and for criticism, and also the George Polk Award for Magazine Reporting. In March of 2013, he was awarded the medal of Chevalier of the Order of Arts and Letters, and in 2021 he was made a Chevalier of the Legion d’honneur. His musical, Our Table, opened in 2017 at the Long Wharf Theatre in New Haven, and his one-man storytelling show, The Gates, played at the Public Theatre in New York.

NOAH DIAMOND 

Noah Diamond restored and adapted the Marx Brothers’ 1924 masterpiece I’ll Say She Is, and played Groucho in its first-ever revivals, at the New York International Fringe Festival (2014) and Off Broadway at the Connelly Theater (2016). Other Marxian projects include a trilogy of streaming documentaries created for the Freedonia Marxonia festival: Home Again: The Marx Brothers and New York City (2020), There’s Nothing Like Liberty: The Marx Brothers and America (2021), and If You Get Near a Song, Play It: The Marx Brothers and Music (2022). He is the author of Gimme a Thrill: The Story of I’ll Say She Is, and can be heard monthly as co-host of The Marx Brothers Council Podcast. Non-Marx projects include 400 Years in Manhattan, Love Marches On, Quarantigone, and the Nero Fiddled musicals, all co-created with Amanda Sisk. Learn more at noahdiamond.com.

UNITED PALACE HISTORY 

The ornate United Palace opened in 1930 as the Loew’s 175th Street Theatre, a deluxe movie theatre and vaudeville house, the last of the five Wonder Theatres in New York City and New Jersey. Its first act as a movie theatre ended in April 1969 with a screening of “2001: A Space Odyssey.”

With a groundswell of community support and our good friend, patron, and neighbor Lin-Manuel Miranda, movies returned to the United Palace in 2013. Since then we have screened over 100 feature films, from world premieres (“In the Heights” and “Halftime” as part of the Tribeca Festival) to all-time classics (“It’s A Wonderful Life”), to community favorites (the documentary “Mad Hot Ballroom” about local school children winning a citywide dance contest).

Our goal is to have the cinematic experience come alive for audiences too used to watching movies on their phones or TVs.

One of our highest compliments came from Robert DeNiro who, speaking before a 50th anniversary screening of “The Godfather,” described watching a movie at the United Palace as: “The moviegoing experience doesn’t get any better.”