Arts Fuse critics select the best in music, film, theater, visual arts, author readings, and dance that’s coming up in the next week.

By The Arts Fuse Staff

Film

Boston Area Film Schedules – What is playing today, Where and When

Boston French Film Festival
Through July 27
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA

The annual festival continues its second week. Here are summaries of new film offerings. Check the MFA schedule for repeat screenings and last week’s Arts Fuse for previous descriptions.

July 17, 
3:00 p.m.
Love is the Perfect Crime: The opening night film screens again. (See Arts Fuse review)

July 17, 5:30 p.m.
Under the Pines: Second screening

July 17, 
8:00 p.m.
Jealousy: Phillipe Garrel has a long history in French cinema. His intimate, handcrafted style is deeply influenced by the traditions of silent film. Here he examines jealousy, following the professional and emotional crosscurrents generated by two romantically entwined theater actors, one of whom is based on his father (played by the director’s son, Louis).

July 18, 
3:30 p.m.
Weekends in Normandy: repeat screening

July 18, 5:30 p.m.
Suzanne: “Talented young French director Katell Quillévéré, who debuted with the 2010 faith-education drama Love Like Poison, knows how to pack a film full of life and urgent questions. Her second film, Suzanne, spans an entire generation in its heroine’s story, and not just hers, committing itself to a bold structure of time leaps in which we’re racing to play catch-up.” (London Telegraph)

July 18, 8:00 p.m.
A Castle in Italy: The latest semi-autobiographic feature written, directed, and starring Valeria Bruni-Tedeschi “deftly shifts between humor and poignancy in a visually beautiful exploration of family, relationships and mortality. When his mother is forced to confront the unpleasant notion of selling off the family home. That’s the starting point but, little of the film has to do with the sale of the castle and myriad of side plots take hold.” (The Australian)

July 19, 8:15 p.m.
Rendez-vous of Déjà Vu: “Antonin Peretjatko’s first feature is a loopy and audacious comedy with a political setting that centers on a group of young adults who, in the face of economic crisis, leave Paris for an impromptu beach trip. With ricocheting references to France’s tradition of violent uprisings, Peretjatko gleefully unleashes the brazen energy of youth — on both sides of the camera.” (The New Yorker)

July 20, 6:00 p.m.
Miss and the Doctors: “Boris and Dimitri Pizarnik are doctors in Paris’s Chinese quarter. They work together and devote all their time to their patients. One night they treat a young diabetic girl being raised by her single mother, Judith. Both brothers fall in love with Judith, and soon everything is turned upside down.” (uniFrance Films)

July 20, 
8:15 p.m.
Domestic Life: How does a modern woman balance the demands of family and career? The wonderful Emmanuelle Devos gives another powerful performance as a dissatisfied mother living in the suburbs. The film is a critical yet sympathetic depiction of 24 hours in the lives of several women — it comes off as a smart French version of Desperate Housewives.

The Wizard of Oz
Monday, July 21
Coolidge Corner Theatre, Brookline, Ma

Once upon a time this film was screened annually on television. Now, kids who have never seen the film, or who have never seen it on a big screen, have a chance to view the movie as it was meant to be seen. One of the great American classics appears for one night as part of the Coolidge Corner’s “Big Screen Classics” series.

Amy Winehouse: The Day She Came to Dingle
July 23
Johnny D’s in Somerville, MA

BJFF FRESHFLIX, Boston Jewish Music Festival, and New Center are hosting an Amy WineHOUSE Party that pays tribute to the talent and spirit of the late singer. The evening includes a screening of the documentary and an eclectic set of Winehouse – inspired songs performed by local talent Ingrid Gerdes and Friends. There will also be a multi-prized raffle with proceeds going to the Amy Winehouse Foundation. Geoff Edgers, documentarian and Boston Globe arts writer, will emcee the event

— Tim Jackson

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Visual Arts

Summer Art Colonies

Thanks to Romanticism, we tend to think of artists as solitary creatures, each on a singular quest for beauty and truth. It’s a bit of a shock to realize that, in life, they flocked together like noisy seagulls, especially in the warmer months. Monet at Etretat, Gauguin at Pont Aven worked amid crowds of other painters, from rank amateurs and pretentious poseurs, girlfriends and hangers-on, to rare figures of genuine originality and genius.

In the United States, summer art colonies followed the railroads out of major east coast cities like Boston, New York, and Philadelphia. To flourish, they needed abundant and picturesque scenery, tolerant locals, a setting that seemed remote yet was easy to escape to and from, and cheap food, lodging, and drink. A good teacher or two or a few wealthy, bohemian-minded patrons were always a plus in getting things started.

Some colonies (Welfleet, Martha’s Vineyard) specialized in writers, editors, and publishers, others (Glouchester, MA; Dublin, NH) in visual artists. Cornish, NH, and Provincetown harbored a yeasty mix of a bit of everything and anything. Social life in these places ranged from laid back to hectic, elegant to louche.

Art colonies come and go like barn owls and lady bugs. The kudzu of tourism chokes some to death; others fade back into the rural obscurity from which they were born. Here are four, old and new, within driving distance of Boston.

Provincetown, MA

Until the late 19th century, Provincetown was nearly an island. No roads reached as far as the fishing village at the tip of Cape Cod. The railroad came in the 1870s and tourists, writers, and artists arrived in large numbers by the 1890s. With its setting of limitless blue skies, rolling dunes, lonely beaches, quaint, crooked streets of weatherbeaten wooden houses, and Portuguese fishing fleet, all anchored by the towering non sequitur of the Pilgrim Monument, Provincetown’s future as a summer magnet was secure.

The roster of artistic Provincetown summer residents has been stellar: Jackson Pollock, Eugene O’Neill and the Provincetown Players (called “the most important innovative movement in American theatre”), Edward Hopper, Hans Hoffman and his famous summer art school, which drew such luminaries as Larry Rivers, Franz Kline, and Mark Rothko, not to mention dozens of lesser lights and many, inclined towards art or bohemian lifestyle, but who just enjoyed a summer by the sea in their wake.

On a tourist choked mid-summer weekend, Provincetown’s Commercial Street can seem pretty much like any east coast resort at high season (the town is said to be the most popular stop on the Cape Cod circuit). But visit the Provincetown Art Association and Museum at 460 Commercial for glimpses into that glorious past.

Ogunquit, ME

Provincetown’s counterpart to the north, Ogunquit is another rugged fishing village that blossomed with tourists in the late 19th century when a new bridge made it accessible. A summer art school followed and so did the unconventional lifestyles (like Provincetown, Oguinquit has been known as a gay refuge for more than a century).

With its broad, white sand beaches and salmon pink granite cliffs near Perkins Cove, Ogunquit had plenty of motifs for painters and watercolorists. The town’s artistic heyday was in the early twentieth century, just as modernism began to take steam there and in New York. Maine-born Marsden Hartley, Edward Hopper, and Peggy Bacon were among those came. Walt Kuhn, champion of the advance of American art, is the artist most closely associated with the colony.

Nowadays, Qgunquit’s narrow downtown streets are clogged with traffic and the standard tourist fare during the summer months. Three local organizations survive, though, from the glory days. The Ogunquit Art Association on Shore Road, self-described as “Maine’s Oldest Artists’ Group,” will hold its 63rd Annual Art Auction on Sunday, August 2, at its Barn Gallery on Shore Road and Bourne Lane. The venerable Ogunquit Playhouse is in the midst of its 82nd season in its vintage 1933 theater on Rt. 1, just south of town.

Set seaside in the hollow of Narrow Cove, once a favorite vantage point for local painters, the Ogunquit Museum of American Art (533 Shore Road), has what might just be the most spectacular setting of any American art museum. Founded in 1953, the museum’s mid-century modern galleries look out on rugged Maine coastline and lush gardens. The collections feature artists from the Ogunquit Art Association, including Kuhn and museum founder Henry Strater.

Cornish-Plainfield-Windsor, NH and VT

When J.D. Salinger died in 2010, he probably closed the final chapter in the story of the Cornish Art Colony. Though, in popular legend, the novelist had retreated to a small and remote New Hampshire Village, he had, in fact, settled into one of the poshest and most celebrity-studded of all New England art colonies.

In the 1890s, Augustus Saint-Gaudens, one of the great sculptors of America’s Gilded Age, began to renovate a run-down Cornish tavern and its grounds into studios and living quarters. Built high on a hillside, the house and its lawns had a commanding view of the Connecticut River, green fields and woods, and the area’s sacred mountain, Ascutney, across the water in Vermont.

Once Saint-Gaudens established himself, a stream of friends, patrons, and associates— Jamesian wealthy dabblers, artists, Saint-Gaudens’ students from the Art Students League in New York, various literary types and prominent public officials— began to congregate. Many built summer homes in the old farmland along the river. The scenery reminded them of Tuscany and their grand Beaux-Arts mansions, sometimes enlargements of Federal-era manses, often featured formal Italian gardens.

At its peak around the turn of the 20th century, the Cornish Colony, which included Plainfield, NH, to the south and Windsor, VT, across the river, the cast was stellar.

Prominent residents and visitors included the actresses Ethel Barrymore and Marie Dressler; the popular historical novelist Winston Churchill (at the time, far more famous than the British politician); Maxwell Perkins, famed Charles Scribner Sons editor of Hemingway and Fitzgerald; painters Everett Schinn, Kenyon Cox, George de Forest Brush, and Thomas Dewing; sculptors William Zorach and Daniel Chester French; pioneering modern dancer Isadora Duncan; President Woodrow Wilson, who kept his “Summer White House” at Cornish; printmaker Stephen Parrish and his son, the beloved illustrator Maxfield Parrish, who based his signature “Parrish Blue” on the afternoon sky over the Connecticut hills; architect and garden planner Charles A. Platt, designer of the Smithsonian’s Freer Gallery in Washington; distinguished jurist Learned Hand, a close friend of Salinger’s; and, near the end of the run, Salinger himself, who was just “Jerry” to the locals.

Once the scene of lavish garden parties, formal dinners, amateur theatricals, and “Pageants” in flowing, Duncan-style Greek costumes, Cornish is a quiet place today. There are no swarms of tourists, no streets of quaint cafés and summer galleries. Neither Cornish nor Plainfield has a downtown and most of the grand summer houses are tucked away on side roads and privately owned. The exception is Saint-Gaudensown home, studio, and gardens, now a National Historic Site and open to the public in the summer months. Its offerings include tours, hiking trails, concerts, classes, and exhibitions.

In 1916, Maxfield Parrish designed a stage set, featuring a view of Mt. Ascutney, for the Plainfield Town Hall stage. The set has been preserved and can be seen when the Town Hall is open. The historical society next door and the Plainfield town library across the street both sell Parrish-related reproductions and books. Remnants of the old colony turn up from time to time at the local auction house, W. A. Smith, Inc.

Hudson, NY

“When we moved to Hudson in 2000, there was a crack dealer on every corner,” jokes a friend and Hudson resident, a former rock musician. “Now we have to drive all the way to Albany.”

Until recently a run-down old Hudson River town, with a colorful past and a rich, though neglected, architectural history, Hudson, NY, has become one of the newest art colonies of the Northeast. Unlike other old and newly-minted colonies, such as Rockland, ME, which grew up around the Farnsworth Museum, Hudson seems to have no particular germinating center, unless it is the Amtrak station, which whisks you up from Manhattan in a quick two hours.

Instead, at some point the antique shops, art galleries, house restorers, artists, poets, musicians, and what my friend calls “kooky people,” just reached critical mass.

Today, the mostly restored Warren Street retail district houses the tourist strip of shops, galleries, restaurants, and night spots. In 2007, the prominent performance artist Marina Abramović bought a run-down theatre-turned-tennis-courts in Hudson and has been converting it (slowly) into the “Marian Abramović Institute,” a multi-function exhibition space. Other empty or abandoned buildings in town are sometimes the site of temporary installations by New York artists and several of Hudson’s grand mansions have been converted to elegant Bed and Breakfasts for visitors who want to sleep over.

Nearby, Olana, the ornate, Orientalizing fantasy estate and studio of Hudson River School painter Frederic Edwin Church, is now a State Historic Site and National Historic Landmark and is open to the public. Its sweeping vistas of the Hudson River and the Catskills are a reminder of why the region has drawn American artists for two centuries.

— Peter Walsh

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Roots and World Music

Yidstock
July 17 – 20
Yiddish Book Center, Amherst, MA

This expertly curated klezmer festival takes place inside the Yiddish Book Center’s air-conditioned auditorium — but don’t fret, there’s still room to dance. Several shows are already sold out, but tickets remain for sets by Klezmatics trumpeter Frank London’s rollicking Klezmer Brass All-Stars and Daniel Khan and the Painted Bird, a group which is in line with Yiddish culture’s radical tradition. Another highlight is a workshop led by Steve Weintraub, who can make any wallflower feel comfortable on the dance floor.

Festival Betances
July 18 – 20
South End, Boston, MA

One of Boston’s hidden free music gems, this long-running fest held outside the Villa Victoria in the South End offers everything from folkloric bomba to modern reggaeton. It’s also a must-attend for many politicians on the campaign trail.

— Noah Schaffer

Straight No Chaser
July 15
Music Hall Historic Theatre
Portsmouth, NH

The ten-man a cappella group Straight No Chaser — yes, the one that had 17 million hits for its interrupted medley version of Twelve Days of Christmas — hits the New Hampshire coast on its “happy hour tour” with a rare performance, although sadly this time they’re not backing Dolly Parton.

— Debra Cash

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Jazz

Bruce Katz Band
July 17, 7:30 p.m.
Regattabar, Cambridge, MA.

Esteemed keyboardist Bruce Katz returns to the Regattabar hitting the piano and Hammond B-3 assisted by guitarist and vocalist Chris Vitarello and drummer Ralph Rosen. Expect all manner of grits and grooves.

Charlie Kohlhase Explorer’s Club
July 17, 8 p.m.
Outpost 186, Cambridge, MA.

One of the finest saxophonists and composers in town, Charlie Kohlhase, convenes one of his best outfits, the Explorer’s Club, with saxophonist Jared Sims, trumpeter Daniel Rosenthal, pianist Joe Berkovitz, bassist Jef Charland, and drummer Curt Newton.

Driff Records Festival
July 18, 7 p.m. to 10 p.m.
Lily Pad, Cambridge, MA

Boston-area indie label Driff Records has its second annual festival, touting five new CD releases. The performers include Matchbox (with saxophonist Jorrit Dijkstra, pianist Pandelis Karayorgis, bassist Nate McBride, and drummer Curt Newton), Bolt (with Dijkstra, guitarist Eric Hofbauer, cellist Junko Fujiwara, and drummer Eric Rosenthal), a solo set by saxophonist Tony Malaby, and a performance by the 10-piece Driff Large Ensemble, featuring Dijkstra, Malaby, Karayorgis, McBride, Newton, saxophonists Matt Langley and Charlie Kohlhase, trumpeter Forbes Graham, trombonist Jeff Galindo, and bassist Aaron Darrell.

Scott Feiner & Pandeiro Jazz
July 18, 7:30 p.m.
Regattabar, Cambridge, MA.

Scott Feiner was a respected guitarist on the New York scene when, in 1999, he took his first trip to Brazil where he fell in love with the traditional music built around the tambourine-like hand drum called the pandeiro. In 2001 he moved down to Rio and stayed for 13 years. Now back in New York, he’s writing and performing his own music and has just released The View from Below, featuring his pandeiro in a trio with guitar and piano. He comes to the Regattabar with guitarist Mike Moreno and pianist Victor Gonçalves.

Pet Noir CANCELLED — NO NEW DATE SET
July 19, 8 p.m.
Lily Pad, Cambridge, MA.

Pianist, composer, and New England Conservatory musical guru emeritus Ran Blake gathers some of his favorite musicians and writers on the combined theme of two of his favorite topics — film noir and domestic animals. Interspersed among animal-noir related film clips, you can hear musical performances on animal themes by pianist Gil Aharon, singer Dominique Eade, saxophonist James Merenda and his band Tickle Juice, Blake with trombonist Aaron Hartley, and others. There will also be a reading by Clea Simon, author of the pet noir Pru Marlowe mystery series (disclosure: I am married to Clea Simon), and a dedication by the MSPCA’s Eve Tyler-Hanig. The event with benefit the MSPCA’s Angell Animal Medical Center.

— Jon Garelick

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Theater

A Great Wilderness by Samuel D. Hunter.
Through July 20
Staged by the Williamstown Theatre Festival, Nikos Stage, Wiliamstown, MA

OBIE Award-winning playwright Hunter is probably preaching to the converted in this script, but he’s taken on a provocative subject: “A man who has devoted his life to counseling teenage boys out of their homosexuality has decided to take on one last client. But when his life and mind begin to unravel, he must confront some demons of his own.”

The Golem of Havana
Music by Salomon Lerner. Lyrics by Len Schiff. Book & Direction by Michel Hausmann.
July 16 – August 10
Staged by the Barrington Stage Company’s Musical Theatre Lab at the St. Germain Stage, Sydelle and Lee Blatt Performing Arts Center, 36 Linden Street Pittsfield, MA

The world premiere production of a musical with an intriguing multi-cultural premise: “The story of a Hungarian-Jewish family living in Batista’s Havana on the brink of the Cuban Revolution. When their maid’s son, a guerrilla fighter, is injured, they must choose between protecting him and guarding their fragile prosperity since emigrating to Cuba after World War II.”

— Bill Marx

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Dance

Great Friends Dance Festival
July 17-20 & 22-26
Great Friends Meeting House
Newport, RI

Island Moving Company hosts an extensive festival of small and mid-sized companies from around the country, with the opening weekend’s presentation of visiting contemporary modern choreography from New Jersey’s Lydia Johnson Dance, the London-trained and New York-based choreographer Matthew Westerby, and Surfscape Contemporary Dance Theatre from Daytona Beach, Florida.

Forty Steps Dance and Sarah Slifer Swift
July 18-20
Windhover Center for the Performing Arts
Rockport, MA

The Windhover Center’s rustic outdoor stage hosts Sarah Slifer Swift’s look at human trust in the age of NSA surveillance in her new Insenser and Invisible Stories, Swift’s collaboration with writer and choreographer Kate Tarlow Morgan. The program is rounded out by Creatures, choreographer Sallee Slagle’s tribute to wildness in nature, danced by the members of Forty Steps.

Ballet 2014
and
Dorrance Dance
Jacob’s Pillow
Becket, MA

Top ballet dancers from New York City Ballet and elsewhere present a broad repertory of big name contemporary ballet choreography at the Ted Shawn Theatre including Christopher Wheeldon’s Liturgy; a collaboration between Benjamin Millepied (Mr. Natalie Portman to you) and Philip Glass protege composer Nico Muhly; and the great sailors-on-leave-in-the-big-city classic, Jerome Robbins’ Fancy Free.

Beginning an unusual extended two-week engagement at the Doris Duke Theater, tap master Michelle Dorrance returns to the Pillow with live music by vocalist Aaron Marcellus and a new set of “innovative tap dance instruments created by Nicholas Young.” Go.

Camille A. Brown & Dancers
July 15, July 17, July 19
Schaeffer Theatre
Bates Dance Festival
Lewiston, Maine

In a free “show and tell” event, Camille A. Brown & Dancers share excerpts of “Mr. Tol E. RAncE” followed by two performances of the choreographer’s complete, thought-provoking exploration of African American minstrelsy and its persistence in our culture of contemporary entertainment. Both full performances will include a talk-back with the audience.

— Debra Cash

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Classical Music

Opening Night
Presented by Boston Landmarks Orchestra
July 16, 7 p.m.
Hatch Shell, Boston, MA

Christopher Wilkins and the BLO open their summer season with a premiere by Larry Bell; Leonard Bernstein’s music for the film, On the Waterfront; and Orff’s ever popular Carmina Burana. One City Choir, the Back Bay Chorale, and soloists Teresa Wakim, R. Joshua Reynolds, and Aaron Engebreth join the orchestra.

Festival of Contemporary Music
Presented by the Boston Symphony Orchestra
July 17-21, various times
Seiji Ozawa Hall, Lenox, MA

Tanglewood’s annual Festival of Contemporary Music is moved up this year from August to July, and this year features a four-day survey of a rich variety of music by contemporary American composers. For my money, the most intriguing program is the last: orchestral music by Roger Sessions (his Concerto for Orchestra) and John Adams (Slonimsky’s Earbox) framing Steven Mackey’s violin concerto, Beautiful Passing, and Charlotte Bray’s At the Speed of Stillness. If you want to see new and recent music done right, look no further.

Joshua Bell plays Lalo
Presented by the Boston Symphony Orchestra
July 19, 2:30 p.m.
Tanglewood Music Shed, Lenox, MA

Nelsons’ Tanglewood residency concludes with this program, showcasing violinist Joshua Bell in Eduardo Lalo’s popular Symphonie espagnole. Christopher Rouse’s Rapture and Beethoven’s Symphony no. 5 round out the program.

Fiesta sinfónica
Presented by Boston Landmarks Orchestra
July 23, 7 p.m.
Hatch Shell, Boston

The BLO’s second Hatch Shell program brings music from and inspired by Central and South America. Music by Gershwin and Revueltas (among others) is paired with “festive music from a half dozen Caribbean nations” with the BLO being joined by what is billed as a “pocket-sized Salsa orchestra.”

The Knights
Presented by the Boston Symphony Orchestra
July 23, 8 p.m.
Seiji Ozawa Hall, Lenox

The hip, NY-based ensemble brings with it the great Dawn Upshaw and a group of superb soloists (including trumpeter Håkan Hardenberger) for a performance of Maria Schneider’s Winter Morning Walks. The program also includes transcriptions of songs by Joni Mitchell, Kurt Weill, Michael Legrand, and Astor Piazzolla.

— Jonathan Blumhofer

Frankish Phantoms: Echoes from Carolingian Palaces
Tues, July 15 at 8 p.m.
At Tanglewood, Lenox, MA

The Boston Symphony Orchestra presents Sequentia Ensemble for Medieval Music (Benjamin Bagby, director) performing its new program, which “explores the musical world of the Carolingian clan – and especially Charlemagne, who became emperor in 800.”

Veni Creator Spiritus – SoHIP Summer Concert Series
Tuesday, July 15 at 8 p.m.
St. Peter’s Church, 320 Boston Post Road, Weston, MA

SOHIP (Society for Historically Informed Performances) presents the Meravelha Medieval Music Group in a program that “explores medieval musical depictions of the Holy Spirit as a source of divine creativity, inspiration, and illumination … [the] performance includes a cappella vocal pieces, original arrangements of traditional chant with instrumental accompaniment on harp and vielle, and instrumental pieces.”

Thomas Hampson — Strauss and his World
Wednesday, July 16 at 8 p.m
At Tanglewood, Lenox, MA

The Boston Symphony Orchestra presents an evening featuring the great baritone, who will be accompanied by the pianist Wolfram Rieger. The evening will be made up of songs by Richard Strauss, Berg, Korngold, and Zemlinksy.

— Susan Miron

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Author Events

Tom Perrotta and Paul Harding
The Leftovers and Enon
Newtonville Books
July 15 at 7 p.m.
Free

Newtonville Books hosts an unbeatable pairing for a reading. Perrotta and Harding – with a brand-new HBO miniseries adaptation and a 2010 Pulitzer Prize between them – will read from their latest books. Perrotta’s tome takes place in a post-Rapture world; the narrative explores the ambiguities of religious faith. Harding’s highly anticipated follow-up to Tinkers catches up with the grandchildren of the Crosby family.

Gary J Bass
The Blood Telegram: Nixon, Kissinger, and a Forgotten Genocide
Harvard Book Store
July 15 at 7 p.m.
Free

Professor Bass will read and discuss his Pulitzer-nominated latest book, the first full account of the Nixon Administration’s sinister indifference to the 1971 atrocities in Bangladesh that led to war between India and Pakistan and changed the fate of Asia. Bass has sifted through thousands of documents in order to uncover a powerful story of power, politics, and Cold War brinkmanship.

Rebecca Makkai
The Hundred-Year House
Brookline Booksmith
July 16 at 7 p.m.
Free

Rebecca Makkai’s latest novel has been garnering a lot of mainstream buzz. Her latest novel is the story of a Marxist literary scholar and her biographer husband who move into a hundred-year old family estate. Things are not what they seem to be, as the two of them find out that the estate holds baffling mysteries and strange enticements.

Gregory Flemming
At The Point of a Cutlass: The Pirate Capture, Bold Escape, and Lonely Exile of Philip Ashton
Porter Square Books
July 17 at 7 p.m.
Free

Happily, the Johnny Depp-inspired pirate trend has bitten the dust. But stories about pirates, especially true ones, never get old. Flemming will be reading from his account of the titular Ashton, who was taken captive in a surprise attack near Nova Scotia in 1722. He spent three years crossing the Atlantic under captivity with the brutal Edward Low, of whom it is said “a greater monster…never infested the seas.”

Lesley and David Solmonson
Twelve Bottle Bar
Brookline Brooksmith
July 22 at 7 p.m.
Free

The husband and wife team behind 12bottlebar.com visit Brookline Booksmith to show how to make a versatile home bar with only twelve bottles. They will be there to demonstrate how, with merely seven hard liquors, one liqueur, two vermouths, and two bitters over 200 cocktail combinations can be yours in imbibe.

— Matt Hanson

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Rock

Queens of the Stone Age
July 14
Providence Performing Arts Center, Providence, RI

Josh Homme and company make their second swing through our general area in support of their acclaimed (and Arts Fuse approved) 2013 album …Like Clockwork. The LP is the work of a mature rock band that still likes to melt faces and crush skulls. Prepare for a sonic pummeling.

Queen + Adam Lambert
July 19
Mohegan Sun Arena, Uncasville, CT
July 22
TD Garden, Boston, MA

Let’s start with the obvious. No-one can replace the late, great, Queen vocalist Freddie Mercury. But if you’re looking for someone with a big voice and more than a touch of flamboyance, then you could do worse than Adam Lambert. With the still sharp playing of guitarist Brian May and drummer Roger Taylor thrown in the mix, these shows will be memorable.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hp0aJN8jGOI

Sidewalk Driver
July 19
The Sinclair, Cambridge, MA

It’s funny that Sidewalk Driver are playing a show the same night Queen + Adam Lambert will take the stage in Uncasville, because Queen are such an obvious influence for the Boston glam rockers (check out their cover of Queen’s “Keep Yourself Alive” below). When I talked to Sidewalk Driver’s frontman and singer Tad McKitterick last December and asked him what people could expect when they saw the group live he responded, “You won’t ignore it. You’ll want to watch and you’ll want to listen. Whether or not it’s something that at the end of the night you’ll want to do again, I don’t know, that’s a matter of taste, but I do know that while it’s happening, you’ll be into it, and you’ll want to watch and see what’s next.”

Upcoming and On Sale…

Nine Inch Nails & Soundgarden (7/29/2014, Xfinity Center); Echo & the Bunnymen (8/14/2014, Paradise Rock Club); Arcade Fire (8/19/2014, Comcast Center); Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers (8/30/2014, Fenway Park); Boston Calling Music Festival feat. The National, Lorde, The Replacements (9/5-7/2014, City Hall Plaza); Bombino (9/5/2014, The Sinclair); Justin Townes Earle (9/10/2014, Royale); Bob Mould (9/12/2014, Paradise Rock Club); Jack White (9/17/2014, Fenway Park); Willie Nelson (9/20/2014, Indian Ranch); The Black Keys (9/21/2014, TD Garden); Kasabian (9/26/2014, Paradise Rock Club); The Orwells (10/9/2014, Brighton Music Hall); J Mascis (10/18/2014, The Sinclair); Temples (10/24/2014, Paradise Rock Club); Peter Hook & the Light (11/8/2014, Royale)

— Adam Ellsworth