Coming Attractions: August 2 through 17 — What Will Light Your Fire
Compiled by Arts Fuse Editor
Our expert critics supply a guide to film, visual art, theater, author readings, television, and music. More offerings will be added as they come in.
EDITOR’S NOTE: Boston area theaters have decided to pretty much ignore what is happening in America and beyond — mounting threats to democracy, the country’s slide toward authoritarianism, the climate crisis, growing economic inequality, ICE’s violent roundup of immigrants, the expansion of internment camps, ongoing genocide in Gaza, transphobia, the grueling war in Ukraine, etc. I have decided to point out a production in Coming Attractions — staged in America or elsewhere — that grapples with today’s alarming realities. Sometimes the stagings will be available via Zoom, sometimes not. It is important to present evidence that theater artists — maybe not here, but elsewhere — are reflecting, and reflecting on, the world around us.
Playwright Sophie McIntosh and director Nina Goodheart. Photo: courtesy of Good Apples Collective
A follow-up to last week’s radical feminist pick: the world premiere staging of Sophie McIntosh’s historical drama benevolent at the IATI Theater, 64 E 4th St, NYC, August 14 through September 5. Set in 1917, the script follows “four young women consigned to New York’s Inwood Benevolent Home, a draconian reformatory for fallen and friendless girls. Forced into drudgery in the basement laundry, the women forge unlikely connections. But when one of them finds herself in trouble, the others must decide what they’re willing to risk in order to help her.” Produced by Good Apples Collective and directed by Nina Goodheart, the comedy-drama claims to be a “piercing illumination of female solidarity: both the intimate places it can be found — and the shocking ways it can be broken.”
— Bill Marx
Film
The Boston French Film Festival
Museum of Fine Art Boston, through August 23
A scene from Colors of Time, screening at the Boston French Film Festival. Photo: courtesy of the MFA
Films added to the venerable festival were recently announced — check the website.
Whatever it Takes (Ceux qui comptent) on August 1 at 11 a.m.
The Girl in the Snow (L’engloutie) on August 1 at 2 p.m.
Colors of Time (La venue de l’avenir) on August 2 at 2 p.m.
Case 137 (Dossier 137) on August 7 at 7 p.m.
The Great Arch (L’Inconnu de la Grande Arche) on August 8, at 11 a.m.
Bazaar (Le crime du 3e étage) on August 8 at 2:00 p.m.
The Little Sister (La petite dernière) on August 9 at 2 p.m,
The Money Maker (L’Affaire Bojarski) on August 14 at 7 p.m.
The Girl in the Snow (L’engloutie) on August 15 at 11 a.m.
A Private Life (Vie privée) on August 15 at 2 p.m.
Little Amélie or the Character of Rain (Amélie et la métaphysique des tubes) on August 16 at 11 a.m.
Whatever it Takes (Ceux qui comptent) on August 16 at 2 p.m.
A scene from Ross McElwee’s Remake. Photo: Coolidge Corner Theatre
Sherman’s March & Remake
Coolidge Corner Theatre, Brookline, through August 6
Local filmmaker Ross McElwee’s Sherman’s March is subtitled “A Meditation on the Possibility of Romantic Love in the South during an Era of Nuclear Weapons Proliferation.” While intending to make a documentary about the lingering effects of General Sherman’s march through the South during the Civil War, the director is continually sidetracked by women who come and go in his life, his recurring dreams of nuclear holocaust, and Burt Reynolds. This landmark work of personal cinema, narrated by McElwee in his inimitable dry style will shown in a 4K Restoration.
This year McElwee returned with Remake, a poignant reflection on the death of his son Adrian from a drug overdose. The doc also includes the often absurd attempts by Hollywood and others to redo Sherman’s March in new guises. The result is, by turns funny, poignant, and unexpectedly affecting. Arts Fuse review
Cat Video Fest
Regent Theater in Arlington
August 2 – 9 Showtimes vary
Capital Theatre in Arlington
August 6 – 9 Showtimes vary
Stop watching cat videos on your cell phone and head over to the Regent or the Capital to see, on the big screen, a compilation of the latest and best cat footage culled from countless hours of submitted possibilities. There will also be sourced animations, music videos, and classic scenes of yore. A portion of the ticket proceeds from the Regent go to Dr. Rachel Geller’s charity, “All Cats All the Time,” while proceeds from the Capital benefit Boston’s “Black Cat Rescue!”
Marlon Brando and Kim Hunter in a scene from A Streetcar Named Desire.
A Streetcar Named Desire
August 3 at 7 p.m.
Coolidge Corner Theatre, Brookline
Elia Kazan’s masterful adaptation of Tennessee Williams’ Pulitzer Prize-winning play is essential viewing. Marlon Brando, Vivien Leigh, Kim Hunter, and Karl Malden star It launched Brando as one of the century’s greatest actors. As Stanley Kowalski, Brando had been recommended for the role by one of his previous stage co-stars, Tallulah Bankhead, who suggested he’d be an ideal fit for the part because he was “a total pig of a man without sensitivity or grace of any kind.” See for yourself!
Wild Inside
August 4 at 7:15 p.m.
Coolidge Corner Theatre
On February 2, 2023, Flaco, a male Eurasian eagle-owl, the largest species of owl in the world, was discovered missing from his cage at the Central Park Zoo in Manhattan. What the bird, who had lived his entire life in captivity, does in NYC becomes a surprising story that taps into the delight, concern, and fascination of millions in the city and beyond. A post-screening Q&A will follow with director Penny Lane, moderated by film critic Ty Burr.
A scene from The Goldfish. Photo: Beta Cinema
The Goldfish
August 5 at 8 p.m.
Goethe-Institut Boston 170 Beacon Street in Boston
Alireza Golafshan’s first feature length film is an amusing and crazy road movie that will be screened outdoors — chairs will be provided. The story: Oliver’s life as a high-flying banker comes to an abrupt end when he crashes into a guardrail at 140 mph and wakes up in rehab, paralyzed from the waist down. Even though he initially tries to deny his new reality, it inspires him to come up with a risky plan. Together with a group of people with disabilities, he sets off for Zurich to get a substantial amount of illicit money to safety.
The Bakery Girl of Monceau and Suzanne’s Career
August 6 at 4:15 and 8 p.m.
Brattle Theatre, Cambridge
Éric Rohmer Thursday screenings of the director’s “Six Moral Tales” begins with the rarely screened Bakery Girl of Monceau (1963, 23 minutes) A law student (Barbet Schroeder) with a roving eye stuffs himself full of pastries daily as a means to garner the attentions of the pretty brunette who works in a quaint Paris bakery. Simple, delicate, and jazzy, the first of the Moral Tales. Suzanne’s Career (1963, 55 minutes) is the second in Rohmer’s series: it is a wonderfully evocative portrait of youthful naiveté and the complicated bonds of friendship and romance. It is filled in a ragged black-and-white 16mm that exudes a strong sense of ‘60s Paris. The double feature includes La Collectionneuse.
The Heat
August 7 at 7 p.m.
WBUR CitySpace 890 Commonwealth Ave.
FBI special agent Sarah Ashburn (Sandra Bullock), a methodical and arrogant investigator, teams with-mouthed, hot-tempered detective Shannon Mullins (Melissa McCarthy) to remove criminals from the streets of Boston. WBUR film critics Sean Burns and Erin Trahan follow the screening with a conversation with Carolyn Pickman, the casting director for this and many other Boston films.
A scene from Talley Brown, New York.
Tally Brown, New York
August 8 and 9 at 1 p.m. and 9 p.m.
The Brattle Theatre
New Digital Restoration! Rosa von Praunheim’s loving portrait of a larger-than-life personality is also a vivid record of New York’s ’70s downtown demimonde. The documentary follows Tally Brown—cabaret chanteuse, underground film star, and a staple of Andy Warhol’s Factory—as she takes the filmmaker on a tour through the grit and glamour of the city that made her. The proceedings capture Brown’s mesmerizing performances as well as her interactions with fellow queer cult icons like Holly Woodlawn, Divine, and Taylor Mead.
The Last Picture Shows
August 16 at 5 p.m.
Somerville Theatre, Davis Square
Filmmaker Rustin Thompson journeys into the American West on a search for traces of what was once a center of small-town life: the movie theater. On the trip, he finds long abandoned and forgotten cinemas; movie houses that have fallen into disrepair; cinemas recently closed or struggling to hold on, and theaters that—thanks to their thoughtful caretakers—are not only surviving but thriving. Between the stops along the way, Rustin poetically intersperses excerpts from Peter Bogdanovich’s 1971 classic film The Last Picture Show, as well as reflections on past and present hardships facing the film exhibition industry.
Pick of the Week
Contempt, streaming Free on Kanopy
A scene featuring Brigitte Bardot and Michel Piccoli in Jean-Luc Godard’s Contempt.
This summer of The Odyssey is a good time to watch – perhaps for the first time – Jean-Luc Godard’s classic 1963 film starring Brigitte Bardot, Michel Piccoli, and Jack Palance. It is about a French screenwriter whose marriage unravels amid creative tensions during the making of a film adaptation of The Odyssey. Shot in ravishing CinemaScope by Raoul Coutard and with a lyrical score by Georges Delerue, Contempt is an ambiguous look at the collapse of a marriage. At the same time, the narrative is a meditation on filmmaking and artistic compromise, which no doubt draws on the artistic quarrels Godard himself was having with the project’s producers. Fritz Lang (Metropolis, M, The Big Heat) is cast as the director. The late critic, Roger Ebert, called it one the greatest films ever made. Martin Scorsese cites the film as a major influence on his work.
— Tim Jackson
Theater
A scene from the Chester Theatre Company production of Amchitka. From left: Will Maizel, Hero Marguerite, and Kelly Lester. Photo: Andrew Greco
Amchitka by Mark St. Germain. Directed by Julianne Boyd. Staged by the Chester Theatre Company at Chester Town Hall Theatre, 15 Middlefield Road, Chester, July 24 through August 8.
The world premiere production of a “philosophical thriller” by a veteran playwright (Magdalene and Freud’s Last Session): “In a monitoring station at Amchitka, a volcanic island 170 miles off the coast of Alaska used for underground nuclear testing in the 1960s, three scientists find themselves cut off from the outside world as an event seems to be underway. But what?”
M: Refractions from an Evil Act by James Wilkinson. Directed by Joe Juknievich. Staged by Exiled Theatre at the Boston Playwrights Theatre, 949 Commonwealth Ave, Boston, through August 9.
The world premiere production of a new horror/thriller. The plot: “A late-night return. A hotel room that feels…wrong. Traveling abroad, a woman’s unease after a night out deepens into something far more insidious. The staff watches too closely. A man appears, disappears and reappears. Time loops, memory fractures and the past begins to repeat itself. As identities blur and reality destabilizes, she must escape the hotel before she’s trapped by its history.” The cast includes Sydney Grant, Julia Hertzberg, Tim Hoover, and Peter Tone.
A New Era by Miranda Austen ADEkoje. Directed by Summer L. Williams. Dramaturgy by Lizzy Cooper Davis. Staged by Company One at the Strand Theatre, 543 Columbia Road, Dorchester, through August 8.
The world premiere production of a script that, according to the Company One site, “blends historical source material with a present-day heartbeat. The play tells the story of real-life activist Josephine St. Pierre Ruffin, founder of The Woman’s Era club and journal (played by Patrice Jean-Baptiste). As we journey to 1895, we watch Ruffin organize the First National Conference of the Colored Women in Boston from her Beacon Hill home, where six other formidable women from across the deeply divided country join her to birth a new movement. Can these women overcome their political differences to build a unified coalition when freedom is fragile and Black Lives are at stake?” Arts Fuse feature
David Garrison and Karen Allen in Berkshire Theatre Group’s production of Lovesong. Photo: Caelan Carlough
Lovesong by Abi Morgan. Directed by David Auburn. Staged by Berkshire Theatre Group at The Unicorn Theatre 6 East Street, Stockbridge, through August 29.
Morgan’s play, according to the BTG website, “traces a marriage across decades, revealing how love evolves, deepens and endures over time. Moving fluidly between youth and later years, the play places two versions of a couple side by side, allowing past and present to unfold simultaneously on stage. Through their shared memories and lived experiences, the story explores love, aging and the ways in which memory shapes identity. As time moves forward, the impact of early choices reverberates across a lifetime, illuminating the fragility of happiness, the resilience of partnership and the inevitability of change.” The cast features Karen Allen, David Garrison, Rebecca Brooksher, and Shawn Fagan.
Hamlet by William Shakespeare. Directed by Omar Laguerre-Lewis. Staged by Reverie Theatre Group at the Rotch-Jones-Duff Museum, New Bedford, August 13 through 23.
An intriguing update of the venerable tragedy, set in “Denmark, USA”: “This Hamlet is set in a church in the present-day American south, blurring the seeming divide between church and state with emphasis on exploring grief, faith, corruption, and LGBTQ+ issues.
Welcome to Elsinore Baptist Church in the small but mighty state of Denmark, USA. Located on the border of Georgia, Alabama, and Florida, our congregation is led by Reverend Claudius, who has just been elected King of Denmark following the death of his brother. Claudius has assumed this position eagerly, leading with a strong hand and reinforcing “traditional” values to strengthen his community. Those who find themselves on the edges of Claudius’ society, however, can smell something rotten in the state of Denmark.”
Playwright Eugène Ionesco. Photo: Wikimedia
Rhinoceros by Eugène Ionesco. Translated by Derek Prouse. Directed by Diane Paulus. At the Loeb Drama Center, Cambridge, August 14 through September 27.
The American Repertory Theater adapts Ionesco’s absurdist 1959 comedy about authoritarian creep, though in this case it is a thunderous stampede. Earlier productions of the play included Orson Welles directing Laurence Olivier in London and a 1961 Broadway staging featuring Zero Mostel, Eli Wallach, and Jean Stapleton. The A.R.T cast is led by Paul Giamatti and John Turturro. Is this the year of the rhino? My review of an excellent production of the script earlier this year at the Yale Repertory Theatre.
iBoss by Thomas Kee. Directed by Clay Hopper. Staged by Great Barrington Public Theater at Great Hall at Saint James Place, 352 Main Street, Great Barrington, July 23 through August 9.
The world premiere of what sounds like a probing script — good to see companies beginning to probe the anti-humanist vision of AI — that “takes place in a not so distant future, where the rapidly accelerating intelligence of AI systems has created LISA Powered by AI, she wields enormous power. Shockingly, LISA displays an emergent property of AI — sentience. And from this newly sentient being something else emerges: an emotional agenda. As Job Johnson begins his first in-person evaluation, it’s clear this isn’t going to be just another day at the office.”
Also of interest, if somewhat scary sounding: “The production will utilize a brand new technology called Random Actor, an interactive design tool that was co-created by director Clay Hopper. This is the first time this software has been used in a professional production of a new play. It creates visuals that are an extension of LISA, the AI character in the play. The images projected in the space respond to her movement, her voice and her mood and intonations. Random Actor allows for the visual design of LISA’S internal state.
The images are not recorded or played back from a video. They are created IN REAL TIME along with the actor’s performance, with a generative algorithm using machine learning to create evocative images that are organic, despite their computational nature. No two performances of this play will be exactly the same…it is live, real-time design, based on the interaction of the actor, the text, and the designer who is responding to the performance in the very same moment that the audience is watching it.”
Nora Eschenheimer (Titania) and the company in the Commonwealth Shakespeare Company’s staging of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Photo: Nile Scott Studios.
A Midsummer Night’s Dream by William Shakespeare. Directed by Steven Maler. Staged by Commonwealth Shakespeare Company at Parkman Bandstand, Boston Common, through August 9. Free
“Young lovers escape to a wonderland of freedom and desire, drawn together and torn apart by forces they can’t quite control,” writes Commonwealth Shakespeare Company about its production of one of the Bard’s most popular plays. This will be the 30th Anniversary outing for the venerable troupe, In this presentation, audiences will be “transported to a neon-lit festival escape, where rules dissolve and self-expression blossoms.”
The CSC cast: Michael Broadhurst as Flute, Annika Burley as Helena, Meghan Carey as Hermia, Nick Cearley as Puck/Philostrate, Nora Eschenheimer as Hippolyta/Titania, De’Lon Grant as Theseus/Oberon, Jack Greenberg as Demetrius, Jaime José Hernández as Lysander, Karen MacDonald as Quince, Paul Melendy as Bottom, and Brooks Reeves as Egeus/Starveling. Arts Fuse feature
Dalloway, First Love by Lindsay Joelle. Directed by Rebecca Bradshaw. Staged by the Gloucester Stage Company at the Natti-Willsky Performance Center, 267 East Main Street, Gloucester, August 13 through 29.
The world premiere of a script inspired by the imagination of Virginia Woolf. The plot: “Before there was Clarissa Dalloway, there was Clarissa Parry. A spirited, tree-climbing Victorian teenager, Clarissa has little interest in the parade of suitors her money-strapped father insists she entertain in hopes of saving the family’s estate. But when an unapologetically independent suffragette enters her life, Clarissa begins to question the expectations placed upon her and imagines a different future—one she can choose for herself.”
Starfuckers written and performed by John Kuntz. Directed by Alex Lonati. At the Central Square Theater, Cambridge, August 13 through 16.
Performer and dramatist extraordinaire John Kuntz has rewritten his solo show after a 20 year (!!) hiatus. The piece garnered both an Elliot Norton Award and a New York International Fringe Festival Award when it first came around, so it is well worth taking in this revision.
— Bill Marx
Television
How the heck is it August already?
Also, how does the Criterion Channel decide which movies to jettison from its streaming library? Every month, the list becomes more depressing. Paying for streaming services these days seems to be less about access and more about deprivation. Anyway, better watch these excellent films before the end of August: Carrie (1976), Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977), Repo Man (1984), After Hours (1985), The Last Temptation of Christ (1988), Wild at Heart (1990), Muriel’s Wedding (1994), Marie Antoinette (2006), We’re All Going to the World’s Fair (2021), several James Bond films starring Sean Connery, and a whole bunch of shorts by Hal Hartley, which may mean they’re planning a big DVD collection (let’s hope). I met Mr. Hartley when he was a guest artist at Harvard (a very nice guy), and I’ve been a big fan of his since the early days, so I’m definitely making time to watch these films.
A scene from Ted Lasso, Season Four. Photo: Netflix
Ted Lasso, Season 4 (August 4, Apple TV): The new season of Ted Lasso—a feel-good and very funny series developed by and starring Jason Sudeikis—will soon premiere on Apple TV, which has been debuting some great shows in the last few months. Rumor has it Season 4 may be the last one for this popular show about an American soccer coach who somehow winds up coaching an English team (where they call it football). Fun stuff, with a great cast.
Monsters of God (August 6, HBO): Okay, the title intrigued me. This is a new docuseries about the world of exotic reptile smuggling. Created by Eric Goode, producer of Netflix’s Tiger King, this looks fascinating, but it also might make you mad that people do this stuff.
It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, Season 18 (August 17, FXX/FX): Hard to believe it’s been 18 seasons of this whacky, brilliant show, and sometimes I wonder how they manage to keep it fresh, but I don’t care—it still works, and that’s due in part to the show’s seeming meta-fascination with its own cult status. FX has had some real winners over the years, and this is one of them.
— Peg Aloi
Visual Art
Words like “exile,” “diaspora,” and “community” appear often in descriptions of contemporary art these days. In many cases, the art described reacts to the physical and cultural dislocations of the post-colonial world. International artists have mixed identities and ancestries, are born on one continent, emigrate to another for their training, and live and work in more than one place.
Maria Blanchard, Cubist Still Life (Nature Morte Cubiste), about 1916-1918. Photo: courtesy of the Hood Museum
The Hood Museum’s Community in Exile: Artists in Paris, 1910-1939 speaks from another era, when the city of Paris replaced Rome as the center of the Western art world. The word “exile” might be a bit of a misnomer, though. The artists who arrived in Paris in this period might have been escaping reactionary cultures, revolutions, or toxic politics in their home country, or just higher rents, but, for the most part, they were happy to escape to Paris, its artistic innovations, and its inescapably vital and attractive cafe culture.
The milieu has been lovingly described by such willing temporary transplants as Ernest Hemingway, Gertrude Stein, and Henry Miller, though rather less warmly by George Orwell and Vladimir Nabokov. Still, the era produced some of the greatest art of the 20th century. The Hood exhibition devoted to it opens on the Dartmouth campus on August 8.
Purim is a boisterous and joyful Jewish holiday that commemorates the rescue of the Jewish community of Persia from an imperial death decree. As recounted in the complex plot of the Book of Esther, Queen Esther, herself secretly Jewish, convinces her husband, the Persian king Ahasuerus, to rescind the edict and execute instead Haman, the evil imperial advisor who had plotted against the Jews.
Jan Lievens, The Feast of Esther, circa 1625. Photo: courtesy of the Gardner Museum
Celebrated with conspicuous energy in Amsterdam, as a symbol of Jewish liberation, Purim also honored a rare place where Jews were able to practice their religion openly. Rembrandt van Rijn, who lived in the Jewish district of the city and often used his neighbors as models, took on the visually rich story of Esther as an important subject, depicting it again and again in his paintings and prints. The Book of Esther in the Age of Rembrandt, opening at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum on August 6, illustrates how the ancient tale became an inspiration for Rembrandt, other artists of the period, and the Protestant population of the Netherlands, who saw it as a symbol of their own national identity, following their freedom from Spanish Catholic oppression.
Somewhat surprisingly, given the important Dutch art in the Gardner collection, the show is the Gardner’s first major exhibition of 17th-century Dutch work. The works on view range across media and include an early Rembrandt self-portrait, Jan Lievens’ painting The Feast of Esther, Jan Steen’s Esther, Ahasuerus, and Haman, and a 16th-century Flemish tapestry of Esther Fainting Before Ahasuerus.
Opening August 8 at the Currier Museum of Art in Manchester, NH, Radical Quiet: Contemporary Drawings of Nature by Victoria Elbroch, Nancy Friese, and Margot Glass features the work of three New England artists who use watercolor, pen and ink, or gold or silver point to depict the natural world. Their detailed, realistic drawings present familiar landscapes or natural motifs with exceptional intensity, as if depicting the silent force of nature itself.
The Wadsworth Atheneum’s MATRIX series of emerging artists continues with Ocean Vuong / MATRIX 199 / I’m Sorry I Love You, opening August 6 in Hartford. Best known as a poet and best-selling novelist, the variously-talented Vietnamese-American is also a photographer. His Wadsworth show is a two-decade journey, inspired by Tracy Chapman and Paul Éluard, documenting in portraiture, landscape, and snapshot, “queer and immigrant life in the Connecticut River Valley.” The result, says the museum, is a “visual-communal autobiography” that carries the “discovered mythos of daily life.”
Carl Sprinchorn, California Beach Scene [detail], n.d. Oil on canvas. Courtesy of Jay DeMartine. Photo: Luc Demers.
Long associated with Maine, Sprinchorn’s work includes lumberjacks and hunters, dancers and swimmers along with portraits. Altogether, these images “illuminate the artist’s negotiations of identity as a Swedish immigrant, a gay man, and a modern painter attuned to shifting ideas of region, nation, labor, and the natural world.” The Bates College Museum in Lewiston opens a related Sprinchorn exhibition in October.
Teenagers who love to draw and make up characters may find this late summer workshop was just made for their passions. The Museum of Fine Arts’ Characters from Imagination, Ages 15-17 starts on August 17. The week-long class meets daily, 10:15 am to 3:45 pm, through August 21. Participants will look at art from the MFA collection, learn human proportions, and how to create new characters in both realistic images and stylized cartoons, and explore layouts from comics and graphic novels to help make a short zine. Tuition, at $630 plus a $20 supply fee, may be a bit pricey, but it compares well with day camp. Museum members get $95 off.
— Peter Walsh
Jazz
Bert Seager’s Heart of Hearing
August 5 at 6:30 p.m.
Lilypad, Cambridge, Mass.
Pianist and composer Bert Seager’s Heart of Hearing quartet is never afraid to dig deep — standards, Seager originals (with taste for global rhythms), and a bit of Monk. Seager usually reads a well-chosen poem mid-set. The band includes saxophonist Rick DiMuzio, bassist Andrew Schiller, and drummer Der Herskovits (he of the “soft” hands and unfailing time).
Award-winning Haitian-American jazz vocalist Tyreek McDole. Photo: courtesy of the artist
Charles River Jazz Festival
August 8, 12 p.m.-8:30 p.m.
Hatch Memorial Shell, Boston
FREE
The Boston Jazz Foundation presents the sixth annual iteration of this free festival. This year’s players include Ghost-Note (headliners), Tyreek McDole, Seba Molnar, the BT ALC Big Band, Zahili Zamora, Roella Oloro, and a “Next Gen” stage with a Berklee Institute of Jazz and Gender Justice ensemble (featuring Noah Allen), Soundz of Now, the Lyric Anderson Quartet, and the New England Conservatory Prep and Adult Ed Jazz Ensemble. The festival’s website includes a link for tickets to the free event, as a way to RSVP, or to make a donation, or to purchase VIP packages.
Bassist Bruno Råberg. Photo: Francesco Gargiul
Point 01 Percent
August 11 at 7:30 p.m
Lilypad, Cambridge, Mass.
This month’s edition of the Point 01 Percent residency brings us two trios: Yoona Kim on ajaeng (a Korean zither), bassist Bruno Råberg, and drummer Eric Rosenthal followed by pianist Pandelis Karayorgis, guitarist Jeff Platz, and drummer Max Goldman. Expect the first set to be mostly “free” and the second to follow some compositional prompts.
Rhythm Future Quartet
August 14 at 7 p.m.
Regattabar, Cambridge, Mass.
For this one-off mid- (as in late-) summer show, the Regattabar brings in violinist and composer/arranger Jason Anick’s Rhythm Future Quartet with Anick’s updating of the Django/Grapelli Hot Club of France sound. Guitarists Henry Acker and Bruno Peterson round out the band with bassist Greg Loughman.
David Chesnut Jazz Festival
August 15 at 2 p.m.
Eustis Estate, Milton, Mass.
The fourth annual David Chesnut Jazz Festival promises a rich afternoon: singer Åsa Runefelt and her quintet (saxophonist Allan Chase, keyboard player Brian Friedland, bassist Bruno Råberg, drummer Austin McMahon); pianist Witness Matlou’s quartet (saxophonist Lihi Haruvi, bassist John Lockwood, and drummer Lee Fish); guitarist Eric Hofbauer’s EHX (saxophonist Temidayo Balogun, cellist Ana Ospina, bassist Tony Leva, drummer Miki Matsuki, singer Hayley Thompson-King); saxophonist Jared Sims’s Aftershock (guitarists Steve Fell and Jeffrey Lockhart, bassist Jef Charland, drummer Charles Haynes). That’s a well-rounded bunch from jazzy-jazz to jazz-funk fusion and the “Gen X post-style” of Hofbauer’s EHX (Beatles, Hendrix, Radiohead, Abbey Lincoln, Eddie Harris et al.).
Saxophonist Grace Kelly. Photo: courtesy of the artist
Grace Kelly
August 18 at 5 p.m. and 8 p.m.
Shalin Liu Performance Center, Rockport, Mass.
The talented former wunderkind saxophonist, singer, and songwriter Grace Kelly (now 34) has been touring in a “with strings” extravaganza drawn from her movie-music project. This show is billed as a return to her jazz roots, with a superb band: pianist and keyboard player Maxim Lubarski, bassist James Heazelwood Dale, and drummer Ross Pederson.
— Jon Garelick
Classical Music
Anna Handler conducting violinist Joshua Bell and the Boston Symphony Orchestra at Symphony Hall. Photo: Winslow Townson
Bell plays Bruch
Presented by Tanglewood Music Festival
August 2, 2:30 p.m.
Koussevitzky Shed, Lenox
Violinist Joshua Bell joins the BSO for Max Bruch’s Scottish Fantasy, while Nelsons leads further works by Sarah Kirkland Snider and Robert Schumann.
The Boston Landmarks Orchestra in action. Photo: courtesy of the artist
Verdi’s Requiem
Presented by Boston Landmarks Orchestra
August 5, 7 p.m.
DCR Hatch Shell, Boston
BLO continues its season of free outdoor concerts with an intriguing pairing of excerpts from Randall Thompson’s The Canticle of Freedom and Giuseppe Verdi’s Requiem. One City Choir (in partnership with Cantata Singers) teams up with the orchestra to provide the vocal fireworks.
Gratitude and Friendship
Presented by Tanglewood Music Festival
August 7, 8 p.m.
Koussevitzky Shed, Lenox
Yo-Yo Ma curated this weekend’s offerings, which kicks off with the cellist and various musical pals (violinist Renaud Capuçon, pianist Emanuel Ax) teaming up for an evening of Fauré, Messiaen, and Brahms with the BSO.
An American Journey
Presented by Tanglewood Music Festival
August 8, 8 p.m.
Koussevitzky Shed, Lenox
More of Ma’s buddies—this time including James Taylor, John Batiste, and Heather Cox Richardson—join him and the BSO for a wide-ranging survey of Americana, including music by Copland, Ives, and Julia Wolfe.
Organist Olivier Latry and Boston Symphony Orchestra Assistant Conductor Samy Rachid perform Gandolfi’s “Ascending Light”. Photo: Hilary Scott
Our Future Together
Presented by Tanglewood Music Festival
August 9, 2:30 p.m.
Koussevitzky Shed, Lenox
Anna Handler and Samy Rachid split conducting duties for a triptych of concerti by John Tavener, Kayhan Kalhor, and Osvaldo Golijov, featuring cellists Ma (in Tavener’s Mahámátar), Karen Ouzounian (in Kalhor’s Venus in the Mirror), and Christine Lee (in Golijov’s Azul).
Saint-Saëns’ “Organ” Symphony
Presented by Boston Landmarks Orchestra
August 12, 7 p.m.
DCR Hatch Shell, Boston
BLO wraps its summer season with a rare, outdoor performance of Saint-Saëns’ “Organ” Symphony. It’s heard alongside works by Mendlessohn, Anna Clyne, Respighi, and Beethoven.
Maestro of the Movies
Presented by Tanglewood Music Festival
August 15, 8 p.m.
Koussevitzky Shed, Lenox
Ken-David Masur leads the Boston Pops in this year’s installment of Tanglewood’s annual John Williams Film Night. The night promises selections from iconic scores plus specially edited scenes and clips projected with live orchestral accompaniment.
Violinst Ray Chen performs Tchaikovsky’s Violin Concerto with the Boston Symphony Orchestra Photo: Hilary Scott
Chen plays Bruch
Presented by Tanglewood Music Festival
August 16, 2:30 p.m.
Koussevitzky Shed, Lenox
This year’s Leonard Bernstein Memorial Concert features Ray Chen performing Max Bruch’s Violin Concerto No. 1. Marin Alsop leads the Tanglewood Music Center Orchestra in further works by Anna Clyne and Mahler.
— Jonathan Blumhofer
Roots and World Music
Blues singer and guitarist Larry McCray. Photo: courtesy of the artist/Curtis Knapp
Larry McCray
August 14 at 7 p.m.
Spire Center for Performing Arts, Plymouth, Mass.
McCray cites “the Kings” (Albert, B.B., and Freddie) as inspirations, along with Johnny Taylor and Bobby Blue Bland. That’s not a band heritage to be mining. The Arkansas-born, Michigan-raised McCray brings has a distinctive soul-infused songwriting style, carrying his big, warm baritone and stinging guitar attack.
— Jon Garelick
Author Events
Peter Aaron at Harvard Book Store
Moving in Stereo: Ric Ocasek, the Driving Force of The Cars
August 3 at 7 p.m.
Free
“Moving in Stereo: The Life of Ric Ocasek, the Driving Force of the Cars” serves as an in-depth guide to Ocasek’s life and catalog as a musician. Drawing on interviews, personal reminiscences, and the journalistic coverage he so reliably inspired, it gives a memorable portrait of one of the most essential voices in pop music during the MTV era and beyond.
Peter Santenello at Harvard Book Store
Your Fellow Americans: Dispatches from Across the Country We Call Home
August 4 at 6 p.m.
Tickets are $34.37 with book
“What began as curiosity became—one story at a time—an intimate, revealing portrait of America today. From road trips and chance encounters to dinners shared in locals’ homes, Your Fellow Americans captures what makes this country so dynamic, so resilient, and most of all, so very human. Because what Peter discovered on his travels wasn’t a nation torn in two. He found something more complex and more powerful: people who want to be seen, who are willing to listen, and who still believe we’re more alike than we are different.
With humor, exuberance, and reverence for the human spirit, Your Fellow Americans is a celebration of the United States that exists far beyond the headlines—and an invitation to sit down, open up, and rediscover the soul of this place that we call home.”
Aaron Mahnke with Alaina Urquhart at Brookline Booksmith
Exhumed
August 4 at 7:30 p.m.
Free
“With Exhumed, Mahnke presents a unique history of the intersection of folklore and science, and how pop culture and both genuine medical advancements and pseudoscience of the time shaped the perspectives of people in 19th century America. From the death of George Washington to Mary Shelley writing Frankenstein, Mahnke leads reads on a fascinating journey through history, touching on methods of mummification, the multifaceted role of executioners, medicine made from corpses, European folklore that traveled across the Atlantic, and so much more.
He reveals that as shocking as Brown’s exhumation might seem, it also reflected surprisingly common attitudes and beliefs about the relationship between the dead and the living, the nature of science and magic, and the fate of a human soul. It all builds to a revelatory understanding of human behavior that continues to this very day.”
Heather Hansman with Julia Sklar at Brookline Booksmith
Fierce Country
August 5 from 7–8 p.m.
Free
“Now, for the first time, outdoor journalist and bestselling author of Powder Days Heather Hansman goes deep into multiple rugged American landscapes to bring three fascinating lives to the forefront of the outdoor movement, affirming their rightful place in the larger story of an evolving American wild.”
Rhonda M. Roorda at Harvard Book Store
Torn from the Root: A Memoir of a Black Transracial Adoptee
August 6 at 7 p.m.
Free
“Rhonda Roorda masterfully weaves her personal search for identity with powerful scholarship. As an adoptee approaching eighty years of life, I know what it means to be ‘ripped from the root’ and grafted elsewhere. For transracial adoptees, the challenge deepens—growing up unseen and unmirrored in one’s own home. Torn from the Root is a brave and necessary book about loss, resilience, and identity—and the enduring question of what it costs to belong.”—Dr. Joyce Maguire Pavao, Lecturer in Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School
Joy Nelkin Wieder at Brookline Booksmith
Rosh Hashanah Square-Circle-Star!: A First Shapes Book
August 9 at 10:30 a.m.
Free
“From baking a circular challah to listening to the blast of a spiral shofar to folding triangular napkins for the dinner table, young readers will grasp the concept of shapes as they learn about the Jewish New Year!
With simple but clever rhyming text paired with stylish, appealing art, this is a perfect starter board book for children just beginning to learn core concepts—and it doubles as the ideal Rosh Hashanah gift. The book also includes an age-appropriate explanation of Rosh Hashanah and the ways in which the holiday is celebrated.”
Dave Zirin at Harvard Book Store
The People’s Historian: The Outsized Life of Howard Zinn
August 10 at 7 p.m.
Free
“The People’s Historian shows Zinn’s presence on the great canvases of the 20th century: from the Depression to World War II to the Civil Rights Movement to the war in Vietnam all the way until his death in 2010. With intimately researched stories from Zinn’s life and career, such as the way Atlanta’s small Spelman College, where Zinn taught as a young professor, helped launch the Civil Rights Movement, Zinn’s work traveling to Hanoi to engineer the release of POWs, and his continuing influence in the emerging Democratic Socialist movement, The People’s Historian explores Zinn’s past while also demonstrating how his 75 years of political engagement with the social struggles of his time informs our perilous present.”
Téa Obreht in conversation with Allegra Goodman at Porter Square Books
Sunrise: A Novel
August 11 at 7 p.m.
Free
“In 2024, Nina’s small-engine plane crashes into a lake in the Wyoming mountains. Her boyfriend Ben, who was flying it, is nowhere to be found. Lost and freezing on the shore, Nina is armed with only a few old protein bars, a phone with no service, and a vague hope of rescue. It is up to her to survive in the vast wilderness. But then she stumbles upon Sunrise—a town of the Old West that is strangely well maintained, but seemingly abandoned. A place that holds the missing link to a ghost story one hundred years in the making.
These three strangers are separated by time and circumstance. But Sunrise’s many secrets are like gunpowder: quiet, contained, until they encounter a spark. Magisterial and suspenseful, Téa Obreht’s novel Sunrise challenges the myths we think we know: of heroes and villains, of the people and places to which we lay claim, and, most of all, of our own lives.”
Clay McLeod Chapman with Kylie Lee Baker at Brookline Booksmith
Devil Inside
August 13 at 7 p.m.
Free
“A man who’s back from the dead meets a woman who’s from somewhere even worse in Clay McLeod Chapman’s new horrormance about love, possession, and just a little murder.”
Summer Grown Up Book Fair at Trillium Brewing!, presented by Porter Square Books
August 16 from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m.
Trillium Brewing~Fort Point Location, 50 Thompson Place, Boston, MA 02210
Free
“Join us on Sunday, August 16th from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. at Trillium Brewing’s Fort Point location for a Grown Up Book Fair! This Summer Grown Up Book Fair will have everything you love about school book fairs, including all of those fun gift-y items like stickers and funky pens, plus beer!”
— Matt Hanson
Tagged: Bill-Marx, Jon Blumhofer, Jon Garelick, Peg Aloi, peter-Walsh
