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.

Film

Roxbury International Film Festival
Through June 25
Multiple Locations

RIFF is dedicated to celebrating films by, for, and about people of color around the world. This year there are 100 features and short films. There will be Q&A sessions with filmmakers, daily script reads, hangouts, panels, and more. There will also be several free screenings and special events. Film Schedule. Listing of all events. List of Films & Shorts

A scene from Funeral Parade of Roses

Queer Cinema
June 22–July 14
Coolidge Corner Theatre, Brookline

The series highlights five films in the queer canon “that both negotiate and play with mysterious perceptions, transparencies, disguises, and manifestations.”

Funeral Parade of Roses (6/22)

Querelle (6/30)

All About My Mother (7/7)

The Peoples Joker (7/14)

We Are Guardians
June 25 at 7 p.m.
Regent Theatre, Arlington

“In the heart of the Amazon Rainforest, the Indigenous forest guardians stand at the frontlines of the fight to protect their ancestral lands from relentless invasions and deforestation. As more and more people illegally invade their lands each year, devastating centuries-old forests for resources and fast profits, these small groups of guardians risk everything to protect their forest and way of life. We Are Guardians offers an intimate portrayal of the lives ensnared within this crisis, bringing a multitude of voices from this complex landscape to the forefront.”

A scene from Twinless. Photo: Lionsgate

Nantucket Film Festival
June 25–30

The festival will open with Twinless, a story about men who form an unlikely friendship after meeting in a twin bereavement support group, and Prime Minister, a documentary that tells the story of former New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern and her five years in power. The Centerpiece selection is National Geographic’s Jaws @ 50: The Definitive Inside Story. Ben Stiller will return to the festival to host the All-Star Comedy Roundtable. “Flipping the Script: Bestsellers to Screen” will feature Ken Burns and Nathaniel Philbrick. The signature celebration, “Screenwriters Tribute,” honors Andor creator Tony Gilroy, documentary director Alex Gibney, and writer Joanna Calo (The Bear and Thunderbolts).

70 mm Widescreen Festival
June 26–30
Somerville Theatre in Davis Square

Checked linked titles for time, dates, and descriptions

2001:A Space Odyssey (6/26)

Harakiri (6/27)

The Sword of Doom (6/27)

Hunt for Red October (6/28)

Always (6/29)

Far and Away (6/29)

Lawrence of Arabia (6/30)

A scene from Nobuhiko Ôbayashi’s His Motorbike, Her Island.

Japan’s Pop Art Renegade: Nobuhiko Ôbayashi x5
Jun 27–30
Brattle Theatre, Cambridge

Ôbayashi made a series of experimental films in the ’60s, thousands of television commercials in the ’70s, a string of coming-of-age movies starring pop “idols” in the ’80s, and a war trilogy in the 2010s before his final feature, Labyrinth of Cinema. Obayashi’s themes cannot be separated from his aesthetics: he explores “nostalgia and memory through imaginative coming-of-age films that champion surrealism and wonder.” (Philadelphia Film Forum) A rare screening of five of his films:

Hausu (House) (6/27)

The Girl Who Leapt Through Time (6/28)

School in the Crosshairs (6/28)

The Island Closest to Heaven (6/29)

His Motorbike, Her Island on (6/29)

The Kids Are Alright
June 28 at 9 p.m.
Regent Theatre, Arlington

The legendary 1979 rockumentary film about The Who, The Kids Are Alright, includes live performances, promotional shorts, and interviews from 1964 to 1978. Plus, the band’s last performance with longtime drummer Keith Moon, filmed at Shepperton Studios in May 1978, three months before his death. A live Q&A with filmmaker Jeff Stein follows the screening.

— Tim Jackson

A scene from Naruse Mikio’s 1955 film Floating Clouds. Photo: HFA

Floating Clouds… The Cinema of Naruse Mikio screening at the Harvard Film Archive, July 5 through November 3.

A generous retrospective of the films made by a Japanese filmmaker Harvard Film Archive calls “still underrated and underappreciated.” Here is what the Arts Fuse‘s Betsy Sherman wrote about the HFA’s 2005 Centennial Tribute to a “Japanese master” who spotlit “the plight of women on the margins of society”: “Was he a precursor to Lars Von Trier, who seems to take sadistic delight in putting his female protagonists through the wringer? Or was Naruse an artist of rare courage, who could depict the pitfalls of desire while retaining a respect for those who fall prey to it?”

— Bill Marx

Pick of the Week

When Fall Is Coming, streaming on Amazon Prime

Hélène Vincent in When Fall Is Coming. Photo: Film Forum

It is a shameful mystery that superior foreign films receive such limited distribution. François Ozon’s gorgeous film appears to have gone to streaming after a sparse theatrical run last spring. This “high-key melodrama in a low-key register” is among the director’s most satisfying films, its surprising plot twists flying in unexpected new directions, triggered by arbitrary cruelty, the vicissitudes of fate, and the unpredictability of human nature. The brilliant puzzle of a narrative will leave you stunned and begging for a sequel. Arts Fuse review

— Tim Jackson

Theater

Out of Character written & performed by Ari’el Stachel. Directed by Tony Taccone. Berkshire Theatre Group Presents a Berkeley Repertory Theatre staging at the Unicorn Theatre, 6 East Street, Stockbridge, June 30 through July 26.

“This one-person solo play takes audiences on an intimate journey through identity, mental health, and self-acceptance.”

Que Diablos! Fausto, adapted by Jesús Valles from Christopher Marlowe’s play, Doctor Faustus. Directed by Armando Rivera. A Teatro en El Verano touring production that will be performed in parks across the state of Rhode Island, including Payne Park, Dexter Park, Roger Williams Park, Jenks Park, and more, July 5 through August 1.

“In the depths of the earth between heaven and hell, demons and humans fiercely fight for souls. One such human, Faust, lets his desire for knowledge and power lead him into a deal with the devil himself! A darkly comedic, bilingual take on the 17th-century classic.”

The Victim by Lawrence Goodman. Directed by Daniel Gidron. Staged by Shakespeare & Company at 70 Kemble Street, Lenox, MA, through July 20.

A description of the play according to the Shakes & Co website: “A successful New York doctor whose racial diversity training has gone horribly wrong. A health aide grappling with racism during the COVID-19 pandemic. A Holocaust survivor facing her own horror, and finding her way back to love and healing. Three women, three interconnected monologues. Who gets to call herself a victim? Who is the perpetrator?”

Christiani Pitts (Robin) and Sam Tutty (Dougal) in rehearsal for A.R.T.’s North American premiere of Two Strangers (Carry a Cake Across New York). Photo: Nile Scott Studios

Two Strangers (Carry a Cake Across New York), written and composed by Jim Barne and Kit Buchan. Directed and choreographed by Tim Jackson. American Repertory Theater production at the Loeb Drama Center, Cambridge, through June 29.

Christiani Pitts and Sam Tutty star in this staging of a West End hit. The sitcom-inspired plot: “A naïve and impossibly upbeat Brit, Dougal, has just landed in New York for his dad’s second wedding — the dad he’s never known. Robin, the sister of the bride, is at the airport to pick him up — and she’s late for work. Hungry for an adventure in the city he’s only seen in movies, Dougal hopes native New Yorker Robin will be his guide. ” Arts Fuse review

4th Annual Boston New Works Festival at the Calderwood Pavilion and the Boston Center for the Arts, 539 Tremont Street, June 26 through 29.

“A weekend long festival celebrating new original plays by local playwrights. The scripts selected for this year’s festival will be performed on five different stages. From the over 50 submissions, Moonbox’s diverse panel of judges chose seven original theatrical pieces for this year’s festival, which will include three mainstage plays and four readings. In addition to the plays, there will be interactive dance performances throughout the weekend and an art installation featuring local artists from Boston and the surrounding areas.”

QUEER [RE]PUBLIC FESTIVAL presented by The Theater Offensive (TTO), Boston’s cultural organization for queer and trans people of color (QTBIPOC) at Arrow Street Arts, 2 Arrow Street, Cambridge, June 26 through 29.

“A groundbreaking four-day celebration of art and performance by and about queer and trans artists of color. The Festival is anchored by three artistic projects: Victoria Lynn Awkward’s dance work In the Space Between; Cheyenne Wyzzard-Jones’s play The Messenger; and Annalise “River” Guidry’s multi-part collective “world-building practice” Theater of Union.”

Melinda Lopez and Luz Lopez in the Central Square Theater production of Mrs. Warren’s Profession. Photo: Nile Scott Studios.

Mrs. Warren’s Profession by George Bernard Shaw. Directed by Eric Tucker. Staged by Central Square Theater at 450 Massachusetts Avenue, Cambridge, through June 29.

I am looking forward to this production. Tucker and Bedlam have a flamboyantly effective way with GBS — a fabulous Saint Joan a few years ago sticks in my mind. An expert cast includes veterans Barlow Adamson, Melinda Lopez, Nael Nacer, and Wesley Savick. As for the 1902 play, it is GBS’s first masterpiece, its provocative thesis dramatized by multidimensional characters. From a 1927 interview, “Shaw Looks at Life at 70”: “Until we free the marriage relation from economic entanglements and from sentimental hocus-pocus, the revolting custom of husband hunting cannot be eradicated. Suffrage, while giving political freedom to woman, does not break her economic chains. Until we sublimate the marriage relation, the difference between marriage and Mrs. Warren’s Profession [owner of a chain of brothels] remains the difference between union labour and scab labour.” Arts Fuse review

The Bohemian, adapted from Willa Cather’s short story “The Bohemian Girl.” Directed by Brenda Withers. Staged by Harbor Stage, 15 Kendrick Ave, Wellfleet, through July 5.

A stage adaptation of an early Willa Cather story, first published in McClure’s in August 1912. Critics classify it as Cather’s first mature work to explore the Nebraska immigrant experience, anticipating themes and characters she would later develop in her celebrated novels like O Pioneers! and My Ántonia. The tale has also inspired an opera. According to the Harbor Stage website: “Ten years after striking out on his own, Nils Ericson returns home in search of what he left behind: the land he knew, the family he confounds, and the girl he (almost) lost.”

Blues for an Alabama Sky by Pearl Cleage. Directed by Jackie Davis. Staged by Trinity Repertory Company at the Dowling Theatre, 201 Washington St., Providence, through June 29.

The plot of this 1995 drama, according to the Trinity Rep website: “It’s 1930 in New York City, and Harlem is sizzling. The summer heat and sultry jazz records set the backdrop as the explosive creativity of the Harlem Renaissance bleeds into the struggle of the Great Depression. And in one small apartment complex, four friends’ lives change forever upon the arrival of a mysterious stranger from Alabama.”

A scene from the Bread & Puppet production of Oh You Beast Descendants. Photo: Facebook

Oh You Beast Descendants, written and performed by Bread & Puppet Theater in the Paper Maché Cathedral at the Bread & Puppet Farm, Glover, VT, Fridays through June.

Here is the description of the show on the Bread & Puppet website: “We human beasts, descendants of revenge and elimination gods, and of the gods of love who preach by killing love, how can we survive while our very own evil empire promotes incinerations and starvation warfare and supreme inhumanity is performed in front of our eyes? We, the numerous people here on the face of the earth, we occupants of not knowing where else to be, living in the jungle of beastly minutes, need Mother Dirt to rebirth our joy muscles, strip us of our horror inhumanity, and make water and bread of life obligatory.”

Magdalene by Mark St. Germain. Directed by Keira Naughton. Staged by Chester Theatre Company at the Town Hall Theatre, 15 Middlefield Road, Chester, through June 29.

The biblical plot: eighteen years after the death of Christ, Peter seeks out Mary Magdalene, whom he banished after the crucifixion. Peter needs an ally against a self-proclaimed Apostle angling for power in the growing church. Adam LeFevre and Danielle Skraastad star.

Liza Giangrande and Patrick O’Konis in Gloucester Stage company’s production of The Glass Menagerie. Photo: Shawn Henry

The Glass Menagerie by Tennessee Williams. Directed by Doug Lockwood. Staged by Gloucester Stage Company at 267 East Main Street, Gloucester, through June 28.

From the director: “This is a play whose characters and language have haunted me from the first time I ever read it. As a director, rather than run away from this feeling, I have learned to lean into it, and to get the chance to do so with these incredible actors and designers in this magical theatre on the harbor just feels really, really right.” The cast includes De’Lon Grant, Adrianne Krstansky, Patrick O’Konis, and Liza Giangrande.

Shake It Up: A Shakespeare Cabaret co-created by Allyn Burrows and Jacob Ming-Trent, directed by Allyn Burrows. Staged by Shakespeare and Company at the Tina Packer Playhouse, Lenox, July 1 through 6.

The reprise of “a mash-up of modern music and Shakespeare verse.” The cast includes Jennifer Apple, Gregory Boover, and Johnny Irion.

A Hundred Words for Snow by Tatty Hennessy. Directed by Michelle Ong-Hendrick. Staged by Chester Theatre at Town Hall Theatre, 15 Middlefield Road, Chester, MA, July 3 through 13.

The plot: “after her father’s unexpected death, 15-year-old Rory discovers that he was planning a trip for the two of them to the North Pole. So, she picks up his ashes, her passport, and her mother’s credit card, and sets out to make good on his plans.”

— Bill Marx

Visual Art

Before Mrs. Gardner collected art, she made gardens. She once described her garden at Green Hill, her estate in Brookline, Massachusetts, as “riotous, unholy, deliriously glorious!” When she began to plan Fenway Court to house her Boston home, her art collections, and eventually her museum, she made a garden the center of it — the now beloved courtyard garden of the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. Mrs. Gardner planned every detail, to bloom perpetually, long after her death. A series of special exhibitions this summer at the museum explore Isabella’s other obsession and the deeper nature and meaning of gardens. Two more open on June 26.

Ming Fay, Buckeye, 1982. Photo: Courtesy of the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum

Gardens have a long history in the human imagination. It is no accident that the first human story in the Bible takes place in one. Ming Fay (1945–2025), part of the Chinese diaspora in the United States, took on the idea, the history, and heritage of the garden in outsized sculptures of fruits, seeds, shells, and hybrid plants — gardens of papier-mâché, bronze, and ceramic. The Gardner’s Ming Fay: Edge of the Garden presents work that “reconsiders gardens as sites of creative potential that reflect the lives and desires of those who cultivate them.” That seems very much in keeping with Mrs. Gardner’s experience.

Flowers for Isabella is a kind of self-portrait as a garden. Hung just outside the Gardner’s courtyard garden, the exhibition includes archival materials and art works from the collection, depicting four of the (no puns please) gardener-collector’s favorite flowers: irises, peonies, chrysanthemums, and nasturtiums.

The rest of the exhibitions in this preview all open on June 28, in anticipation, no doubt, of the July 4th weekend the following week, and the height of the summer tourist season that comes after.

Nancy Friese, Lieutenant River Shore, 2010. Watercolor on paper mounted on linen, 40 x 60 in. Florence Griswold Museum, Purchased with an anonymous gift

The Florence Griswold Museum in Old Lyme, Connecticut, opens two exhibitions focused on the out-of-doors. Nancy Friese: Living Landscapes features the work of a painter and printmaker whose landscapes, usually created over multiple visits to protected places like botanical gardens or, in 2010, the artist’s colony gardens of the Griswold Museum, are dense with details and a rich range of colors.

Following a long tradition going back to the 17th-century Netherlands, Cow Tales, drawn from the museum’s permanent collections, features some 30 compelling works depicting cows in their classic, rural bovine glory. The works on view range from the mid-19th century to the present ,with a focus on paintings by members of the Lyme Art Colony (1900-1937). Artists include George Henry Durrie, Aaron Draper Shattuck, Matilda Brown, Tina Barney, and Brian Keith Stephens.

MassMOCA’s New York State of Mind is the latest in a series of exhibitions of music photography. This edition features images of the riotous music scene in New York City during the 30-year span of 1969 to 1999. This era included Woodstock, Max’s Kansas City, St. Mark’s Place, and Times Square, out to the outer boroughs, where Madonna had her first show and Joey Ramone once walked the beach at Coney Island with a surfboard. Other musicians with images in the show include Iggy Pop, Lou Reed, David Bowie, Joan Baez, Bruce Springsteen, Patti Smith, and Tom Waits.

The Fuller Craft Museum in Brockton opens Soul of a Nation: Voices of Resilience in Ukrainian Folk Art, an exhibition celebrating traditional Ukrainian crafts and “enduring creative spirit,” both of which, the museum says, play key roles as acts of resistance and cultural preservation. Exhibits include the vivid colors, floral motifs, and geometric patterns of hand-painted pysanka (Easter Eggs), Zaporizhzhya (embroidered textiles), Crimean-Tatar ceramics, Hutsul wood art, and Petrykivka painting.

Gordon Parks, Dinner time at Mr. Hercules Brown’s home in Somerville, Maine, 1944. Photo: Courtesy of the Gordon Parks Foundation

Finally, three rather nostalgic shows opening at the Bowdoin College Museum of Art explore the various landscapes of the State of Maine over a range of decades. Rudy Burckhardt: Three Maine Films screens three pieces the artist shot near his midcoast home: Daisy (1966), The Apple (1967), and Caterpillar (1973), short works that reveal, the museum says, “the playful, contemplative, and collaborative aspects of the artist’s work” in the natural Maine landscape.

John McKee: As Maine Goes revisits and updates a 1966 exhibition at the Bowdoin Museum drawn from a series of black-and-white photographs revealing the environmental degradation of Maine’s coast: pollution, seaside dumps, and rapid development. The refresh, the museum says, “is no less relevant in the face of the changing climate and its impact on Maine.”

The 65 photographs in Gordon Parks: Herklas Brown and Maine, 1944, are images the legendary American photographer made of the owner of the general store and Esso gas station in Somerville, Maine, at the height of World War II. Made before Parks joined Life magazine in 1948, the show highlights an early chapter in Parks’s career, before he began to attract the wider recognition his work enjoys today.

— Peter Walsh

Roots and World Music

Ukrainian rock band Vopli Vidopliassova marks its 40th anniversary this year. Photo: Courtesy of the artist

Vopli Vidopliassova
June 24
Middle East Downstairs, Cambridge

Long one of Ukraine’s biggest rock bands, this outfit — who took their name from a character in a Dostoevsky novel — is returning to the US for the first time in a decade in celebration of its 40th anniversary. Over that time, the group has been influenced by everything from traditional Ukrainian folk to industrial and electronic music. When founding members lead singer Oleh Skrypka and drummer Serhiy Sakhno started the band, Ukraine was still part of the Soviet Union. Today the country is fighting for its survival and autonomy. A silent auction will benefit Kraina Mriy, a festival and humanitarian charity founded by Skrypka.

BAMSFest
June 28
Franklin Park Playstead

This celebration caps the annual Black Music Month. The Saturday festival in Franklin Park includes soul diva Lalah Hathaway, hip-hop poets Little Brother, pan-Caribbean masters Roots Alley Collective, the unstoppable energy of DJ Whysham and Boston hip-hop pioneer Edo.G. No one will be turned away, but, given that corporate funding for Black culture is being withdrawn, organizers request that attendees show their support by registering for a pay-what-you-can “Solidarity Ticket.” The Franklin Park festival is one entry in a series of BAMSFest Momentum events, which also include screenings of films about Little Brother and BAMSFest itself, a fashion show, a female DJ night, a dance party, and much more.

Master of the Ghanaian highlife sound — Gyedu-Blay Ambolley. Photo: Agogo Records

Gyedu-Blay Ambolley
July 1
Crystal Ballroom at Somerville Theatre

In the mid-’70s, Ambolley helped pioneer the glorious Ghanaian highlife sound. He’s been rarely seen in these parts, but thanks to the Jazz is Dead crew, he’s mounting a US tour with his eight-piece band during which he will be performing his debut LP Simigwa in its entirety. This show was rescheduled from last year, and for fans of West African music it should be well worth the wait.

— Noah Schaffer

Popular Music

The Gruesomes with Muck and the Mires and The Chelsea Curve
June 27 (doors at 7)
Middle East Upstairs, Cambridge

A triple-bill of expert garage/mod/punk-style retro rock purveyors will arrive atop the Middle East on June 27 to celebrate their past, present, and future. Leading off will be the Jam-inspired Boston trio The Chelsea Curve, who will be releasing a deluxe edition of its debut, All the Things (And More) (which cleverly puns on the title of a two-volume Ramones compilation) that day. Up next will be the first stateside gig for Muck and the Mires since the Beantown quartet launched Beat Revolution in April. Finally, the Montreal-spawned The Gruesomes (named after the titular family on a 1964 episode of The Flintstones) will draw from their late-80s catalog of undilutably pure garage rock, as well as from 2001 reunion album, Cave-In, of which Alien Snatch! Records recently reissued a 20^th anniversary edition.

Friendship and 2nd Grade with Jake McKelvie
June 28 (doors at 7/show at 8)
Deep Cuts, Medford

I forget exactly how I happened upon 2^nd Grade, but I am glad that I did. Their latest release at the time, the 23-track/39-minute Scheduled Explosions, was good enough to earn itself a spot among my 2024 favorites. To get an idea of the sound that singer, songwriter, and multi-instrumentalist Peter Gill is going for, imagine his seven favorite Beach Boys albums – which range chronologically from Shut Down, Volume 2 to Love You – filtered through a Guided by Voices aesthetic.

Like 2^nd Grade, Friendship is based in Philadelphia. However, it was formed in Yarmouth, Maine. And while Gill is a member of both, Friendship is the creative vehicle for Dan Wriggins, who sings in a solemn and deliberate manner that recalls Lou Reed and Jonathan Richman and are a world away from Brian Wilson  (RIP) and Robert Pollard. Some of the 11 songs on Friendship’s new release, Caveman Wakes Up, are borderline funereal. The contrast between these two bands brings to mind Tom Waits’ comparison of his simultaneous 2002 releases Alice and Blood Money to “a photograph and a negative”. Worcester-based Jake McKelvie will take the stage first, adding a folky, Americana-flavored element that will make this bill a uniquely diverse one.

Florry with Clifford
June 29 (doors at 7/show at 8)
Deep Cuts, Medford

The Deep Cuts air will still be thick with the aural aroma of the Philly indie scene when Florry arrives to add another layer on June 29. Fronted by Francie Medosch (who recently relocated to Burlington, Vermont), Florry – whose namesake is a character in A Tree Grows in Brooklyn – will follow quickly on the heels of its fellow Philadelphians when they arrive in Medford Square to showcase Sounds Like…, which hit stores on May 23. Along with Medosch’s voice, the band’s use of pedal steel guitar and fiddle gives their songs a distinct country feel, and pretty rockin’ one to be sure.

Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs
June 29 (doors at 7/show at 8)
Brighton Music Hall, Allston

Heavy, sludgy stoner rock out of Newcastle-Upon-Tyne, “PigsX7” (maybe every other number of “Pigs” was already taken), dropped Death Hilarious in January. The LP’s title along with songs called “Blockage”, “Stitches”, and “Toecurler” give a good indication of album’s tone. Interestingly, “Glib Tongued” is a collaboration with rapper El-P. Earplugs recommended for those in attendance at BMH on June 29.

Lifeguard with PARKiNG
July 8 (doors at 7/show at 8)
Deep Cuts, Medford

Lifeguard is a trio of youngsters from Chicago whose debut LP, Ripped and Torn, will have just turned one month old when they play Deep Cuts on July 8. The band has worked its way up to this record over the past five year via several EPs and singles, including an inspired cover of The Jam’s “In the City.” (This alone was enough to pique my interest.) While this is partly indicative of Lifeguard’s sound, they mine genres such as post-punk and noise rock with equal aplomb. Louisville triad PARKiNG will open with songs from their 2-1/2-week old debut PORTRAiTS.

— Blake Maddux

Jazz

Bruce Gertz Quintet
June 24 at 8 p.m.
Lilypad, Cambridge

The veteran bassist and composer Bruce Gertz leads a superb ensemble in his progressive post-bop style — trumpeter/flugelhornist Phil Grenadier, tenor sax Rick DiMuzio, pianist Gilson Schachnik, and drummer Austin McMahon.

A look at the crowd at the Festival International de Jazz de Montréal. Photo: Frédérique Ménard-Aubin

Festival International de Jazz de Montréal
June 26–July 5
Montréal, Quebec

Five hours (by car) takes you to the 45th edition of the Festival International de Jazz de Montréal, a huge event that takes over the city in multiple venues, indoors and out, this year boasting 367 artists over the course of 10 days. Two-thirds of the 350 shows are free. (I’ll always fondly recall a free performance by the Hank Jones Trio in a lovely little theater.) This year, as usual, there are plenty of big names — Wynton, Branford, Rhiannon, Samara, Vijay with Wadada, the usual crossover mix (Nas, Thundercat, Violent Femmes), and plenty of talented Canadian artists you may not have heard of, including those in a gala centennial tribute to Montréal native son Oscar Peterson. Among the free shows are esperanza spalding, Mavis Staples, Trombone Shorty, Nubya Garcia, Brandon Woody, Marquis Hill, the Sun Ra Arkestra, Christine Jensen, and Linda May Han Oh.

Evan Arntzen will be part of the Rhythm Future Quartet mix at the Regattabar. Photo: Courtesy of the artist

Rhythm Future Quartet
June 26 at 7:30 p.m.
Regattabar, Cambridge

The Rhythm Future Quartet, led by violinist Jason Anick, carries on with their updating of the virtuoso style of “Gypsy jazz” created by Django Reinhardt with Stephane Grappelli. Rhythm Future is rounded out by guitarists Max O’Rourke and Henry Acker, bassist Greg Loughman, and, for this show, the young swing jazz clarinetist, saxophonist, and singer Evan Arntzen. Arntzen’s true-blue New Orleans style should be a welcome ingredient in the Rhythm Future mix. Aside from his unfussy clarinet, he has a disarming vocal style (heard on Sidney Bechet’s “Georgia Cabin”), which the late Dan Morgenstern called “gratifyingly unaffected and unpretentious.”

Saxophonist and composer Joshua Redman is back with a new band. Photo: Zack Smith

Joshua Redman Quartet
June 27 at 8 p.m.
Groton Hill Music Center, Groton, MA

After a couple of seasons of touring behind his 2023 masterpiece where are we, saxophonist and composer Joshua Redman is back with a new band, and a new album, Words Fall Short. He’s joined by two of the players from that album, pianist Paul Cornish and drummer Nazir Ebo, along with the great bassist Larry Grenadier (in for Philip Norris).

The Art of Cuban Piano
July 1 at 8 p.m.
Lilypad, Cambridge

Cuban pianists Anibal Cruz and Zahili Zamora front a series of duets with flutist Melvin Lamented and singer Barbara Zamora.

Point01 Percent
July 8 at 7:30 p.m.
Lilypad, Cambridge

A very special opening act in this edition of the Point01 Percent residency: accordionist Ted Reichman, who has had long tenures in the bands of Anthony Braxton (a former teacher) and John Hollenbeck’s Claudia Quintet, and the Bogotá-born guitarist Lautaro Mantilla, who augments his playing with extended vocal techniques and electronics. They’re followed by Point01 (and Driff Records) regulars Blink, with saxophonist Jorrit Dijkstra, guitarists Eric Hofbauer and Gabe Boyarin, bassist Nathan McBride, and drummer Eric Rosenthal.

— Jon Garelick

Classical Music

To the People Like Us
Presented by White Snake Projects
June 28, 2 p.m. & 7 p.m.
Strand Theater, Dorchester

Boston’s “activist opera” troupe presents a new opera by composer Jorge Sosa with a libretto by students from 826 Boston that focuses on gentrification and the climate crisis. The cast consists of soprano Nina Evelyn, mezzo-sopranos Linda Martitza Collazo and Melissa Bonetti Luna, and tenor Jesús Daniel Hérnandez. Tianhui Ng conducts. Read Arts Fuse preview/interview

The Dreams and Requiems of German Music
Presented by Rockport Music
June 29, 5 p.m.
Shalin Liu Performance Center, Rockport, MA

Former Boston Globe music critic Jeremy Eichler and A Far Cry team up for a concert drawn from his exceptional book, Time’s Echo, that features music by Bach, Mendelssohn, and Richard Strauss.

Andris Nelsons leads Daniil Trifonov and the BSO in Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto No. 3 in D minor. Photo: Hilary Scott

Trifonov plays Rachmaninoff
Presented by Boston Symphony Orchestra
Koussevitzky Shed, Lenox
July 5, 8 p.m.

Andris Nelsons and the BSO kick off their Tanglewood season with an all-Rachmaninoff concert featuring the one-and-only Daniil Trifonov playing that composer’s Piano Concerto No. 3. The Symphonic Dances round out the evening.

Bronfman plays Beethoven
Presented by Boston Symphony Orchestra
Koussevitzky Shed, Lenox
July 6, 8 p.m.

Pianist Yefim Bronfman joins Nelsons and the BSO for an all-Beethoven night built around the Piano Concerto No. 3. Also on the docket are the Leonore Overture No. 2 and Symphony No. 5.

— Jonathan Blumhofer

Author Events

Madeleine Thien and Jonas Hassen Khemiri in Conversation with Lewis Hyde at Harvard Book Store
The Book of Records: A Novel and The Sisters: A Novel
June 24 at 7 p.m.
Free

“Rich, ambitious, and utterly engrossing, The Book of Records is at once a Borgesian meditation on Time’s overlapping folds, and a complex, moving feat of human storytelling. Madeleine Thien is an extraordinary novelist.” –Claire Messud, author of This Strange Eventful History

Mike Curato in Conversation with Malinda Lo at Brookline Booksmith
Gaysians
June 25 at 7 p.m.
Free

“Meticulously observed and gorgeously illustrated, Gaysians is a fierce, funny, and tender story of queer resilience and self-discovery. ‘I’ve been hunting for books like this my whole life; this story broke my heart and healed it’ – Maia Kobabe, author of Gender Queer”

Kate Marvel at The Brattle Theatre – Harvard Book Store
Human Nature: Nine Ways to Feel About Our Changing Planet
June 25 at 6 p.m.
Tickets are $31.88 with book, $5 without

“Human Nature is a deeply felt inquiry into our rapidly changing Earth. In each chapter, Marvel uses a different emotion to explore the science and stories behind climate change. As expected, there is anger, fear, and grief — but also wonder, hope, and love. With her singular voice, Marvel takes us on a soaring journey, one filled with mythology, physics, witchcraft, bad movies, volcanoes, Roman emperors, sequoia groves, and the many small miracles of nature we usually take for granted. Hopeful, heartbreaking, and surprisingly funny, Human Nature is a vital, wondrous exploration of how it feels to live in a changing world.”

Third Thursdays Poetry: Rob Macaisa Colgate & Nadia Alexis at Brookline Booksmith
June 26 at 7 p.m.
Free

“Nadia Alexis is a poet and photographer, born and raised in Harlem to Haitian immigrants. She is the author of Beyond the Watershed, a hybrid collection which was also a finalist for the 2022 Ghost Peach Press Prize. Rob Macaisa Colgate is a disabled, bakla, Filipino American poet from Evanston, Illinois. Hardly Creatures (Tin House) is his debut collection. He received an MFA in poetry and critical disability studies from UT Austin.”

Alex Beam at Harvard Book Store
Wallace Stegner: Dean of Western Writers
July 1 at 7 p.m.
Free

“In a career that spanned half a century, Stegner wrote fourteen novels and seventeen works of nonfiction. Reared on the Canadian-American frontier and educated in Salt Lake City, Utah, this quintessential Man of the West won both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. He landed a coveted teaching job at Harvard but, eager to get back to the West, left it for a professorship at Stanford.

“Stegner was a full-throated environmentalist who served on the board of the Sierra Club, worked for the Secretary of the Interior, and wrote the famous Wilderness Letter on the healing power of open spaces. He founded Stanford University’s legendary Stegner Writing Fellowship, where his students included Edward Abbey, Wendell Berry, Ken Kesey, Larry McMurtry, Sandra Day O’Connor, Tillie Olsen, and Scott Turow.

“In his later years Stegner wondered if he had lived too deep into the wrong century. He left Stanford when he felt students no longer accorded professors the respect they deserved, and later became embroiled in a plagiarism scandal that tarred his Pulitzer Prize-winning Angle of Repose.”

Peter Mendelsund at Porter Square Books
Exhibitionist and Weepers
July 1 at 7 p.m.
Cambridge Edition, 1815 Mass. Ave, Cambridge
Free

“In the early days of the pandemic, Peter Mendelsund and his family traveled up to a secluded New Hampshire farmhouse to weather the chaos. There began his journey through a crippling and seemingly intractable depression — which differed in degree but not in kind from episodes that have recurred periodically throughout his life — that brought him to the brink of suicide.

“Relief came from an unlikely source: painting, something Peter had never contemplated doing before. And yet it became the thing that may very well have saved his life. Bleakly funny, profoundly moving, and — against all odds — truly inspiring, Exhibitionist is not just an account of a mind thinking through its own suffering in real-time, and of the author’s reckoning with his father’s tortured legacy; it’s also the story of the birth of an artist, and a portrait of an artist at work.”

Christopher Shaw Myers at Harvard Book Store
Robert Shaw: An Actor’s Life on the Set of JAWS and Beyond
July 7 at 7 p.m.
Free

“I have seen very few movies more captivating than Jaws, and very few actors more captivating than Robert Shaw. This book provides fascinating insight into a legend and his most legendary work.” —Mike Greenberg, ESPN anchor, author of Why My Wife Thinks I’m An Idiot and the novels My Father’s Wives and All You Could Ask For.

— Matt Hanson