A Wondrous Array of Boundary Pushers at SummerStage
This year, City Parks Foundation SummerStage celebrates its landmark fortieth anniversary by bringing a wide and wondrous array of free shows to more than a dozen parks across the five boroughs, including Central Park. With the festival already in full swing, many of the most exciting acts are yet to come. Kicking off an exceptional run of shows is the avant-garde artist Laurie Anderson (June 26), backed by the jazz quartet Sexmob, for the multidisciplinary performance “Republic of Love,” presented as a meditation on the state of the union and doubling as a reimagining of key Anderson works. Other boundary pushers join the festivities: the soul revivalists Bilal and GENA (July 12), the American fixture Mavis Staples (July 16), the West African icon Angélique Kidjo (Aug. 23).
Throughout the summer, audiences of diverse taste gather in collective support of a rich, collated music scene. In jazz, the mavericks SHABAKA and Kokoroko break the ice (July 1), before several shows held in conjunction with the Charlie Parker Jazz Festival: the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra (Aug. 28); the saxophonist Joshua Redman with the pianist Nat Adderley, Jr. (Aug. 29); and the saxophonist Ravi Coltrane, the drummer Kassa Overall, and the vocalist Vanisha Gould (Aug. 30). In rock, the Austin indie band Spoon is co-billed alongside Ratboys (July 8), and Andrew Bird performs with the Wordless Music Orchestra, for the twentieth anniversary of his album “The Mysterious Production of Eggs” (Aug. 6). And, in hip-hop, such home-town m.c.s as MIKE, Max B (July 11), De La Soul (July 17), and Doug E. Fresh (July 31) lead homages to rap mecca.—Sheldon Pearce
About Town
The new dramedy “The Audacity,” on AMC, offers a panoramic critique of Silicon Valley’s particular form of trickle-down rot. Duncan Park (Billy Magnussen) is the C.E.O. of a data-mining startup called Hypergnosis, whose latest project—a program described as “God’s eye”—collects intimate details about people, including the man whom Duncan’s wife, Lili (Lucy Punch), just slept with (they have an open marriage), and Duncan’s financially strapped therapist, JoAnne (Sarah Goldberg), who rationalizes her insider trading. The tech is terrifying, but it’s treated matter-of-factly, played for barked laughs. “The Audacity” ’s focus on data harvesting gives the show its strange verve, born of a conviction that it can make this perpetually overlooked issue an object of emotional investment. Its satirical aim feels spot-on.—Inkoo Kang (Now streaming.)
The modern pop paradigm has been greatly influenced by Jack Antonoff, the producer du jour who cut his teeth in such bands as fun. and Steel Train. He has been prolific and versatile, with a robust set of credits: the singer-songwriters Taylor Swift and Lana Del Rey, the art-rockers St. Vincent and the 1975, and the rappers Kendrick Lamar and Doja Cat. When he isn’t on call for culture-shifters, he maintains his creative autonomy as the front man of Bleachers, a solo project turned full band that has furthered his indie-rock bona fides. On the heels of its confessional new album, “everyone for ten minutes,” Bleachers takes the stage with the special guest Wednesday.—Sheldon Pearce (Madison Square Garden; June 23.)
American Ballet Theatre brings out its biggest, most lavish productions to fill the giant stage at the Metropolitan Opera House. Its season opens and closes with the biggest of them all, “Swan Lake,” to be performed by a slew of its ballerinas, including the young, but already stunningly refined, Chloe Misseldine. (The fiery Catherine Hurlin is her antithesis, all boldness and power.) Then comes “Onegin,” John Cranko’s opulent and fussy take on Pushkin’s novel in verse. The Russian powerhouse Natalia Osipova returns for a single performance of “Don Quixote,” the same ballet in which she emerged with an explosive stage presence and a jump like a colt, with her first company, the Bolshoi. But the pearl of the season is “Sylvia,” Frederick Ashton’s tongue-in-cheek gloss on Greek mythology, to a glistening score by Léo Delibes.—Marina Harss (Metropolitan Opera House; June 17-July 18.)
As the writer and director of “Maddie’s Secret,” John Early parodies previous generations’ disease-of-the-week TV movies with forced antics that play like a comedy sketch inflated to feature-film length. His ingenuity, however, is on bold display in his performance: he stars as Maddie Ralph, a food magazine’s test-kitchen dishwasher who aspires to be a great chef. When her worshipful husband (Eric Rahill) posts videos of her home cooking online, she becomes famous overnight, and the magazine makes her its video star. But colleagues’ cattiness and her own insecurity dredge up traumatic memories and send her spiralling into bulimia. Early portrays Maddie with earnest intensity that yields authentic emotion, but the movie’s satire is meek and its sense of style is both bland and slapdash.—Richard Brody (Opening June 19 in limited release.)
There’s a lot of poignancy and humor in “Knots,” Lucy Sante’s show of collages, which are beautifully displayed in one of the Academy’s stately libraries. Actually, the subversive images, which often feature a female protagonist standing amid world history—one of the strongest shows a chic woman in profile with pursed lips, blowing on an image of Haussmann’s Paris being blown up—are wonderful examples of instances where writing is made visual, and where the visual is a form of writing. Another especially strong piece shows the words “DE LA” and features a man examining a woman’s back, where a large hand print has been left. In these various worlds, Sante focusses on the body, and what history and collage can make, and have already made, of it.—Hilton Als (American Academy of Arts and Letters; through July 3.)
In Satyajit Ray’s emotionally harsh and finely observed melodrama “Days and Nights in the Forest,” from 1970, four educated young men from Kolkata, staring grimly into the maw of middle age amid frustrations in love and work, drive to a remote rural zone for a few days of uninhibited machismo. They flash their cash amid the peasantry, bribe a gatekeeper for use of a bungalow, and drink themselves silly. Then they meet the local gentry, including an unmarried woman of poetic refinement and a still youthful and desperately lonesome widow, and the story of unstrung dissolution turns rapturous and scathing. Ray’s incisive view of the gross inequities of the caste system, a stifling bureaucratic order, and rigid traditions reveals the societal roots of intimate misery.—R.B. (Film Forum; through June 18.)
Pick Three
Rachel Syme on summer cultural happenings.
1. I have lived in New York City for twenty years, and yet there are still parts of it that feel completely foreign to me, one being Roosevelt Island, a two-mile-long slice of fertile land plopped into the East River. Formerly Blackwell’s Island, it was the original home of the city jail, a giant tuberculosis ward, and a crumbling mental asylum (where the journalist Nellie Bly reported her 1887 exposé, “Ten Days in a Mad House”). The modern island still has a strange vibe: there is a tramway, a Gothic lighthouse, and a huge cat sanctuary. And now another mystical attraction: inside Four Freedoms Park, on the island’s southern tip, is a wonderful sound installation by the Finnish artist Hans Rosenström, called “Out of Silence” (through June 21). At the top of every hour, a recording of the Estonian choir Vox Clamantis singing a haunting song a cappella, inspired by the late composer Arvo Pärt, plays throughout the park. Listening to eerie harmonies while watching ships sail past is, for this New Yorker, worth the tram ride.
2. I’m lightly ignoring most two-hundred-and-fiftieth anniversary revelries, but I’ll make an exception for the Museum of the Moving Image’s new series “By the People, for the People” (through July 5), which highlights American films that focus on marginalized communities. I’m particularly excited about “Salt of the Earth” (July 5), a radical drama about a mining strike in small-town New Mexico.
3. Nothing screams summer like a big, boisterous, campy musical. And a fresh Encores! revival of “La Cage aux Folles” (City Center; June 17-28), with an all-Black cast fronted by Billy Porter and Wayne Brady, will be just that.
P.S. Good stuff on the internet: