Julio Torres’s Sea Wench, Qween Jean at Little Island
Can you really say that you’ve seen a summer show in New York City until you’ve sat through at least one performance in brain-liquefying humidity? There are plenty of opportunities: Shakespeare in the Park’s second, and last, main production this season, “The Winter’s Tale,” starring Raúl Esparza and Lily Rabe, starts performances this weekend, and there’s still time to catch “Othello” at Marcus Garvey Park, or “As You Like It” and “King Lear” at Hudson Valley Shakespeare.
Plus, Little Island is just ramping up its suite of shows (July 29-Sept. 6). In past years, the floating venue on the Hudson River has served up bonbons of genre-busting performances. A highlight from two summers ago: Anthony Roth Costanzo single-throatedly taking on all the roles in “The Marriage of Figaro” and projecting his vocal cords onto hulking screens with a laryngoscope. Little Island’s schedule may be sparser this year: Zack Winokur, the producing artistic director, recently announced that “we’re taking this year to rethink our long-term programming plan.” It’s all the more reason to make a Naruto dash to the island’s acts—including Costanzo, putting his uniquely maximalist spin on minimalist music for five nights.
The amphitheatre lineup also includes a performance from the cabaret legend Justin Vivian Bond; an acoustic celebration of the Harlem Renaissance, curated by Louis Cato (formerly of “The Late Show”); Qween Jean’s third annual Summer Legacy Ball; Cécile McLorin Salvant’s musical homage to Tin Pan Alley; and “Marina,” a new show by the former “Saturday Night Live” writer and perennially puckish surrealist Julio Torres, about a sea wench (Martine Gutierrez) looking for love.
Several food-focussed events beckon at the smaller-scale Glade. WNYC’s “Radiolab” is leading a synesthetic romp through grass-fed foods, the “Sporkful” podcast will digest the yogurt wars (and distribute free samples), and Cake Zine will host readings from the writers Stephanie Wambugu, Hilary Leichter, and The New Yorker’s own Doreen St. Félix and Leslie Jamison.
Then, in early September, Laurie Anderson, the pianist Thomas Bartlett, and others join forces to mark the centenary of Allen Ginsberg’s birth. “America when will you be angelic? When will you look at yourself through the grave?,” the speaker of Ginsberg’s poem “America” asks, before subsiding into the thought that “there must be some other way to settle this argument.” Another anniversary—our nation’s semiquincentennial—has come and gone, and we’re not much closer to settling this and other questions.—Rhoda Feng
About Town
Housing Works Bookstore is an inspired setting for a revival of “The Gin Game,” D. L. Coburn’s Pulitzer-winning play, from 1978, about two residents of a scruffy nursing home who strike up a tentative friendship. Ashley Basile’s spare set—table and chairs, green couch—quietly evokes lives pared down to their bare essentials. Weller (Arliss Howard) teaches Fonsia (Debra Winger) to play gin rummy—and then proceeds to lose every round, along with his temper. In life, they’ve both been dealt bad hands: Fonsia has chronic diabetes and a son who never visits, and Weller still fumes over failed business dealings. David Blum directs with a light, Shiatsu-like touch, allowing Howard and Winger to suggest that you’re only as sick as your need to keep sanctimonious tabs on others’ secrets.—Rhoda Feng (Through Aug. 14.)
In the first half of the nineteen-seventies, Philadelphia International Records created a sound that came to be known as Philly soul. Embodied by the O’Jays, Harold Melvin & the Blue Notes, Lou Rawls, and others, it was grown-up and plush, but still grooving—the seedbed for the sizzle of disco, with an emphasis on Black pride. During Philadanco!’s latest visit to the Joyce, Rennie Harris, Philadelphia’s master of putting street dance on the concert stage, offers a love letter to his city, set to a soundtrack of the city’s own brand of soul. The company’s agile, eager dancers also dig into works by Christopher Huggins and Tommie-Waheed Evans.—Brian Seibert (Joyce Theatre; July 29-Aug. 2.)
Born in the panic-stricken days of the pandemic, the BAAND Together Dance Festival has become a mainstay of Lincoln Center’s feel-good summer offerings. Dancers from Ballet Hispánico, Alvin Ailey, American Ballet Theatre, New York City Ballet, and Dance Theatre of Harlem share a stage, bringing something from each company’s repertory, as to a potluck. Alvin Ailey presents a lovely, mournful duet by Judith Jamison, “A Case of You,” set to Joni Mitchell. Adrian Danchig-Waring and Taylor Stanley, of N.Y.C.B., perform Lar Lubovitch’s ever-flowing same-sex duet “Each in Their Own Time,” to Brahms. The one novelty is “Zephyr,” a pas de deux by Claire Davison, a dancer at A.B.T.—Marina Harss (David H. Koch; July 28-Aug. 1.)
While attending the Etobicoke School of the Arts, in Toronto, the singer and multi-instrumentalist Emily Haines met Kevin Drew and Amy Millan, inextricably linking the three artists as confederates. Haines and Millan played together at school, before growing into separate bands: Metric and Stars, respectively. In 1999, Drew co-founded the music collective Broken Social Scene with his fellow singer and guitarist Brendan Canning, counting several members of the two units among its creative lineups. The three groups—which all navigate a pop-and-rock divide that has, gradually, started to close—are now overlapping institutions of the Canadian indie scene, making their assembly for the “All the Feelings” tour more of a convivial get-together than a full-blown reunion.—Sheldon Pearce (Brooklyn Paramount; July 30-31.)
The extraordinary adventure of Flaco the Owl, who escaped from the Central Park Zoo in February, 2023, is recounted in fanatical detail in Penny Lane’s documentary “Wild Inside.” The story is essentially crowdsourced, composed largely of footage and photos shot by dozens of devoted owlers who tracked the bird’s tenuous début on the loose, his steep learning curve as he started hunting in the park, his new life as a celebrity, and his perilous journeys through Manhattan. Lane fills out the tale with wide-ranging interviews, done on location, with enthusiasts and scientists; the result is an invigorating philosophical exploration of animal life, a vision of the modern media spotlight, and a symphonic outpouring of the energy, passion, and knowledge that make the city run.—Richard Brody (Screening July 29 in Central Park; opening July 31 at IFC Center.)
Jennifer Nettles’s new musical, “Giulia: The Poison Queen of Palermo”—based on the legend of the eponymous seventeenth-century Sicilian apothecary (played by Nettles) who dispatches her abusive husband and supplies other women with the means to escape their own unhappy marriages—is ambitious and intermittently captivating. Sumptuous staging, by Mary Zimmerman, evokes the brooding chiaroscuro of Artemisia Gentileschi’s paintings, while Didi Romero relishes every commedia dell’arte lazzo as the big-haired Duchessa. Musically, the show straddles the styles of “Hamilton” hip-hop and the fatally thesis-driven “Suffs.” Vitoria (Naomi Serrano), Giulia’s daughter, disapproves of her mother’s actions, but her motivations are tidied away by the end, with a resolution of sub-“Sweeney Todd” vengeance.—R.F. (PAC NYC; through Aug. 2.)
Pick Three
Sarah Larson on the summer’s best podcasts.
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1. “Dan Taberski’s Manifesto” argues that, done right, a manifesto is a nonviolent call to action, an “artful scream”—and, perhaps, just what we need right now. Taberski (“Missing Richard Simmons”) studies significant cris de cœur—by such figures as Luigi Mangione, the late Mohawk activist Richard Oakes, and the punk musician Kathleen Hanna—and develops theories about how to compose a good one. It’s a refreshing response to a cultural moment that has many of us, as Taberski says of himself, “seething underneath, all the time.”
2. I wasn’t expecting “OnlyFantasy,” a series about the OnlyFans adult-content phenomenon, to be quite so moving and revelatory. Leon Neyfakh, the veteran journalist-podcaster, and Gracie Canaan, an insightful comedian and an OnlyFans creator herself, co-host, sensitively interviewing fans, creators, and behind-the-scenes workers to understand the psychology of OnlyFans intimacy. Much of the fantasy, we discover, is emotional, and we can hear it in the vulnerability of interviewees’ voices.
3. “The Gaza Chef,” from the German newspaper Die Zeit and its personable investigative journalist Yassin Musharbash, tells the story of Mahmoud Almadhoun, a young Palestinian cook who ran a soup kitchen in the Gaza Strip, and was killed by an Israeli projectile, in 2024. Almadhoun had been a reporting source of Musharbash’s; when Musharbash learns of Almadhoun’s death, he launches an extraordinary remote investigation into what happened and why. The results feel vivid and immediate, revealing much about survival efforts in Gaza and raising unnerving questions about modern warfare, including the use of A.I.
On and Off the Avenue
Rachel Syme on sweating with the crowd.
Last month, the restaurant-review site The Infatuation published its quarterly report, surveying the food trends currently dominating New York City, in which its writers noted a particularly distressing phenomenon that they dubbed “The Same-ification of NYC.” The dining routines of many city dwellers, the report read, have become tediously predictable: “Coffee at Blank Street. Lunch at Pura Vida. Dinner at Little Ruby’s and drinks at Le Dive. . . . One-offs are turning into mini-chains, mini-chains are evolving into chains, and every neighborhood is starting to look identical.” More and more, it seems, we are entering a period of peak urban hive mind, a malady that is not limited to everyone visiting the same frozen-yogurt spots. Same-ification has extended to street style, as well; as the reporter Brock Colyar noted in their viral “West Village Girls” story for New York, in 2025, a cadre of youths bounds around below Fourteenth Street seemingly all swaddled in white baby tees, ballet flats, and baggy, low-rise jeans. (The popularity of the last continues unabated; this month, Hailey Bieber released a capsule collection of relaxed, belly-baring denim with Gap, which sold out in hours.) Lately, I’ve noticed that the monotony is especially pernicious when it comes to gymwear. I see woman after woman pass me on the street wearing matching (and often quite pricey) workout sets—typically, a pair of high-waisted bike shorts and a strappy sports bra—from global spandex juggernauts such as Lululemon, Alo, Varley, and Vuori. The colors vary, but not much: there is a preponderance of chocolate brown, butter yellow, and chalky lilac. There can be small variances—some women layer two bras, or swap their shorts for leggings, or (gasp!) dare to wear different shades on top and bottom—but, in general, the fitness crowd has never looked more homogeneous. On the one hand, I yearn for visual stimulation. Give me garish leopard-print unitards! Give me Jane Fonda-esque neon leg warmers! Give me belted bodysuits à la mid-century Helena Rubinstein! On the other, I get it. You have to wear something to Pilates, and a matching set is the quickest way to feel put together. So if you’re ready to hop on the bandwagon with the wellness gang, but you want to branch out a tiny bit from the superchains, you may want to look at sets from Daughter Lessons, a rising N.Y.C.-based brand founded by two former-competitive-dancer sisters; Splits59, an L.A.-based brand popular with ballerinas; or Literary Sport, a surging high-end runningwear line from Canada. These looks may cost you (a pair of basic running shorts from Literary Sport is $275), but at least you’ll have something different—until everyone else has it, too.
P.S. Good stuff on the internet: