Kacey Musgraves, Crossover Queen
In the past few years, country music has reëxerted its sway on the pop-music charts and the broader Zeitgeist they reflect, but the genre’s greatest crossover success story remains the Texas singer-songwriter Kacey Musgraves. Since her 2013 major-label début, “Same Trailer Different Park,” she has been a shaping voice of modern Americana, not just in the way her music marries rustic and cosmopolitan sensibilities but in its underlying progressive ideal. Clever, observant, and funny as hell, she is one of music’s sharpest lyricists, and a breakthrough in 2018, the kaleidoscopic disco-country masterpiece “Golden Hour,” expanded her creative world view, scaling up from small-town concerns to something more universal, winning Album of the Year at the Grammys in the process.
Musgraves’s subsequent albums have been sprawling in their search for meaning, and even more adventurous in the sonic pathways travelled to get there. “Star-Crossed,” from 2021, was a psychedelic divorce record that incorporated soft rock and dance music, while “Deeper Well,” from 2024, goes even more soft-spun for the songs of her Saturn return and its reassessed priorities, which included seeing the big picture. Her most recent album, “Middle of Nowhere,” is a homecoming, if not a full reset. Not only does its music scale back to the sounds of the country canon—bluegrass and Western swing, regional Mexican music such as norteño, and the Creole blues of zydeco, with plenty of acoustic guitar and pedal steel—it does so for meditations on how she defines herself as a woman and as an artist. Musgraves brings those conversations with her to the stage at Madison Square Garden, on Aug. 31 and Sept. 1, as she continues her journey of self-discovery.—Sheldon Pearce
About Town
In 2001, the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Company prepared a work that was scheduled to première, on a stage between the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center, on Sept. 12. The début did not happen, but, twenty-five years later, the company performs a new piece that reflects on that moment and all that has happened since. “Curriculum IV: Spin and Spin! Turn! Turn! Turn!,” the final offering of this year’s River to River Festival, features a live score by Samora Pinderhughes sourced from Nina Simone’s rendition of “Turn! Turn! Turn! (To Everything There Is a Season).” The free performances at Wagner Park also nod to the outdoor theatre’s presiding spirit, the Statue of Liberty.—Brian Seibert (Robert F. Wagner, Jr., Park; Sept. 10, 12-13.)
This has been a big summer for moviegoing—“The Odyssey,” “Minions 3,” “Jackass 5,” “Scary Movie 6”—and the Met Opera wants in on the action. It’s reigniting its annual HD Festival, screening live recordings of recent operas. Did you miss the Met’s début of Gabriela Lena Frank’s “El Último Sueño de Frida y Diego”? They’ve got you. What about “I Puritani,” the first new production of Bellini’s bel-canto masterwork that the Met has put on in almost fifty years? Breathe easy. Have you always been afraid to sneak to the rest room during Wagner’s nearly five-hour “Tristan und Isolde”? No sweat: the festival splits it up into two movies, a day apart. You’ll just have to wait twenty-four more hours for that chord to resolve.—Jane Bua (Josie Robertson Plaza; Sept. 2-7.)
The idea that “behind every great fortune is a great crime” gets a twist in Andrew Stein’s topical new artificial-unintelligence play, “Disruption,” in which a great fortune is about to be made through a series of moral crimes. Nick (John David Washington), a silky-smooth tech entrepreneur, invites three friends and their wives to invest in a new algorithm he’s developed, pitched as “Waze . . . but for your life.” Yet the unwitting guinea pigs are eerily reminiscent of what Daisy Hildyard calls “second bodies,” rather than ensouled beings. Their quiddities remain hazily drawn, snapping into focus only when required by Stein’s overdetermined plot; the rhizomatic spread of numbers across the stage floor—Zoë Hurwitz designed the set—reinforces that uncanny cybernetic quality.—Rhoda Feng (Pershing Square Signature Center; through Oct. 4.)
As the City Parks Foundation’s SummerStage winds to a close, the concert series saves some of its best for last, pairing the singer Samara Joy with the bassist and bandleader Christian McBride to celebrate the seventieth anniversary of the historic jazz label Verve Records. A Bronx native and six-time Grammy winner, Joy is among the most expressive jazz performers working, her satiny and sumptuous voice deployed sparingly. McBride, a fixture of the scene since the early nineties, has collaborated with artists across the spectrum, including Joy, on his most recent album, “Without Further Ado, Vol 1.” They are joined by a group of other musicians, led by Mei Semones, in honoring “Getz/Gilberto,” the classic 1964 album by João Gilberto and Stan Getz.—Sheldon Pearce (Rumsey Playfield in Central Park; Sept. 2.)
Exquisite style and confrontational substance fuse to startling effect in Rafael Manuel’s teeming début feature, “Filipiñana,” which is set at a golf resort near Manila that’s a microcosm of modern political dysfunction. The story, which is told in comedically choreographed visual anecdotes, is centered on women who work there—caddies and so-called tee girls, whose underpaid labor puts them in close contact with wealthy, arrogant, and predatory men. The main drama involves a rural teen-age tee girl who recognizes the resort’s president as the potentate who evicted her family from their land. Rage stays wryly below the surface; Manuel sardonically delights in musical spectacles staged for guests, and the synchronized swinging of clubs at a driving range evokes the superficial charm of robotic lives.—Richard Brody (Opening Aug. 28 at Film Forum, nationally Sept. 4.)
Ridley Scott brings admirable restraint to “The Dog Stars,” a post-apocalyptic drama set in Colorado in the near future, after a strain of influenza has killed most people. A mechanic named Hig (Jacob Elordi), who lives at an abandoned airstrip with a fierce military veteran (Josh Brolin), pilots a small plane to the ghost town of Denver, where he fetches supplies and visits the house he’d shared with his late wife. In his travels, he encounters a father-and-daughter pair of ranchers (Guy Pearce and Margaret Qualley) and tries to make contact with other survivors. The heart of the film—despite gory confrontations with feral marauders—is the rebuilding of trust, the overcoming of grief, and the importance of vaccines; the science-fiction premise morphs sweetly into sentimental melodrama.—R.B. (In wide release.)
P.S. Good stuff on the internet: