Mark Morris’s Summer Season
The choreographer Mark Morris is famously musical—“I like music more than I like anything else,” he has said—and his musical tastes are famously eclectic. He once made a dance—“O Rangasayee”—to South-Indian Carnatic music, but he has also used Schubert, Vivaldi, and the Violent Femmes. Since the beginning, though, Morris, who grew up in Seattle in the nineteen-sixties, has had a soft spot for Americana, in all its forms. “American music happens to be vast, contradictory, and full of invention, so there’s plenty to work with,” he said recently, of this vein of his career.
A two-week engagement for his company, Mark Morris Dance Group, at the Joyce (July 14-25), reflects this variety. One program leans toward the recognizable, with offerings ranging from Gershwin (“Three Preludes,” a solo he originally created for himself, in 1992) to James P. Johnson, the pianist who invented the jazz style known as stride piano. This program also includes the only new work of the run, “Pizzica,” set to “Grande Tarantelle,” a jaunty piece by the New Orleans pianist Louis Moreau Gottschalk. (If it sounds familiar, that’s because it was popularized by George Balanchine, in 1964, with his faux-Italian duet, “Tarantella.” Morris, who loves folk dances, actually throws in some tarantella steps.)
Country-and-Western tunes dominate the second program, which closes with the folksy but also rather melancholy “Going Away Party,” made up of songs, by Bob Wills and His Texas Playboys, with titles such as “Milk Cow Blues.” Most of the real bonbons, however, can be found in the third program, devoted to works by the West Coast modernists Henry Cowell and Lou Harrison, including Morris’s savage pas de deux “Jenn and Spencer”—imagine a breakup gone terribly wrong—and the mysterious and ritualistic “Grand Duo,” a great stomping dance that closes with a thrilling, yet not at all upbeat, polka.—Marina Harss
About Town
The director Stephen Brown-Fried’s taut adaptation of the infrequently performed trilogy of history plays “Henry VI”—condensed into two three-ish-hour parts—is crowded with coups, rebellions, dynastic feuds, and beheadings, here memorably signified by bundles of rope slipping from actors’ hands. This production, by the National Asian American Theatre Company, navigates the antagonisms and the alliances with precision and economy; it is led by Jon Norman Schneider’s quietly stirring Henry and Teresa Avia Lim’s wily Queen Margaret. Actors play multiple roles, which can be confusing, but red or white roses sometimes worn by the characters help keep us on track. On a spare, blood-stained set by Kimie Nishikawa, each death accumulates weight, turning royal power struggles into a sobering reckoning with the cost of ambition.—Rhoda Feng (Public Theatre; through July 19.)
Summer in the French countryside can be idyllic: sprawling fields of sunflowers and lavender, the southern sun reflecting off the turrets of castles, a glass of crisp white wine wherever you turn. But, alas, summer in the French countryside can also be expensive. So why not just go upstate? This year, the musical hub of Caramoor is bringing France to Westchester, with an evening of music by the Baroque composer Marc-Antoine Charpentier. Up first is the chamber opera “Les Arts Florissants,” whose characters include Peace, Discord, and Jupiter; then “La Descente d’Orphée aux enfers,” based on the myth of Orpheus. Quel plaisir!—Jane Bua (Katonah, N.Y.; July 17.)
Shortly after the conclusion of the fourth season of the Netflix blockbuster “Stranger Things,” in 2022, one of the series regulars, Joe Keery, released “Decide,” his second album as Djo. His career as a musician largely existed in the huge shadow of the show, and for a while it seemed as if it would stay that way—at least until, curiously, nearly two years later, one of the songs on “Decide,” the wistful “End of Beginning,” went viral on TikTok. The single became a bona-fide hit, and it spurred a cult following for Keery as a pop-rock sparkplug, culminating in the release of a new LP, “The Crux,” in 2025. He is joined in this show by the Australian psych-rock band Pond.—Sheldon Pearce (Forest Hills Stadium; July 17.)
Based on the gently wistful 1999 film of the same name, the musical “A Walk on the Moon” tracks the sexual awakening of Pearl (Talia Suskauer), a housewife whose marriage to the TV repairman Marty (Max Chernin) is unsettled, during the sultry summer of 1969, by an encounter with the peripatetic blouse salesman Walker (Sam Gravitte). A giant moon in the backdrop swells like a balloon—an apt metaphor for a strangely under-oxygenated production that repeatedly treats epochal events such as the moon landing as screen savers for Pearl’s self-actualization. Despite its committed performances, the show, with music by AnnMarie Milazzo and a book by Pamela Gray, traces an all too familiar emotional arc, and does little to evoke the quicksand sensation of falling in love.—R.F. (Laura Pels; through Aug. 22.)
Ross McElwee, a longtime personal documentarian whose family figures prominently in his films, faces tragedy in “Remake”: the death of his son, Adrian, in 2016, at the age of twenty-seven, from an overdose of fentanyl. This loving, anguished memorial movie includes copious clips of Adrian from the director’s earlier films and from home movies. Adrian, creative and energetic from childhood on—and raised in the presence of movie cameras—became a filmmaker himself, fusing a passion for extreme skiing with his cinematic sensibility. He also struggled with mental illness and substance abuse, and had begun to make a documentary about his troubles. McElwee presents generous and poignant selections from his son’s work, while also reckoning with his own life and career—and with the practice, and the ethics, of filming his family.—Richard Brody (Film Forum; opening July 10.)
The teeming series “Immigrant Nation: People in Transit,” ongoing at MOMA, offers more than fifty films from around the world that document, dramatize, and analyze the fundamental phenomenon of migration. Some notable works stay close to home, such as Clara Law’s 1990 crime drama, “Farewell China,” starring Tony Leung Ka-fai as an undocumented man who travels to New York City in search of his missing wife, played by Maggie Cheung. Other international features include Jean Renoir’s doom-laden plein-air melodrama “Toni,” from 1935, filmed on location in a mining town in Provence, where laborers from Italy and Spain, along with their native French bosses, get entangled in romantic conflicts and schemes of predatory greed, unleashing operatic passion and tragic violence.—R.B. (Through Sept. 9.)
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Bar Tab
Taran Dugal encounters spirits steps from Green-Wood Cemetery.
The art of carousing has long featured a mystical element. In the Middle Ages, alchemists began calling distilled alcohol “aqua vitae,” the water of life, and regarded it as the soul of a drink—hence the term “spirits.” Folk, a new cocktail lounge situated just a stone’s throw from Green-Wood Cemetery, in South Slope, follows in that occult tradition. To two first-timers, the bar’s fittingly morose, all-black exterior cut an unassuming figure on the quiet block. Inside, soft house music played, patrons awash in dim red light. The menu featured an assortment of cocktails loosely inspired by the distances people travel to live in, or to leave, Brooklyn, showcasing the bar’s effort to embrace a different kind of spirit. The guests ordered the Mangalorean, named after the chef Jay Kumar’s birthplace, an Indian city on the Arabian Sea: a sublime, sweet, velvety mix of rum, pineapple, lime, and coconut cream infused with amchur, a tangy spice made from unripe mangoes. Their second drink, the Mexpipe, Puerto Escondido, was a tequila-based number with a beachy feel, honoring one of western Mexico’s most iconic stretches of surf. Next, they ventured back to South Asia with the Roti Tagliatelle, an experimental small plate subbing out pasta for hand-cut flatbread, and served with scrumptious, steaming minced lamb. Sweet teeth practically chattering, the newcomers ended their night with the bar’s eponymous sundae, a gourmet Madagascan-vanilla ice cream topped with rose-water syrup and cashews. They left a few minutes before sunset. At the end of the block, just past Green-Wood’s fenced exterior, a small army of gravestones cast long shadows in the evening. Maybe it was the bartender’s heavy pour, or the cemetery air, but the pair felt that they understood what those medieval alchemists were talking about.
P.S. Good stuff on the internet: