Summer Culture Preview
In the summer, New York City likes to play outside—quite literally—as with the genre-skipping, star-packed music festival Governors Ball; Lincoln Center’s congenial “Summer for the City” dance programming on the plaza; the Public Theatre’s always electrifying, free Shakespeare in the Park; and the New York Philharmonic’s blissfully cultivated borough-hopping parks tour (complete with post-show fireworks), among many, many other outdoor performances. If you prefer a dark room with air-conditioning, there are revamps of classics from various eras on the small and big screens—including, streaming, “Little House on the Prairie,” “Cape Fear,” and “Legally Blonde,” and, at the cinema, tales of Odysseus (Christopher Nolan’s “The Odyssey”) and Robin Hood (Hugh Jackman carries the quiver). Blockbusters abound, among a murderers’ row of musical icons, at the Guggenheim’s Pop-art show, and in a movie that sees Steven Spielberg dabbling, once again, in aliens. But there’s also plenty that is new and unusual: John Early in drag as an addled chef-influencer, in the indie flick “Maddie’s Secret”; Clubbed Thumb’s edifying Summerworks series; the Morgan Library’s meditation on the history and mysteries of tarot. Have a spritz, catch some rays, and, most definitely, see a show. Enjoy our summer culture preview, and start making plans.—Shauna Lyon
Jump to: Television | Art | Movies | The Theatre | Dance | Contemporary Music | Classical Music
Television
Hollywood’s current book-adaptation mania is turning the proverbial beach read into the beach watch this summer. Many boast fresh premises, foremost among them the Peacock drama “The Five-Star Weekend” (premièring on July 9). Based on Elin Hilderbrand’s Nantucket-set novel, the series follows a food influencer, played by Jennifer Garner, who copes with the sudden death of her husband by bringing together friends from different stages of her life—played by the likes of Chloë Sevigny and Regina Hall. Across the Atlantic, a schoolteacher in the London suburbs (Rebecca Hall) is tormented by a debilitating hum in Starz’s “The Listeners” (June 12). The show, which Jordan Tannahill adapts from his own best-seller, finds its protagonist searching for others unable to escape the mysterious and unrelenting noise.
A more visceral danger arrives in the form of a vengeance-obsessed Javier Bardem in Apple TV’s “Cape Fear” miniseries (June 5), which is inspired by John D. MacDonald’s novel “The Executioners” and its two big-screen adaptations. Bardem will play the role made famous by Robert De Niro in Martin Scorsese’s 1991 film—that of a violent parolee determined to get revenge on the married lawyers who represented him at his trial, now played by Amy Adams and Patrick Wilson. The streaming site will also see the début of “Lucky” (July 15), starring Anya Taylor-Joy as a con woman wanted by both the F.B.I. and an organized-crime boss, in an action thriller based on Marissa Stapley’s novel.
Next month brings us America’s two-hundred-and-fiftieth birthday—an occasion that Barack Obama apparently intends to celebrate through a collaboration with Larry David. The unlikely pair are the faces of “Life, Larry, and the Pursuit of Unhappiness” (June 26), an HBO sketch show that revisits moments in American history through David’s jaundiced, hapless lens. (In one skit, an attempt to kiss a nurse in the midst of V-J Day celebrations quickly gets David’s character labelled a “pervo.”) A more earnest look at the country’s past will be on offer in a new “Little House on the Prairie” series on Netflix (July 9), based on Laura Ingalls Wilder’s semi-autobiographical books. Its community-mindedness is sure to rival that of Apple TV’s “Ted Lasso” (Aug. 5), whose fourth season features good-guy Ted coaching a women’s soccer team, and introducing his London friends to the delights of Kansas City barbecue.
While much of the country will celebrate in red, white, and blue, “Legally Blonde” ’s Elle Woods will spend this summer in her signature pink. The character, played by Reese Witherspoon in the 2001 movie, gets a prequel with Prime Video’s “Elle” (July 1), which takes its protagonist (Lexi Minetree) from sun-kissed Bel Air to rain-soaked Seattle. If she’s anything like her future self, teen-age Elle is sure to be guided by an unerring sense of truth and justice while maintaining her irrepressible girliness. What, like it’s hard?—Inkoo Kang
Art
For the most part, the art world doesn’t do summer blockbusters. This season, though, a few of New York’s museums are mounting decidedly fun shows that could be big hits. Chief among them is the Morgan Library & Museum’s “Tarot! Renaissance Symbols, Modern Visions” (opening June 26), an exhibition that perfectly bridges the institution’s scholarly approach with mass appeal. The first section of the show looks at the cards’ origins in Renaissance Italy, focussing on an original, hand-painted deck from the fifteenth century, when tarot was still a court game. The second part centers on tarot as a tool of divination and creative inspiration, beginning with the iconic 1909 Rider-Waite-Smith deck and moving on to art works from the twentieth century into the present day.
The Guggenheim Museum’s summer crowd-pleaser is less subtle. “Guggenheim Pop: 1960 to Now” (June 5) surveys Pop art through the lens of the institution, from landmark early exhibitions to recent acquisitions (including questionable ones, such as Maurizio Cattelan’s infamous banana duct-taped to the wall). It’s hard to tell what will provide the most photogenic moment: posing with Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen’s massive soft sculpture of a shuttlecock or snapping selfies in a Yayoi Kusama infinity room. Either way, expect to wait.
Meanwhile, the International Center of Photography continues the recent fashion-forward streak among the city’s museums. “Yves Saint Laurent and Photography” (June 11) traces the trajectory of the designer, and of his brand more broadly, through some three hundred fashion photographs, ad campaigns, personal snapshots, and more. The exhibition, a collaboration with Paris’s Musée Yves Saint Laurent and Fondation Pierre Bergé–Yves Saint Laurent, makes the case that part of the French pioneer’s expertise included understanding the value of a good picture.
This summer also brings deep dives into more niche, yet still fascinating, subjects. At the Museum of Modern Art, “Architects of Liberation: Modernism in Western Africa” (July 5) examines how political independence helped shape the built environment in seven countries, from Nigeria to Senegal, between the nineteen-fifties and eighties. The show, the result of four years of research, includes roughly four hundred and fifty objects, spotlighting architects and projects that have received little international attention. It should be eye-opening.
The Jewish Museum also revisits a chapter of history with “Modernity and Opulence: Women of the Wiener Werkstätte” (July 17). The Viennese collective and workshop, which merged high aesthetics with functional design, was founded, in 1903, by three men; however, women made up a substantial proportion of its artisans and clients—particularly, it seems, Jewish women. This exhibition aims to tell their story through paintings, ceramics, textiles, films, and more.
Among the other shows of the season, it’s worth noting two: “Akinsanya Kambon: Soul Sessions” (May 28), a doubleheader at SculptureCenter and the Center for Art, Research and Alliances, which introduces New Yorkers to the spiritual ceramics of a former marine and Black Panther; and the Drawing Center’s “Certainly an Act: Works on Paper by Pope.L” (June 26), a focussed look at lesser-known work by the unclassifiable contemporary artist, who died three years ago.
But perhaps the most art-world thing you can do in New York in the summertime is to flee the city for greener pastures. If you’re plotting a getaway, why not time it for Upstate Art Weekend, June 25-29? The bonanza of exhibitions and events happening everywhere from museums to barns in the Hudson Valley and the Catskills seems to grow larger and more delightfully unwieldy every year.—Jillian Steinhauer
Movies
Studios and independent producers alike are planning hot fun in the summertime. Olivia Wilde directed “The Invite” (June 26), an erotic comedy, in which she and Seth Rogen play a San Francisco couple whose swinger neighbors (Penélope Cruz and Edward Norton) proposition them. “Gail Daughtry and the Celebrity Sex Pass” (July 10), directed by David Wain, stars Zoey Deutch as a Midwestern hairdresser who, enraged when her fiancé (Michael Cassidy) hooks up with Jennifer Aniston, heads to Los Angeles to pair off with Jon Hamm. In Gregg Araki’s “I Want Your Sex” (July 31), Cooper Hoffman plays an art-studio assistant, Elliot, in a B.D.S.M. relationship with his boss (Olivia Wilde); Charli XCX plays Elliot’s girlfriend. Monica Barbaro and Callum Turner star in Will Gluck’s dystopian comedy “One Night Only” (Aug. 7), set in a time in which premarital sex is legal for a single night a year.
Action films, whether fantasies or plausible realities, are seasonal mainstays, as in “Disclosure Day” (June 12), Steven Spielberg’s science-fiction drama about contact with extraterrestrials, with Emily Blunt as a TV newscaster and Josh O’Connor as a cybersecurity expert. The disaster-film comedy “Stop! That! Train!” (June 12) features performers from the “Drag Race” series, including Ginger Minj and Jujubee, as stewardesses on a high-speed rail line, and RuPaul, as the President; Adam Shankman directed. In “Unidentified” (June 19), directed by Haifaa Al Mansour, a Saudi woman (Mila Al Zahrani) who’s obsessed with a true-crime podcast gets a clerical job at a police station and winds up investigating a murder. “Her Private Hell” (July 24), directed by Nicolas Winding Refn, blends science fiction and melodrama, as a mysterious substance penetrates the atmosphere amid an American soldier’s search for his daughter; Charles Melton and Sophie Thatcher star. Andrew Patterson’s crime drama “The Rivals of Amziah King” (Aug. 14) stars Matthew McConaughey as an Oklahoma beekeeper who reconnects with his former foster daughter (Angelina LookingGlass) and gets ensnared in a criminal scheme involving the honey trade.
Classic and modern mythology come in for big-screen workouts, starting with Michael Sarnoski’s “The Death of Robin Hood” (June 19), in which the bow-and-arrow-wielding wealth redistributor (played by Hugh Jackman), wounded and vulnerable, looks back with regret at his violent past. In “Supergirl” (June 26), directed by Craig Gillespie, Milly Alcock plays the titular heroine, who helps a friend (Eve Ridley) avenge the killing of her father; David Corenswet returns as Superman. Christopher Nolan’s version of “The Odyssey” (July 17) stars Matt Damon as Odysseus, whose homecoming to his wife, Penelope (Anne Hathaway), is impeded by battles with human and superhuman opponents. Tom Holland plays their son, Telemachus; Lupita Nyong’o plays Helen of Troy. In “Spider-Man: Brand New Day” (July 31), directed by Destin Daniel Cretton, the webmaster (Tom Holland) comes out of retirement to combat mysterious criminals in New York; Zendaya, Sadie Sink, and Jacob Batalon co-star.
Summer offers no vacation from creative people’s struggles. John Carney’s “Power Ballad” (May 29) features Paul Rudd as a wedding singer in Ireland who seeks amends after a former boy-band star (Nick Jonas) steals a song that he wrote. John Early wrote and directed “Maddie’s Secret” (June 12) and also stars—in drag—as an aspiring chef whose sudden fame as a food influencer is threatened by her struggle with bulimia. Angelina Jolie stars in Alice Winocour’s “Couture” (June 26), as a director who, while making a film about Paris Fashion Week, is diagnosed with breast cancer. Jane Schoenbrun’s movie-centric horror drama “Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma” (Aug. 7) stars Hannah Einbinder, as a filmmaker hired to reboot a long-running slasher franchise, and Gillian Anderson, as an actress from the franchise’s first installment.—Richard Brody
The Theatre
This season’s playwrights seem fascinated by the idea of close encounters: couples stranded in deserts, churches, tents, and other pressure cookers. “Jerome” (Playwrights Horizons; in previews, opening June 2) features a gay couple in the early nineties, living in the Arizona hinterlands, where the arrival of another man unsettles the pair’s equilibrium. The play, by John J. Caswell, Jr., presents polyamory as an emotional bomb shelter, built hurriedly against the catastrophe of the AIDS epidemic. Another kind of hospitality is on offer in “The Loved Ones” (Irish Rep; June 13). Erica Murray’s work, which premièred in Dublin, in 2023, follows Nell, the host of an Airbnb in rural Ireland, as she receives two strangers into her home—one of whom is a compromisingly friendly American—and reckons with the death of her adult son. At Atlantic Theatre Company, Bubba Weiler’s “The Saviors” (July 8) follows two altar boys whose friendship buckles under the combined tensions of faith, masculinity, and adolescence. In “Camping” (HERE; June 13), Victoria Lynne Barclay traps two best friends inside a tent brewing with secrets, longing, and petrichor-tinged memories. Levi Holloway’s “Paranormal Activity: A New Story Live on Broadway” (August Wilson; Aug. 14) brings the frightening premise of the film franchise—that it’s people, rather than places, that are haunted—to the stage.
Revamps and reduxes are under way at Lincoln Center Theatre and New York City Center. The “Encores!” series at the latter presents “La Cage aux Folles” (June 17-28), featuring an all-Black cast led by Billy Porter and directed by Robert O’Hara. The French Riviera-set show outstretches a hand-lettered invitation to both drag devotees and night-club romantics. Julia May Jonas’s “A Woman Among Women” (Claire Tow; in previews, opening June 4), which premièred at Bushwick Starr two years ago and is being mounted at LCT3, retools Arthur Miller’s “All My Sons,” relocating its story from postwar Ohio to a present-day back yard in Northampton, Mass. “The Whoopi Monologues” (Newhouse; July 7) revisits Whoopi Goldberg’s landmark one-woman show by splitting its psychological striptease across five performers, including Kara Young and Kerry Washington, both endlessly watchable.
Clubbed Thumb’s Summerworks programs, playing through the end of June, offer yet more anxiety-inducing choices, including a show about ordinary Americans who are burdened with magical powers (Jesse Jae Hoon’s “Titans”), two female friends having a life-changing dinner (Nadja Leonhard-Hooper’s “Derangements”), and the death of a beloved pet (Bailey Williams’s “The Family Dog”).
Questions of inheritance hover over Jonathan Spector’s “Birthright” (MCC Theatre; June 5), which follows six friends from a 2006 trip to Israel through eighteen years of shifting allegiances and digitally sustained intimacy. César Alvarez’s “The Potluck” (Soho Rep; June 30) turns the Greensboro massacre into a hauntological musical about labor, memory, and surviving a slaughter you didn’t personally witness.
The city’s directors have apparently decided that if crowns are going to be fought over, audiences might as well sweat a little, too. The Public Theatre mounts “Henry VI” (June 9) in two three-hour installments of dynastic collapse, featuring an Asian cast. Shakespeare in the Park reopens the Delacorte with “Romeo & Juliet” (in previews; opening June 11), letting Verona’s most impulsive teen-agers fall in love in the mosquitoed Central Park air.
And for patrons craving more venom with their summer spritz, Perelman Performing Arts Center unveils “Giulia: The Poison Queen of Palermo” (June 28), directed by Mary Zimmerman and starring the writer, Jennifer Nettles, as the seventeenth-century poisoner whose discreet concoctions allegedly dispatched hundreds of abusive husbands across Italy. Rotten spouses may prove this season’s least mourned casualties.—Rhoda Feng
Dance
In summertime, the city develops a new personality: open, relaxed, even, at times, outdoorsy. Each year, the plaza at Lincoln Center goes through a vernal transformation, its formal granite parterre converted to a busy dance floor with twinkling lights, part of the center’s Summer for the City programming. Free nightly dance parties happen there from June 10 to Aug. 8 (often with headphones, so as not to disturb performances at the nearby theatres). This summer, the Center introduces a new Contemporary Dance Festival (Alice Tully Hall; June 18-July 5), curated by the savvy, stylish Kyle Abraham. Its offerings include a recent work by the Bengali British choreographer Akram Khan, inspired by ancient myth, and a meditation on the African influences on Flamenco, by the Ghanaian Jamaican British choreographer Yinka Esi Graves.
Just beyond the dance floor, American Ballet Theatre takes up residence at the Metropolitan Opera House with a quartet of big, evening-length, narrative works (June 17-July 18), to the delight of lovers of old-school ballets, the kind that include colorful sets and Romantic plotlines: “Don Quixote,” “Onegin,” “Swan Lake,” and the endlessly charming “Sylvia.” (Watch, in particular, for casts that include Chloe Misseldine, Catherine Hurlin, and Daniel Camargo.) On July 6, the former Bolshoi phenom Natalia Osipova, who made her name in the early two-thousands with her stratospheric ballon (jumping capacity), returns for her first appearance with the company since 2018, in “Don Q.”
Osipova is not the only star paying New York a call: the Apollo-esque Hugo Marchand, étoile of the Paris Opéra Ballet, has organized an evening of dances at New York City Center (July 23-26). The selections will include Maurice Béjart’s lusty “Boléro,” from 1961, in which a soloist (Marchand) undulates seductively on a table to Ravel, like a snake charmer weaving a spell. Better yet, he’s bringing a few of his Opéra-étoile friends, including Léonore Baulac and Germain Louvet, who will dance George Balanchine’s “Sonatine,” a pas de deux as breezy as a stroll on the Champs-Élysées.
Mark Morris, for his company’s two-week residence at the Joyce Theatre (July 14-25), has chosen a trio of programs set to Americana—a personal specialty. The first is mostly made up of popular tunes (also with a new piece, “Pizzica,” set to the Italian-ish music that Balanchine used for his high-spirited “Tarantella”). The second focusses on country-and-Western songs. But it is the third that contains one of Morris’s most striking dances, the weird, ritualistic “Grand Duo,” to stirring music by the Portland-born Lou Harrison.—Marina Harss
Contemporary Music
Listen closely and summer’s approach can be heard in the distance as the roar of the crowds at the 2026 edition of Flushing’s Governors Ball Music Festival grows near. Headliners Lorde, Kali Uchis, and Jennie, of the K-pop girl group Blackpink, are joined by such artists as Wet Leg, Blood Orange, King Princess, 2hollis, Geese, and Slayyyter (June 5-7). The night before the Vegas rapper Baby Keem takes his top-billed Friday-night slot at the fest, he builds a pop-up casino at Brooklyn Paramount (June 4).
A handful of the best guitarists in the world convene in the city. At Sony Hall, as part of the Blue Note Jazz Festival, Mdou Moctar unleashes riffy jams inspired by assouf, a fusionist Tuareg guitar music (June 7). The 2025 Rock and Roll Hall of Famer Jack White shows off the skill that earned him his enshrinement, at Brooklyn Paramount (July 11-12). And, at Lincoln Center, St. Vincent sets down her axe to play with the New York Philharmonic, her music arranged for accompaniment by Jules Buckley (July 2).
Though a genre-fluid affair, the Blue Note fest also features some of the most adventurous pacesetters in modern jazz, among them the flautist Shabaka, the London septet Kokoroko, the trumpeter Chief Adjuah, and the harpist Brandee Younger. Younger also has a co-billed show with Ravi Coltrane at Nubeluz on June 8, with special guest Samara Joy, after which Coltrane will set up at Birdland for his own residency (June 16-20). Principally, the season hosts the most daring saxophonist of the past decade, the cosmic visionary Kamasi Washington (Music Hall of Williamsburg; July 29-30).
The stirring power of soul is alive in a few cross-generational musicians carrying on the legacy in distinct ways. On June 3, Alex Isley, a scion of the Isley Brothers group, lights up Irving Plaza with her warm, glowing sound. On June 25, Son Little brings a rootsier approach and the blues of his March record, “Cityfolk,” to Music Hall of Williamsburg. Jill Scott, on the heels of her first album in ten years, holds space for spoken-word positivity at Kings Theatre (July 16, 18-19). For electronic music that is just as awe-inducing, there’s the ambient-pop artist Laurel Halo (Pioneer Works; June 25), the eclectic avant-rap producer Flying Lotus, playing with a live band (Blue Note; July 8-9), and the psychedelic composer Dan Deacon (Pioneer Works; July 31).
Larger crowds gather for idols from various spheres of influence. At Forest Hills Stadium, catch the indie-rock outfit Wilco (June 20) and the folk-rock laureate Bob Dylan (July 21). The arenas play host to child stars turned pop girlies (Ariana Grande at Barclays Center; July 12-13, 16, and 18-19, and Hilary Duff at Madison Square Garden; Aug. 5-6) in addition to trailblazers in Spanish-language pop (Rosalía at M.S.G.; June 16-17, and Shakira at Barclays Center; July 20-21). The summer goes full bore when one of the rap GOATs, Jay-Z, takes over Yankee Stadium (July 10-12) to celebrate the anniversaries of two home-town classics—“Reasonable Doubt” and “The Blueprint.”—Sheldon Pearce
Classical Music
If you need a break from un-air-conditioned subway platforms this summer, there’s a multitude of classical events to stop by. The contemporary Time:Spans Festival kicks off, on Aug. 8, with the New York première of Wolfgang Rihm’s “Jagden und Formen,” an orchestral piece that begins with hand claps—listen up! The series also includes a world première by Suzanne Farrin, honoring the Hungarian composer György Kurtág (Aug. 10); the International Contemporary Ensemble, performing “I did not paint the war. I lived the war,” by the Iranian composer Farzia Fallah (Aug. 17); and the Grammy-winning chamber group Alarm Will Sound, with Georg Friedrich Haas’s “in vain,” hopefully not in vain (Aug. 21).
Lincoln Center holds its third annual Festival Orchestra, the successor of the Mostly Mozart Festival. Jonathon Heyward, the director, will once again lead us in a “Symphony of Choice,” where the audience can vote for pieces on their phones (July 8). “A Mother’s Love” (July 31, Aug. 1) features Brahms’s “Lullaby.” Frau Brahms, for her part, wrote her son dozens of heartfelt letters, including one saying that he was always her “first thought” in the morning. (He had two other siblings. A mother’s love!)
The Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center’s “Summer Evenings” series returns to Alice Tully Hall, with performances that include Gershwin’s Three Preludes for Violin and Piano (July 11), Bernstein’s Meditations for Cello and Piano, from “Mass” (July 14), and Beethoven’s Quintet Op. 29 (July 18). At the Rose Theatre, Teatro Nuovo will put on Mozart’s beloved “Don Giovanni” (July 15) and Rossini’s less-loved “Il Turco in Italia” (July 16). Strauss’s “The Egyptian Helen,” set after the Trojan War, will make an appearance at Bard Summerscape (Fisher Center, Annandale-on-Hudson; July 24-Aug. 2)—move over, Christopher Nolan’s “Odyssey.”
In Brooklyn, on June 3, National Sawdust honors Felipe Lara, the Brazilian American composer and, as of 2024, Pulitzer finalist. Lara’s special interest in mosaics and mazes will be reflected in his winding, labyrinthine piece called, neatly enough, “Mosaic Maze.” At Green-Wood Cemetery, Death of Classical digs into what it means to celebrate the country’s two-hundred-and-fiftieth birthday. Its program spotlights compositions that reinvent the song “America the Beautiful,” performed by the pianist Min Kwon (June 18-20); tickets include a walking tour of the catacombs. Also embracing the outdoors, the New York Philharmonic goes borough to borough for its “Concerts in the Park” series. Otherwise, this summer promises music from A.C. to shining A.C.—Jane Bua
P.S. Good stuff on the internet: