{"id":477,"date":"2026-06-12T13:39:22","date_gmt":"2026-06-12T13:39:22","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/cityrelocationnews.com\/?p=477"},"modified":"2026-06-12T13:39:22","modified_gmt":"2026-06-12T13:39:22","slug":"a-wondrous-array-of-boundary-pushers-at-summerstage","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cityrelocationnews.com\/?p=477","title":{"rendered":"A Wondrous Array of Boundary Pushers at SummerStage"},"content":{"rendered":"
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You\u2019re reading the Goings On newsletter, a guide to what we\u2019re watching, listening to, and doing this week. Sign up to receive it in your inbox.<\/strong><\/em><\/span><\/div>\n<\/div>\n

This year, City Parks Foundation SummerStage<\/strong> 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 \u201cRepublic of Love,\u201d 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<\/em> (July 12), the American fixture Mavis Staples (July 16), the West African icon Ang\u00e9lique Kidjo (Aug. 23).<\/p>\n

Read more Why \u201cBook-Shaming\u201d Won\u2019t Solve the Children\u2019s Literacy Crisis<\/a><\/p>\n

Throughout the summer, audiences of diverse taste gather in collective support of a rich, collated music scene. In jazz, the mavericks SHABAKA<\/em> 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 \u201cThe Mysterious Production of Eggs\u201d (Aug. 6). And, in hip-hop, such home-town m.c.s as MIKE<\/em>, Max B (July 11), De La Soul (July 17), and Doug E. Fresh (July 31) lead homages to rap mecca.\u2014Sheldon Pearce<\/em><\/p>\n

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About Town<\/h2>\n

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Television<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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The new dramedy \u201cThe Audacity,\u201d<\/strong> on AMC, offers a panoramic critique of Silicon Valley\u2019s 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\u2014a program described as \u201cGod\u2019s eye\u201d\u2014collects intimate details about people, including the man whom Duncan\u2019s wife, Lili (Lucy Punch), just slept with (they have an open marriage), and Duncan\u2019s financially strapped therapist, JoAnne (Sarah Goldberg), who rationalizes her insider trading. The tech is terrifying, but it\u2019s treated matter-of-factly, played for barked laughs. \u201cThe Audacity\u201d\u00a0\u2019s 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.\u2014Inkoo Kang (Now streaming.)<\/em><\/p>\n

Alternative Rock<\/div>\n

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\u2019t on call for culture-shifters, he maintains his creative autonomy as the front man of Bleachers,<\/strong> a solo project turned full band that has furthered his indie-rock bona fides. On the heels of its confessional new album, \u201ceveryone for ten minutes,\u201d Bleachers takes the stage with the special guest Wednesday.<\/strong>\u2014Sheldon Pearce (Madison Square Garden; June 23.)<\/em><\/p>\n

Dance<\/div>\n

American Ballet Theatre<\/strong> brings out its biggest, most lavish productions to fill the giant stage at the Metropolitan Opera House. Its season opens and<\/em> closes with the biggest of them all, \u201cSwan Lake,\u201d 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 \u201cOnegin,\u201d John Cranko\u2019s opulent and fussy take on Pushkin\u2019s novel in verse. The Russian powerhouse Natalia Osipova returns for a single performance of \u201cDon Quixote,\u201d 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 \u201cSylvia,\u201d Frederick Ashton\u2019s tongue-in-cheek gloss on Greek mythology, to a glistening score by L\u00e9o Delibes.\u2014Marina Harss (Metropolitan Opera House; June 17-July 18.)<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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Movies<\/div>\n

As the writer and director of \u201cMaddie\u2019s Secret,\u201d<\/strong> John Early parodies previous generations\u2019 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\u2019s 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\u2019 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\u2019s satire is meek and its sense of style is both bland and slapdash.\u2014Richard Brody (Opening June 19 in limited release.)<\/em><\/p>\n

Read more \u201cMudville,\u201d Reviewed: An Atlanta Filmmaker\u2019s Expansive D.I.Y. Family Drama<\/a><\/p>\n

Art<\/div>\n

There\u2019s a lot of poignancy and humor in \u201cKnots,\u201d Lucy Sante\u2019s<\/strong> show of collages, which are beautifully displayed in one of the Academy\u2019s stately libraries. Actually, the subversive images, which often feature a female protagonist standing amid world history\u2014one of the strongest shows a chic woman in profile with pursed lips, blowing on an image of Haussmann\u2019s Paris being blown up\u2014are 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 \u201cDE LA<\/em>\u201d and features a man examining a woman\u2019s 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.\u2014Hilton Als (American Academy of Arts and Letters; through July 3.)<\/em><\/p>\n

Movies<\/div>\n

In Satyajit Ray\u2019s emotionally harsh and finely observed melodrama \u201cDays and Nights in the Forest,\u201d<\/strong> 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\u2019s incisive view of the gross inequities of the caste system, a stifling bureaucratic order, and rigid traditions reveals the societal roots of intimate misery.\u2014R.B. (Film Forum; through June 18.)<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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Pick Three<\/h2>\n

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Rachel Syme on summer cultural happenings.<\/em><\/p>\n

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1.<\/strong> 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\u2019s 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 expos\u00e9, \u201cTen Days in a Mad House\u201d). 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\u2019s southern tip, is a wonderful sound installation by the Finnish artist Hans Rosenstr\u00f6m, called \u201cOut of Silence\u201d<\/strong> (through June 21).<\/em> 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 P\u00e4rt, plays throughout the park. Listening to eerie harmonies while watching ships sail past is, for this New Yorker, worth the tram ride.<\/p>\n

2.<\/strong> I\u2019m lightly ignoring most two-hundred-and-fiftieth anniversary revelries, but I\u2019ll make an exception for the Museum of the Moving Image\u2019s new series \u201cBy the People, for the People\u201d<\/strong> (through July 5), which highlights American films that focus on marginalized communities. I\u2019m particularly excited about \u201cSalt of the Earth\u201d (July 5), a radical drama about a mining strike in small-town New Mexico.<\/p>\n

3.<\/strong> Nothing screams summer like a big, boisterous, campy musical. And a fresh Encores! revival of \u201cLa Cage aux Folles\u201d<\/strong> (City Center; June 17-28), with an all-Black cast fronted by Billy Porter and Wayne Brady, will be just that.<\/p>\n

Read more Are Americans Too Old?<\/a><\/p>\n

P.S. Good stuff on the internet:<\/strong><\/p>\n