{"id":872,"date":"2026-07-10T11:37:07","date_gmt":"2026-07-10T11:37:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/cityrelocationnews.com\/?p=872"},"modified":"2026-07-10T11:37:07","modified_gmt":"2026-07-10T11:37:07","slug":"mark-morriss-summer-season","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cityrelocationnews.com\/?p=872","title":{"rendered":"Mark Morris\u2019s Summer Season"},"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

The choreographer Mark Morris<\/strong> is famously musical\u2014\u201cI like music more than I like anything else,\u201d he has said\u2014and his musical tastes are famously eclectic. He once made a dance\u2014\u201cO Rangasayee\u201d\u2014to 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. \u201cAmerican music happens to be vast, contradictory, and full of invention, so there\u2019s plenty to work with,\u201d he said recently, of this vein of his career.<\/p>\n

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A two-week engagement for his company, Mark Morris Dance Group,<\/strong> at the Joyce (July 14-25), reflects this variety. One program leans toward the recognizable, with offerings ranging from Gershwin (\u201cThree Preludes,\u201d 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, \u201cPizzica,\u201d set to \u201cGrande Tarantelle,\u201d a jaunty piece by the New Orleans pianist Louis Moreau Gottschalk. (If it sounds familiar, that\u2019s because it was popularized by George Balanchine, in 1964, with his faux-Italian duet, \u201cTarantella.\u201d Morris, who loves folk dances, actually throws in some tarantella steps.)<\/p>\n

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Country-and-Western tunes dominate the second program, which closes with the folksy but also rather melancholy \u201cGoing Away Party,\u201d made up of songs, by Bob Wills and His Texas Playboys, with titles such as \u201cMilk Cow Blues.\u201d 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\u2019s savage pas de deux \u201cJenn and Spencer\u201d\u2014imagine a breakup gone terribly wrong\u2014and the mysterious and ritualistic \u201cGrand Duo,\u201d a great stomping dance that closes with a thrilling, yet not at all upbeat, polka.\u2014Marina Harss<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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About Town<\/h2>\n

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Off Broadway<\/div>\n

The director Stephen Brown-Fried\u2019s taut adaptation of the infrequently performed trilogy of history plays \u201cHenry VI\u201d<\/strong>\u2014condensed into two three-ish-hour parts\u2014is crowded with coups, rebellions, dynastic feuds, and beheadings, here memorably signified by bundles of rope slipping from actors\u2019 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\u2019s quietly stirring Henry and Teresa Avia Lim\u2019s 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.\u2014Rhoda Feng (Public Theatre; through July 19.)<\/em><\/p>\n

Classical<\/div>\n

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<\/strong> is bringing France to Westchester, with an evening of music by the Baroque composer Marc-Antoine Charpentier. Up first is the chamber opera \u201cLes Arts Florissants,\u201d whose characters include Peace, Discord, and Jupiter; then \u201cLa Descente d\u2019Orph\u00e9e aux enfers,\u201d based on the myth of Orpheus. Quel plaisir!\u2014Jane Bua (Katonah, N.Y.; July 17.)<\/em><\/p>\n

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Shortly after the conclusion of the fourth season of the Netflix blockbuster \u201cStranger Things,\u201d in 2022, one of the series regulars, Joe Keery, released \u201cDecide,\u201d his second album as Djo.<\/strong> 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\u2014at least until, curiously, nearly two years later, one of the songs on \u201cDecide,\u201d the wistful \u201cEnd of Beginning,\u201d 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, \u201cThe Crux,\u201d in 2025. He is joined in this show by the Australian psych-rock band Pond.\u2014Sheldon Pearce (Forest Hills Stadium; July 17.)<\/em><\/p>\n

Read more Should You Recline Your Airplane Seat?<\/a><\/p>\n

Off Broadway<\/div>\n

Based on the gently wistful 1999 film of the same name, the musical \u201cA Walk on the Moon\u201d<\/strong> 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\u2014an apt metaphor for a strangely under-oxygenated production that repeatedly treats epochal events such as the moon landing as screen savers for Pearl\u2019s 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.\u2014R.F. (Laura Pels; through Aug. 22.)<\/em><\/p>\n

Movies<\/div>\n

Ross McElwee, a longtime personal documentarian whose family figures prominently in his films, faces tragedy in \u201cRemake\u201d<\/strong>: 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\u2019s earlier films and from home movies. Adrian, creative and energetic from childhood on\u2014and raised in the presence of movie cameras\u2014became 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\u2019s work, while also reckoning with his own life and career\u2014and with the practice, and the ethics, of filming his family.\u2014Richard Brody (Film Forum; opening July 10.)<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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The teeming series \u201cImmigrant Nation: People in Transit,\u201d<\/strong> ongoing at MOMA<\/em>, 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\u2019s 1990 crime drama, \u201cFarewell China,\u201d 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\u2019s doom-laden plein-air melodrama \u201cToni,\u201d 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.\u2014R.B. (Through Sept. 9.)<\/em><\/p>\n

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Bar Tab<\/h2>\n

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Taran Dugal encounters spirits steps from Green-Wood Cemetery.<\/em><\/p>\n

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The art of carousing has long featured a mystical element. In the Middle Ages, alchemists began calling distilled alcohol \u201caqua vitae,\u201d the water of life, and regarded it as the soul of a drink\u2014hence the term \u201cspirits.\u201d Folk,<\/strong> a new cocktail lounge situated just a stone\u2019s throw from Green-Wood Cemetery, in South Slope, follows in that occult tradition. To two first-timers, the bar\u2019s 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\u2019s effort to embrace a different kind of spirit. The guests ordered the Mangalorean, named after the chef Jay Kumar\u2019s birthplace, an Indian city on the Arabian Sea: a sublime, sweet, velvety mix of rum, pineapple, lime, and coconut cream infused with amchur<\/em>, 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\u2019s 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\u2019s 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\u2019s fenced exterior, a small army of gravestones cast long shadows in the evening. Maybe it was the bartender\u2019s heavy pour, or the cemetery air, but the pair felt that they understood what those medieval alchemists were talking about.<\/p>\n

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