While Gustavo Dudamel is busy jump-starting the Carnegie Hall season with a glamorous gala—complete with another Gustavo, the baritone Castillo—the Park Avenue Armory has a slightly less ostentatious night planned. The tenor Karim Sulayman, a Lebanese American son of immigrants who fled Beirut during the Civil War, and the guitarist Sean Shibe, who was born in Edinburgh to an English father and a Japanese mother, explore the relationship between Eastern and Western musical traditions. The pair place composers like Britten and Purcell in conversation with Layale Chaker and Tōru Takemitsu, for a meditation on mosaicked identity which challenges the false polarities among traditions in the classical-music world.—Jane Bua (Park Avenue Armory; Oct. 8 and Oct. 10.)
Dance
Photograph by Ben Jackson
The Dayton Contemporary Dance Company, founded in 1968, has long been known for lovingly preserving and performing classic works by African American choreographers. Now it has become the first Black-centered troupe to take on “Esplanade,” a masterpiece of walking, running, and sliding to Bach that Paul Taylor (who was white) made nearly fifty years ago. For the company’s return to the Joyce, it sets “Esplanade” next to “Jacob’s Ladder,” a 2006 tribute to the painter Jacob Lawrence, by the hip-hop authority Rennie Harris, and “This I Know for Sure,” a moody rendering of choreographic process by Ray Mercer.—Brian Seibert (Joyce Theatre; Oct. 1-6.)
Off Off Broadway
In Luis Quintero’s stunning “Medea: Re-versed”—directed by Nathan Winkelstein, in a co-production by Red Bull, Bedlam, and Hudson Valley Shakespeare Festival—the playwright restages the ancient tragedy in a rap idiom, changing Euripides’ flights of Greek lyric into blistering rhymes, rapid-fire stichomythia into an m.c.’s call-and-response. Compression creates thrilling effects: in a swift eighty minutes, a beatboxer, a two-piece band, and an expert, five-person cast capture all the vicious human comedy and contagious moral stain of the original. The theatre is tiny, but the show feels enormous. Sarin Monae West’s Medea is an entire hurricane, and the others—including Quintero himself, as a terrorized chorus leader—become the city in her path, all of it, laid waste.—H.S. (Sheen Center; through Oct. 13.)
Indie Rock
Photograph by Alysse Gafkjen
In recent years, the singer-songwriter Julien Baker has evolved as part of the indie hydra boygenius, a supergroup she co-founded, in 2018, alongside the fellow folk-adjacent rockers Phoebe Bridgers and Lucy Dacus. The band’s music found the overlap among its members’ finespun styles, and its début album, “The Record,” from last year, was nominated for Record and Album of the Year at the Grammys. Before boygenius, Baker’s poignant début, “Sprained Ankle,” from 2015, revealed a confessional artist blurring the lines between faith and addiction, finding God among the pews at church and the stools at the bar. Her weary voice relays longing as well as woe, and subsequent albums have seemed to reflect an only deepening understanding of both self-help and self-harm.—Sheldon Pearce (Webster Hall; Oct. 5-7.)
Movies
Francis Ford Coppola’s imagination is excited above all by power, and his spectacular new movie “Megalopolis” offers a thrillingly audacious premise to explore the idea—and to flaunt it. In a corrupt futuristic city called New Rome, characters and conflicts from the Roman Empire are grafted onto the gaudy amusements, the political battles, and the romantic entanglements of a near-dystopia. A civic-minded genius, Cesar Catilina (Adam Driver), strives to turn his world into a utopia instead, one of abundance and beauty, but his mighty plan—which blends science, art, and urbanism—meets with opposition from Mayor Franklyn Cicero (Giancarlo Esposito) and is complicated by a relationship with the Mayor’s daughter, Julia (Nathalie Emmanuel). Coppola’s passionately triumphalist view of a lone visionary gives rise to images and performances of hectic, extravagant wonder.—Richard Brody (In wide release.)
On and Off the Avenue
The staff writer Rachel Syme shares highly edible culinary delights.
On the wry, gabby, hyper-intellectual podcast “POOG,” the L.A.-based comedians Jacqueline Novak and Kate Berlant interrogate all things wellness. They happily dabble in adaptogen tonics, colonics, and crystals and yet maintain a crucial critical distance. The duo’s running dialogue has developed an army of fans—called, lovingly, “Hags.” On the show, the two often gush about Jar, an old-school steak house near Beverly Hills, where they meet for lychee Martinis, a drink that Berlant describes as “angel’s bathwater.” This August, the pair monetized the obsession, releasing—in partnership with Jar and the California-based cannabis company Rose—a pretty box, about the size of a deck of cards, of lychee-Martini-flavored weed gummies, each containing just one milligram of THC. (Most gummies on the market contain five or ten.) The gummies themselves, called “delights”—starch-based, sugar-dusted, chickpea-size cubes, which resemble Turkish Delight in texture—contain fresh lychee purée, along with an essence of “Italian nipple lemon,” also known as a Femminello. A pack of twenty costs forty-five dollars. As a Hag myself, my interest was piqued.
