Little Island Goes Big

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Brian Seibert
Seibert has covered dance for Goings On since 2002.

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When Little Island, the extravagantly landscaped public park that floats above the Hudson River on tulip-shaped columns, first opened, in the summer of 2021, its outdoor performance spaces were especially welcome. At that stage of the pandemic, outdoor shows were nearly the only kind. And here was an Instagram-friendly destination with an amphitheatre, right on the water, seating nearly seven hundred, along with a smaller performance area at the base of a sloped lawn. It shimmered with potential.

The initial programming, partly organized by resident artists, had a populist attitude. Some of the hundred-plus events in Little Island’s first few years featured big names, often from Broadway, but everything had something of a pop-up, neighborhood feel. The title of one program could have served for all: “The Big Mix.”

Illustration by Manddy Wyckens

Too much mix and not enough big is what Barry Diller, the mogul who paid for the park and bankrolls its programming, may have thought. This summer, he’s put his money into fewer and more ambitious projects with nine high-profile premières.

The season opens, on June 1, with a new work by Twyla Tharp. That production runs for almost a month, as does a condensed version of “The Marriage of Figaro” (starting Aug. 30), in which the countertenor Anthony Roth Costanzo plays every leading role. Throughout the summer, in weeklong stints, the star bass-baritone Davóne Tines takes on the repertory and troubled story of Paul Robeson; Chris Thile, America’s favorite mandolinist, gives a troubadour treatment to the story of a cocktail bar; and the choreographer Pam Tanowitz applies her brilliant spatial sense to the unusual location. Additional shows in the lawn area boast lots of boldface, too, with spates of music, talks, and cabaret curated by Suzan-Lori Parks, Justin Vivian Bond, and Cécile McLorin Salvant.

But first comes Tharp. Her première, “How Long Blues,” has a live score, by the roots-music experts T Bone Burnett and David Mansfield, and a cast that mixes Tharp regulars with the likes of the Broadway leading man Michael Cerveris. Other than that, all Tharp will share about the work is that it’s an epic narrative on the theme of resilience, and is inspired by Camus. If the project turns out to be Sisyphean, at least Tharp has set her sights high.

About Town

Podcasts

“White Devil,” a provocative new series from Campside Media, hosted by Josh Dean, explores the aftermath of a 2021 killing in Belize which made international headlines: the shooting of a senior police officer, Henry Jemmott, by Jasmine Hartin, a Canadian property developer connected to one of the most powerful families in the country. The series isn’t true crime; if anything, the shooting itself, apparently an accident, gets short shrift. Where “White Devil” excels is in using Hartin’s overnight reversal of fortune to examine power and corruption in postcolonial Belize, whose status as getaway and tax haven for wealthy foreigners makes life perilous for everybody else. The show zooms in on Hartin’s former de-facto father-in-law, the British Belizean business magnate Lord Michael Ashcroft, a Tory-supporting, heroism-medal-collecting billionaire, whose local nickname gives the series its title.—Sarah Larson

Off Broadway

Dave Malloy’s pandemic-isolation-era sad-cabaret “Three Houses” takes the form of three monodramas, sung by participants at a kind of supernatural open-mike night, the songs delivered in a quasi-operatic oom-pah-pah recitative. Each section starts the same way: a breakup, then lockdown and a retreat to an otherwise empty refuge, where mental cohesion frays. A small ensemble expands on the soloists’ fantasies, bringing to life a dead grandma’s ghost (Ching Valdes-Aran), or a spider (Margo Seibert) that harasses an increasingly paranoid man (J. D. Mollison), or the metaphorical wolf (Scott Stangland) who tries to blow all the little houses down. The director, Annie Tippe, emphasizes these whimsical elements to warm the evening, but Malloy’s existential horror—and a drumbeat of self-accusation—chills every second of the show’s hundred difficult minutes.—Helen Shaw (Pershing Square Signature Theatre; through June 9.)

Indie Pop

Of Montreal’s Kevin Barnes.

Photograph by Shervin Lainez

The Athens, Georgia-born band of Montreal has experienced many iterations, all of which revolve around the singer-songwriter and multi-instrumentalist Kevin Barnes. Across nineteen albums, starting in the mid-nineties, the band’s mercurial indie-pop sound has shifted from the zippy psychedelia of such LPs as “The Gay Parade” and “Satanic Panic in the Attic” to the electronic-forward synth pop of its recent outings, particularly “UR FUN” (2020). Its latest album, “Lady on the Cusp,” marks the end of an era: it’s the last record that Barnes made while living in Georgia. Fittingly, the record’s wheezing tunes are a disorienting jumble of many previous modes. The band plays from the entire catalogue at shows, but Barnes has said that they prefer doing new songs—only then are the crowd’s reactions truly a surprise.—Sheldon Pearce (Elsewhere; June 4.)

Dance

Like so many institutions founded by towering cultural figures, Alvin Ailey American Dance Theatre now has a split personality. On the one hand, it serves as a repository for Ailey’s beloved dances, first among them the always-thrilling “Revelations.” But a company can’t live on its past alone, and that’s where commissions come in. A weeklong run at BAM offers both facets. In one of two programs, the impressive, generous Ailey dancers take on the poetic “Ode,” by Jamar Roberts, a meditation on death and transfiguration from 2019, and Alonzo King’s fluid, meditative 2000 work “Following the Subtle Current Upstream.” The other is all Ailey, including the powerful hymn to womanhood “Cry” and, yes, “Revelations.”—Marina Harss (Howard Gilman Opera House; June 4-9.)

Off Broadway

Sheldon Best, in “The Fires.”

Photograph by Julieta Cervantes

In Raja Feather Kelly’s melancholy “The Fires,” three generations of Black men occupy the same apartment at three different times: we see them in 1974, when Jay (Phillip James Brannon) composes an allegorical text about Aphrodite, as his lover, George (Ronald Peet), tends to him; in 1998, when Sam (Sheldon Best) searches Jay’s and George’s notebooks for clues about his own father’s recent suicide; and in 2021, when Eli (Beau Badu) sequesters himself in the apartment during the pandemic, reading the notebooks as a friend (Jason Veasey) badgers him into attempting a meaningful connection. Feather Kelly’s long experience as a choreographer has made him comfortable with iteration, and this shapes his deliberately repetitive, looping dialogues about sorrow and sex. Strangely, his direction of actors, rather than language, is less controlled—though his interest in physical languor does create a certain hypnotic, aching lassitude onstage.—H.S. (Soho Rep; through June 16.)

Movies

Nanni Moretti, a master of cinematic autofiction, returns boldly to the form with “A Brighter Tomorrow,” in Film at Lincoln Center’s “Open Roads” series of new Italian films. Moretti, now seventy, builds his political and artistic passions into his role as Giovanni, an Italian director who is making a historical drama, set in 1956, about a Hungarian circus troupe stranded in Rome among Italian Communist hosts. Meanwhile, Giovanni’s marriage to a producer (Margherita Buy) is coming apart. Moretti gleefully unleashes intricate narrative maneuvers while scathingly satirizing the movie business. Giovanni’s film coalesces both with his intimate life and with his romantic vision, which is put on scintillating display when he sees a young couple in the street and directs their lovers’ dialogue.—Richard Brody (June 1 and June 5.)

Pick Three

The staff writer Inkoo Kang on what to watch.

Jean Smart, in “Hacks.”

Photograph by Hilary Bronwyn Gayle / Courtesy Max

1. The prestige show: With its third and final season, “Hacks” (Max) makes a compelling case for the limited series. The boomer-meets-zoomer dramedy—about a once legendary comic, Deborah Vance (Jean Smart), attempting a comeback and her scrappy joke writer, Ava (Hannah Einbinder), coaxing her into uncomfortable new places—has skillfully guided its central duo to their inevitable dénouement. As Deborah schemes to, finally, host a late-night show, the question of whether she can mature enough to see her protégée as an equal builds this swan song to its emotional crescendo.

2. The comfort show: In “Elsbeth” (CBS), a second spinoff of “The Good Wife,” Carrie Preston reprises her role as a ditzy legal savant, who moves from Chicago to Manhattan ostensibly to monitor the N.Y.P.D. But Elsbeth spends most of her time solving homicides, which, taken together, depict a glittery metropolis teeming with entitled, well-heeled killers, played by a murderer’s row of character actors, who satisfyingly get their comeuppance.

3. The what-the-hell-am-I-watching show: On Paramount+, the “Good Wife” creators, Robert and Michelle King, let their freak flag fly with “Evil,” a case-of-the-week procedural that has perfected Catholic horror-camp. A priest (Mike Colter), a psychologist (Katja Herbers), and a debunker (Aasif Mandvi) walk into, well, usually a house in need of an exorcism. The show is riotous, but its greatest strengths are its knowing outlandishness and its tech-centric story lines. What better way for a demon to crush one’s soul than by urging a person to spend too much time online?

P.S. Good stuff on the Internet: