Also: Long-running culture podcasts having a moment, David Byrne’s art-rock palette, Robert Rauschenberg’s photographs, and more.
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In the year 2000, when cinema’s most recent Batman was George Clooney and the first movie in the Marvel Cinematic Universe was eight years away, Michael Chabon published the novel “The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay.” The book was about two cousins in nineteen-forties New York City—one finding refuge after fleeing Nazi-occupied Prague, the other trying to make a name for himself as a writer. Together, they embark on a comic-book venture, centering their stories on an antifascist superhero called the Escapist. The narrative, vividly written and ripe with visual dynamism, is now adapted for opera: “The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay” opens the Metropolitan Opera’s season, on Sept. 21, directed by the Met vet Bartlett Sher, with a libretto by Gene Scheer—a leading expert in big-book operas—and a score composed by Mason Bates. The production develops three primary worlds from the original story. One is Europe: “We’re in Prague, we’re on the battlefields in France, we’re in a boxcar train to a concentration camp,” the set designer Jenny Melville, of 59 Studio, explained. “That’s all represented in this grainy, black-and-white look.” The setting’s gravity is also reflected in the music: Bates includes haunting strings, spindly mandolin, and gritty analog synthesizers, along with Wagnerian tubas, a nod to Adolf Hitler’s composer of choice. The second world is New York City, where the cousins pursue their artistic endeavors. “New York is much more realistic,” Melville said. “It’s the one area where we used very naturalistic props.” The music that soundtracks this atmosphere focusses on a big-band sound, highlighting “saxophones and swagger,” as Bates put it, and is set to tunes in F-sharp major—an homage to Irving Berlin’s affection for the key—which makes for a vibrant aural palette. The final world is that of the comic: where the audience sees the process of creation, from first sketch to printed product, in bright-colored digital projections, and the score is characterized by synthetic sounds and chromatic tonality. “It’s less about one key than about this phantasmagoric mix of electronica and Technicolor orchestration,” Bates explained. But, though they each have their own signposts, the three worlds are not so removed from one another. Trauma and escapism necessarily interweave, as do their corresponding artistic elements—when someone jumps off a bridge in Europe, for example, their figure shapeshifts into a projected sketch. In 2025, a story that asks what it means to create amid tyrannical politics feels especially relevant. “We look for a force of good when we’re looking at authoritarianism,” Bates said. “Unfortunately, that hasn’t really changed since the nineteen-forties.” Another thing that hasn’t changed is the ability of art to offer an avenue for humanity, a means for trauma to give way to something with a kernel of beauty and hope. As Chabon wrote, escape from reality is a worthy challenge.—Jane Bua
Although Robert Rauschenberg often used photographs in his paintings, prints, and assemblages, many were pictures cut or copied from newspapers and magazines—the media was always a key part of his message. But the artist also took and incorporated his own photographs, and “Robert Rauschenberg’s New York: Pictures from the Real World,” at the Museum of the City of New York, focusses on those pictures and the wider range of black-and-white images he made in the city. His photos are full of quick glances and incidental moments: torn posters, a bare bulb, a tattooed arm. “[H]ow marvelous it is to have an excuse to just look at everything,” Rauschenberg said. In his hungry eye, everything deserves and rewards our attention.—Vince Aletti (Through April 19.)
A few years ago, when a long-abandoned power station on Brooklyn’s Gowanus Canal was refashioned into Powerhouse Arts, a chicly industrial space for visual artists, the graffiti that covered the walls was largely kept intact. That helps make it the perfect setting for “Skatepark,” the first show in the new Powerhouse: International arts festival. The Danish choreographer Mette Ingvartsen equips a crew of skateboarders and roller-skaters with the ramps and rails they need, plus instruments and microphones to rev up a punk vibe. Round and round they go, falling and trying again, weaving in and out of one another’s paths and modelling coexistence in the hidden rules they follow.—Brian Seibert (Powerhouse Arts; Sept. 25-27.)
I don’t always know where I am in the films of Ufuoma Essi, just that I’m always somewhere haunted. MOMA presents two works by Essi that interrogate the way memory—and all its eerie perturbations—moves through Black bodies. In “Half Memory,” from 2024—inspired by Toni Morrison’s notion of “rememory,” describing recurrent flickers of traumatized memory in the Black psyche—Essi’s Super 8 camera ushers viewers through carefully observed slices of San Francisco, New York, Paris. The grain and grit of the film lend the aesthetic touch of the archive—it’s as if we’re looking at the present through the eyes of a ghost. When it erupts into mesmerizing abstract fulgurations of color, it’s as if the film itself has imploded under the force of all the memories held therein.—Zoë Hopkins (MOMA; through Oct. 13.)
When David Byrne joined Olivia Rodrigo to perform “Burning Down the House” at this year’s Governors Ball, it was just another reminder of the rich and quirky musical life he’s led. The singer-songwriter and guitarist has often used his work to bridge creative mediums, both with his new-wave band Talking Heads and beyond—highlighted by the seminal 1984 concert film “Stop Making Sense.” Across his numerous albums outside the band, Byrne has continued to expand a lively art-rock palette. His cross-platform “Reasons to Be Cheerful” project encompassed a website and a lecture series, and was connected to an album, “American Utopia,” and a Broadway show. For his latest project—“Who Is the Sky?” with Ghost Train Orchestra—he promises an immersive live-storytelling experience.—Sheldon Pearce (Radio City Music Hall; Sept. 30-Oct. 1, Oct. 10-11.)
There’s a missing link in the handful of films for which Elaine May has lately won long-overdue acclaim as a director: “The Heartbreak Kid,” from 1972, which hasn’t been reissued because of rights issues. Charles Grodin stars as a schlubby New Yorker who, during a Miami Beach honeymoon, dumps his awkward bride (Jeannie Berlin, May’s daughter) for a breezy Minnesota socialite (Cybill Shepherd) whose father (Eddie Albert) he then has to face. Working with a script by Neil Simon, May turns its tightly wound comedy into an uproarious, bitterly ironic vision of self-liberation and the pursuit of happiness. Berlin and Albert were nominated for Oscars; fittingly, the movie is being shown at the Museum of the Moving Image in a 35-mm. print borrowed from the Academy Film Archive.—Richard Brody (Sept. 27-28.)
Off Off Broadway In Eisa Davis’s choreopoem “The Essentialisn’t” the artist-composer-performer makes new work out of old ideas of Black womanhood, sometimes by mocking clichés—she gets the audience to scream-sing a “Dreamgirls” riff—and sometimes by remaking them. At the beginning of her dreamy performance, Davis plunges into a tall tank of water, murmuring “darkness be my friend”: she will return several times to water metaphors, which can represent both the Middle Passage and a ritual benediction. Between episodes, she asks versions of the question, “Can you be Black and not perform?” She sings several elliptical answers, accompanying herself on electric keyboard: many are call-and-response numbers with her co-performers Princess Jacob and Jamella Cross; others are quiet, inward-turning affirmations, such as “Blackness minus narrative equals us.”—Helen Shaw (HERE; through Sept. 28.)
This season, in a cosmic convergence of radio waves, several of our mightiest long-running culture series—some of which predate the podcast itself—are observing milestones at once. The series below are, respectively, changing, ending, or celebrating carrying on; beyond those, “This American Life” turns thirty and “Fresh Air,” incredibly, just turned fifty. (Terry Gross’s recent appearance on “Talk Easy with Sam Fragoso” is a must-listen.) All have near-endless back catalogues; all are endlessly listenable. 1. The beloved British polymath and broadcasting legend Melvyn Bragg, who joined the BBC in 1961, recently stepped down from his show “In Our Time,” which, since 1998, has delved into matters of science, art, and far, far beyond, informed by academics moderated with Bragg’s great brio. In characteristic fashion, some of Bragg’s last episodes explore dragons, civility, and the evolution of lungs. 2. “WTF with Marc Maron” helped define the podcast form, starting in 2009, as Maron soul-searched and mea-culpaed his way through old beefs with fellow-comedians; he evolved into one of the best interviewers in the business. Autumn brings the end of “WTF” and a documentary about Maron, “Are We Good?” 3. “Kreative Kontrol,” an insightful labor-of-love interview podcast by the Edmonton-based journalist and music enthusiast Vish Khanna, marked its thousandth episode this summer. Khanna’s passion and depth of knowledge have yielded many coups, including notable interviews with the Silver Jews’ David Berman, in 2019, and with all the members of Fugazi, in 2024.
September is unofficially Fashion Month in New York. The runway shows stomp through, along with the attendant canapé-dotted parties and slick brand events. Magazines drop their thickest, glossiest issues. There is an energized, back-to-school vigor around shopping—nubbly sweaters of all colors tempt passersby from well-composed store windows. This year, even a movie theatre is getting in on the stylish mood: Metrograph, on the Lower East Side, hosts a weekend film series, complete with talkbacks and special guests, called “Starving for Beauty!: Superfine Stories on Screen” (Sept. 20-21), a companion to “Superfine,” the Metropolitan Museum’s current Costume Institute exhibition exploring Black dandyism in fashion. (The exhibition’s curator, Monica L. Miller, put the series together.) Here are the five films on view. “The Gospel According to André” (2017, Kate Novack) When André Leon Talley died, in 2022, the fashion world lost one of its most charismatic and fascinating figures. Talley, a brilliant bon vivant and the first Black man to serve as creative director of Vogue, was a kind of caped crusader for high fashion (quite literally; his cape collection was legendary). Talley was a staunch advocate for designers and their craft, even as he often critiqued the industry at large for its clubbish exclusivity. “Black Is . . . Black Ain’t” (1995, Marlon Riggs) The director put his own story at the center of this wide-ranging documentary about the diversity of Black experience in America. While making it, Riggs was battling AIDS, and the film’s meta-narrative, about whether he will survive to see it finished, lends the work a poignant urgency. The film won the 1995 Filmmakers Trophy at Sundance, but Riggs was not there to accept it; he died in 1994. “Looking for Langston” (1989, Isaac Julien) This gorgeous black-and-white exploration of the Harlem Renaissance poet Langston Hughes expands into a wider meditation on queer Black identity. Julien used archival footage from the nineteen-twenties, intercut with the writing of Hughes, James Baldwin, and others, to show the connection between artists across time, both in speakeasies and on the page. “Dressed Like Kings” (2007, Stacey Holman) Holman’s short documentary digs into the subculture of oswenka (or “swank”) pageants in South Africa, in which men parade in their finest clothes in pursuit of being named “Best Dressed.” “Portrait of Jason” (1967, Shirley Clarke) A riveting documentary that is part monologue, part character study, part confrontation, this cult classic, shot in the course of twelve hours in Clarke’s apartment at the Chelsea Hotel, features a long, meandering conversation with Jason Holliday, a gay street hustler and aspiring cabaret performer who is a talker par excellence. Jason alternately romances the camera and spars with it; you will leave with your head spinning.
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