After the Ceremony, the City
The 79th Tony Awards closed last night at Radio City; this week, the city's attention turns to a free Romeo and Juliet at the Delacorte, an inaugural guitar festival across Greenpoint and Prospect Park, and a Pride theater season that puts Arab queer voices at the center.
The 79th Tony Awards wrapped last night at Radio City — P!nk hosting, Schmigadoon! and The Lost Boys carrying the evening’s narrative — and by this morning the city had already swung its attention elsewhere. By Monday, a queer retelling of The Odyssey opens at BAM’s Fishman Space in Fort Greene, and the National Queer Theater begins its Criminal Queerness Festival at HERE Arts Center with Arab queer voices at the center. By Thursday, Romeo and Juliet is officially open at the Delacorte, free by lottery, under a June sky, in a production where the lovers speak only to each other in Spanish. An inaugural guitar festival strings together Greenpoint and Prospect Park across the weekend. The ceremony had its night; the city is getting its week.
Theater
The week’s theatrical centerpiece is Saheem Ali’s Romeo and Juliet, officially opening Thursday, June 11 at the Delacorte Theater after a preview run, and what has drawn attention in that time is a dramaturgical choice that feels genuinely new: Romeo and Juliet speak only to each other in Spanish, a private language within a bilingual world, making their intimacy literally unintelligible to the families and feuds surrounding them. Ra’Mya Latiah Aikens and Daniel Bravo Hernández lead the cast, which includes LaChanze, Okieriete Onaodowan, Deirdre O’Connell, and Francis Jue. This is the first time the Public has mounted this play at the Delacorte in nearly twenty years. Tickets remain free, same-day lottery at the theater or TodayTix; the run continues through June 28. publictheater.org
Unverified
Descriptions of the Spanish-language device as a “private language” are drawn from preview accounts; critical assessments are not yet published ahead of opening night.
Opening the same week in Fort Greene: Todd Almond’s I’m Almost There at BAM’s Fishman Space begins June 9 — a queer Odyssey reimagining Odysseus as a gay New Yorker trying to navigate to a first date while the city keeps intervening. Almond wrote the show and performs in it; Tony Award winner David Cromer directs. It arrives fresh off Edinburgh Fringe, runs three weeks through June 28 before a US tour. bam.org
Also opening June 9: the National Queer Theater’s Criminal Queerness Festival at HERE Arts Center (145 Sixth Ave.), the official theater program of NYC Pride. This year’s edition centers Arab queer voices — playwrights from countries where queerness is criminalized or suppressed — in a series running through June 27. HERE is one of the city’s essential off-off venues, and this festival is one of the reasons why. herearts.org
Independent Film
IFC Center’s marquee restoration this week is Mary Harron’s I Shot Andy Warhol (1996), opening June 12 in a new 4K print as part of its 30th anniversary release, with Harron in person for Q&As through the weekend and a benefit screening for Missing Movies on June 14. Lili Taylor’s performance as Valerie Solanas — wound-tight, darkly funny, dangerous in ways that keep surprising — is one of the defining lead performances of American independent cinema from that decade. Harron went on to direct American Psycho (2000), but this was the debut, and returning to it thirty years later is an argument for why restoration matters. ifccenter.com
Also at IFC this week: Lilian T. Mehrel’s debut feature Honeyjoon screens June 10 with a Q&A, and Gaslit — directed by Katie Camosy — gets a June 12 conversation with executive producer Jane Fonda.
Unverified
The detail of Jane Fonda as executive producer of Gaslit and her participation in a June 12 IFC Q&A comes from a single source summary and could not be independently confirmed.
Over on Ludlow Street, Metrograph’s Shunji Iwai retrospective, “The World at Full Volume,” continues through June 27 with curator Marc Francis introducing a program on June 14. The series is built around the new 4K restoration of Iwai’s Love Letter (1995) — a film about grief, misaddressed letters, and something approaching grace — and it is one of the stronger arguments for repertory cinema in the city this summer. metrograph.com
Music
The inaugural Brooklyn Guitar Festival arrives June 12–13 across two venues, and it already has the bones of something that should become annual. Friday night at Warsaw in Greenpoint — the 1,000-capacity room at 261 Driggs Avenue, one of the best live spaces in the borough — is anchored by a Jeff Beck tribute featuring Al Di Meola, Vernon Reid, Eric Gales, and Mike Stern. Saturday moves outdoors to the LeFrak Center at Lakeside in Prospect Park for John Scofield tribute sets and a master class, with Bill Frisell also on the afternoon’s bill. The festival was curated by Alex Skolnick and Joel Harrison, and the programming reflects their sensibility: the guitar is the organizing principle, genre is a secondary concern. prospectpark.org
Saturday evening at the Lena Horne Bandshell — a few minutes’ walk from the Lakeside venue — BRIC Celebrate Brooklyn! brings Antibalas for a free show with DJ Marc Bars. Antibalas has been one of Brooklyn’s most durable and undersung working bands for two decades; that you can see them for free, outdoors, in Prospect Park on the same day as a guitar festival nearby, is one of the city’s persistent small miracles. bricartsmedia.org
For those whose June requires a different register: Khalid and Lauv play Radio City Music Hall June 12.
Visual Arts & Other
Brooklyn Pride week runs June 8–13, building toward its main events on Saturday: the 30th annual Brooklyn Pride Multicultural Festival along Fifth Avenue between Union and 9th Streets in Park Slope, followed by the borough’s twilight parade along the same corridor. Three decades in, this remains one of the city’s most genuinely neighborhood-rooted Pride events — not a destination for visitors so much as a block party that belongs to Park Slope and its neighbors, the same few blocks it’s always been.
P.P.O.W Gallery opens Daniel Correa Mejía’s second solo show with the gallery on June 12 at 392 Broadway in Tribeca: El amor se esconde como un animal salvaje runs through July 17. Mejía is a Colombian-born, Berlin-based painter whose canvases move between mythological residue and intimate domestic scale; the P.P.O.W shows have been the most reliable New York access point to his work as European institutional attention has grown. ppowgallery.com
Coming Up
- Romeo & Juliet officially opens June 11 at the Delacorte — free via same-day lottery at the theater or TodayTix; runs through June 28. publictheater.org
- I’m Almost There opens June 9 at BAM Fisher Fishman Space, Fort Greene; runs through June 28. bam.org
- Criminal Queerness Festival opens June 9 at HERE Arts Center, 145 Sixth Ave., running through June 27. herearts.org
- Brooklyn Guitar Festival — Friday, June 12 at Warsaw (261 Driggs Ave., Greenpoint); Saturday, June 13 at LeFrak Center at Lakeside, Prospect Park. prospectpark.org
- Brooklyn Pride Festival & Parade — Saturday, June 13, Fifth Avenue, Park Slope; festival between Union and 9th Streets.
- NYC Pride March — Sunday, June 14, 11am, Fifth Avenue from 44th to 79th Street. nycpride.org
Takeaway
Takeaway
What the week after the Tonys tends to reveal is what theater in New York is actually made of when the broadcast is over — and this week the answer is a Spanish-language intimacy free by lottery in Central Park, a queer Odyssey in Fort Greene, and Arab queer voices at HERE Arts Center for a festival that exists precisely because some stories can only be told in places that haven’t decided in advance what belongs on a stage. The ceremony was real, but this is the practice. The city has always known the difference, and June is when the difference is easiest to see.