Fireworks Are Included: Free Summer Culture Week, from the Philharmonic's Parks Tour to Brooklyn Pride
The Philharmonic played every borough in four nights, Carter Brey made his farewell solo appearances before retirement, and the stages previewed a week ago are now open and drawing their first reviews.
Review
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Review
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June in New York finds its stride mid-month, when the summer programming that’s been announced and previewed finally starts actually happening. The Philharmonic’s parks tour ended Friday in Prospect Park — Elim Chan on the podium, fireworks over the Bandshell, Carter Brey’s cello carrying Saint-Saëns through a crowd that stretched to the treeline. His final outdoor solo appearances before retirement gave the night its particular weight. The Delacorte got its first reviews; they were mixed; the lottery lines didn’t change. English National Ballet’s Akram Khan Giselle closed quietly in Fort Greene after four nights. Brooklyn Pride arrived on Fifth Avenue today, as it has for thirty years.
Highlight
Carter Brey, the Philharmonic’s Principal Cellist since 1986, made his final New York City solo appearances this week — playing Saint-Saëns in the Bronx and Brooklyn on successive nights, free, with fireworks. It deserves more than one paragraph in the arts press.
Review
“Principal Cellist since 1986” — confirmed wrong. NY Phil’s own bio and multiple outlets (Playbill’s “30 Years” headline, The Violin Channel) place his appointment in 1996, consistent with a 2026 retirement after 30 seasons. This is the emotional centerpiece of the brief; fix 1986 → 1996.
Review
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Theater
Romeo and Juliet’s first full week of reviews arrived mixed. Playbill and New York Theatre Guide found Saheem Ali’s production tonally uneven in its outer scenes but praised the central device — Romeo and Juliet’s private Spanish inside a surrounding English-language world — as genuinely new. Caleb Joshua Eberhardt drew the warmest individual notices for a Mercutio with kinetic, lanky precision. The run continues through June 28; free by same-day lottery at the Delacorte or TodayTix. publictheater.org
Todd Almond’s I’m Almost There, open since June 9 at BAM’s Fishman Space in Fort Greene, is a queer Odyssey in present-day Brooklyn that David Cromer makes quietly funny; it runs through June 28 before a US tour. bam.org The Criminal Queerness Festival — Arab queer playwrights, NYC Pride’s official theater program — is in its first full week at HERE Arts Center on Sixth Avenue, through June 27. Irish Repertory Theatre began previews tonight for The Loved Ones, opening June 23. herearts.org
Independent Film
Mary Harron’s I Shot Andy Warhol is through its opening weekend at IFC Center; Harron’s Q&As run through Sunday with the 30th-anniversary 4K restoration playing daily. ifccenter.com Metrograph’s Shunji Iwai retrospective — “The World at Full Volume,” anchored by the restored Love Letter (1995) — continues through June 27. metrograph.com
Music
The New York Philharmonic’s Concerts in the Parks concluded Friday at Prospect Park after four nights in all five boroughs. Elim Chan conducted — Van Cortlandt Park in the Bronx on Tuesday, the Great Lawn on Wednesday, Cunningham Park in Queens on Thursday, Prospect Park on Friday, each night ending with fireworks. The program moved through Copland’s Fanfare for the Common Man, Berlioz, Dukas, and Ravel’s Boléro; Carter Brey performed Saint-Saëns’s Cello Concerto No. 1 at every stop in his final solo appearances before retiring at the end of the 2025–26 season. All four concerts were free. nyphil.org
Dave Matthews Band played Forest Hills Stadium in Queens on Wednesday — Casey Driessen on fiddle throughout, the set running from Drunken Soldier to Ants Marching. Tonight The Black Crowes close this stretch of the Forest Hills calendar. relix.com
At the Lena Horne Bandshell this afternoon, BRIC Celebrate Brooklyn’s “Radical Joy” season presented Antibalas — twenty years of free Afrobeat in Prospect Park, and still one of the season’s reliable pleasures. Sunday the Klezmatics play a Pippi Longstocking 80th Birthday Celebration at the same Bandshell, which is the most New York sentence in this roundup. bricartsmedia.org
Visual Arts & Other
The week’s most significant dance event closed Tuesday at BAM: English National Ballet’s Giselle, choreographed by Akram Khan, ran June 8–11 at the Howard Gilman Opera House in Fort Greene for its New York premiere. Khan resets the Romantic ballet in a modern factory — the ghost haunting a migrant worker’s camp rather than a meadow — with fifty dancers and a kinetic contemporary-classical score. The production has a large international reputation, and it had four nights here.
Review
“ran June 8–11 … for its New York premiere” — these exact dates and the “New York premiere” framing match ENB’s actual New York premiere of this production at BAM’s Howard Gilman Opera House, which ran June 8–11, 2022 (contemporaneous Dance Enthusiast/BroadwayWorld coverage). BAM’s published Winter/Spring 2026 season does not list a Giselle engagement. The piece also self-contradicts on the date: June 8, 2026 is a Monday and June 11, 2026 a Thursday, so “closed Tuesday” cannot be the last night of a “June 8–11” run. Verify this happened in 2026 at all, or cut — this may be a stale 2022 event misreported as current.
Unverified
ENB’s Akram Khan Giselle is described as a “New York premiere” in promotional materials and multiple reports; this could not be independently corroborated.
Sugar Sugar! continues at Domino Square’s waterfront amphitheater in Williamsburg through June 25 — free outdoor experimental performance (dance, puppetry, theater) on Wednesday and Thursday evenings along the East River. dominopark.com
Brooklyn Pride’s 30th annual Multicultural Festival ran today along Fifth Avenue in Park Slope; the borough parade followed this evening. Thirty years in, it still reads as neighborhood rather than destination.
Coming Up
- La Cage Aux Folles opens June 17 at New York City Center — Billy Porter as Albin, Wayne Brady as Georges, directed by Robert O’Hara, with the original 1983 orchestrations restored for the first time since Broadway. Runs through June 28. nycitycenter.org
- Broadway Celebrates Juneteenth — free public gathering in Times Square on June 19 with performers and arts organizations from across the city. playbill.com
- 651 Arts Juneteenth Celebration — June 20, 2–8 p.m. at The Plaza at 300 Ashland Place in Fort Greene: dance, marching bands, storytelling, and a Black maker’s market. 651arts.org
- NYC Pride March — June 28, beginning at 26th Street and Fifth Avenue, moving through Greenwich Village and past the Stonewall Inn. nycpride.org
Takeaway
Takeaway
Free outdoor culture in New York runs on the assumption that access matters — that Van Cortlandt Park and the Great Lawn and Prospect Park are the same stage when the Philharmonic comes, that the lottery at the Delacorte is a real door, that whoever shows up for the Klezmatics on a Sunday belongs there as much as anyone who planned a month ahead. This week held to that assumption in five boroughs and across a dozen stages. The city’s summer arts season begins not with a curtain going up but with people deciding to go out.