The Long Sunday: From La Cage's Last Bow to a Brooklyn Wife Already in the Catskills
Four major productions close their doors simultaneously on June 28 as the new season is already underway — A Walk on the Moon in previews at the Laura Pels, Giulia making its world premiere at PAC NYC, and Cymande at Sony Hall for the Blue Note Festival's final weekend.
This is the kind of week where New York’s arts calendar asks you to hold two things at once. On Sunday, June 28, four major productions take their last bow simultaneously — La Cage aux Folles, Romeo and Juliet, The Fear of 13, and Giant, which between them represent a season’s worth of Tony Awards, Broadway debuts, free Shakespeare, and a landmark recasting of the American musical. But the new season is already mid-scene: A Walk on the Moon plays its official opening Monday at the Laura Pels, Giulia: The Poison Queen of Palermo makes its world premiere tonight at PAC NYC, and Patti LaBelle sang last night to a packed Prospect Park crowd under a summer sky. The city in late June does not do clean endings.
Highlight
Sunday, June 28 is one of the more remarkable single afternoons in recent New York theater memory: La Cage aux Folles, Romeo and Juliet, The Fear of 13, and Giant all playing their last performances simultaneously — four productions of genuine weight clearing out at once, with new work already filling the space behind them.
Review
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Theater
June 28 is a Sunday of curtain calls. Robert O’Hara’s all-Black La Cage aux Folles closes at City Center Encores! — Billy Porter, Wayne Brady, Tonya Pinkins, and a 28-piece orchestra in a production that became one of the most passionately reviewed New York theater offerings this spring, reconfiguring what Herman and Fierstein’s queer classic is arguing and who it’s arguing for. Saheem Ali’s bilingual Romeo and Juliet ends its Shakespeare in the Park run at the Delacorte after a season of admiration and honest disagreement: the production’s formal conceit — Romeo and Juliet speaking only to each other in Spanish as a private language within a bilingual world — drew consistent praise for Ra’Mya Latiah Aikens, LaChanze, and Okieriete Onaodowan while leaving critics genuinely uncertain whether the device carried its full weight or merely its beauty. Down the street at the James Earl Jones Theatre, The Fear of 13 closes two weeks early: Adrien Brody and Tessa Thompson’s Broadway debuts end after a Tony Awards shutout dimmed the box office on an otherwise well-regarded wrongful-conviction drama. And John Lithgow’s Giant closes at the Music Box — an Olivier-winning portrait of Roald Dahl that won its star a Tony and served as a reminder of what a properly mounted theatrical import looks like.
That’s a great deal leaving in one afternoon. But the season doesn’t wait for Monday. A Walk on the Moon, Roundabout’s new off-Broadway musical adapted by original screenwriter Pamela Gray from her 1999 film, plays its official press opening Monday, June 29, at the Laura Pels Theatre — in previews since June 15 and running through August 22. Directed by Tony-nominated Sheryl Kaller and starring Talia Suskauer as Pearl Kantrowitz, a Brooklyn wife heading to a Catskills bungalow colony in the summer of 1969 while Woodstock and the moon landing happen just out of reach, it’s a particular kind of New York story: a woman negotiating what freedom looks like when the century’s forward motion is happening somewhere you’re not. awalkonthemoonmusical.com
Also tonight, the world premiere of Giulia: The Poison Queen of Palermo opens at Tribeca’s Perelman Performing Arts Center — written by and starring Grammy Award-winner Jennifer Nettles, directed by Tony Award-winner Mary Zimmerman. Giulia Tofana was a 17th-century Sicilian woman whose underground poison network reportedly helped over 600 abused women before her execution. That a major world premiere about a Palermitan folk heroine of women’s resistance is opening at one of the city’s newest and most ambitious mid-size venues, at the close of Pride month, is an occasion worth sitting with. Runs through July 26. pacnyc.org
Review
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The Criminal Queerness Festival — the National Queer Theater’s Pride program centering Arab queer playwrights from countries where queerness remains criminalized — closes today at HERE Arts Center, ending a run that felt genuinely necessary this June. herearts.org
Independent Film
IFC Center opened two new films on Friday night, each with director Q&As this weekend. Avalon Fast’s Camp is a queer witchcraft horror film — a young woman takes a counselor job at a troubled girls’ camp and finds something in the trees that knows her name — that won Best Feature in Fantastic Fest’s Next Wave competition and arrives at IFC as exactly the kind of formally ambitious genre work that makes arthouse horror worth tracking. Dark Sky Films releasing it during camp season is a joke the film has apparently earned. Director Q&A tonight after the 9:10pm screening. ifccenter.com
Also opening Friday: Lucio Castro’s Drunken Noodles, the Argentine director’s quiet study of desire and encounter across two summers. Castro premiered the film at Cannes’ ACID section in 2025; Strand Releasing is handling the U.S. debut. Q&A with Castro tonight after the 7:35 screening. ifccenter.com
Down on Ludlow Street, Metrograph is hosting director Igor Bezinović in conversation with critics Richard Brody and Nick Newman for screenings this weekend of Fiume o Morte!, his Tiger Award-winning documentary about Gabriele D’Annunzio’s 1919 nationalist occupation of the Adriatic city of Fiume — now Rijeka, Croatia, where Bezinović grew up. The film uses anachronistic reenactments with contemporary residents to trace the proto-fascist theatricality at the occupation’s core, and it has the casual confidence of a filmmaker making something for his city before he makes it for anyone else. metrograph.com
Music
Patti LaBelle played the Lena Horne Bandshell at Prospect Park last night as the headliner of BRIC Celebrate Brooklyn!‘s annual benefit concert, with Lady Wray and MORERNBPLEASE opening. The benefit is a ticketed fundraiser rather than a free show, but LaBelle at 81, at a bandshell named for a woman the entertainment industry marginalized for decades, under BRIC’s “Radical Joy” theme in the festival’s 47th year — the convergences write themselves. By multiple accounts it was the kind of June night you keep. bricartsmedia.org
Review
“LaBelle at 81” — Patti LaBelle was born May 24, 1944 and turned 82 in May 2026; the age stated in the brief is incorrect — fix to 82
Tonight at Sony Hall in Midtown, Cymande plays at 8pm as part of the Blue Note Jazz Festival’s final weekend stretch. The South London funk-soul collective formed in 1971 — whose debut album has been sampled by Jay-Z, De La Soul, the Fugees, and dozens more, for years without the band receiving royalties — represents one of the formative and underrewarded stories of how American hip-hop absorbed the Black Atlantic sound. They continue to tour and record. The Blue Note Jazz Festival runs through July 1 at the Blue Note’s Greenwich Village room, Sony Hall, and SummerStage. bluenotejazz.com
Visual Arts & Other
South Korean choreographer Sung Im Her’s 1 Degree Celsius had its U.S. premiere Wednesday and Thursday at Alice Tully Hall, as part of Lincoln Center’s inaugural Pasculano Collaborative for Contemporary Dance Festival. The work places seven dancers inside a formal investigation of the individual and collective body in relation to urban and natural environments — described by one reviewer as a “feast of mobile bodies,” inventive movement that moves between jagged sharpness and fluid release. The dance festival has made Alice Tully one of the summer’s more essential performance destinations.
The summer gallery season is fully open. At Nicelle Beauchene in the Lower East Side, Jordan Kasey’s new figurative paintings combine 1970s super-graphic scale with surreal, oversized figuration. At Bortolami in TriBeCa, Hanoi-based Tran Luon — curator, social activist, and artist — is showing his first New York solo. Both are worth the walk while the heat provides a reason to enter any building with a door. twocoatsofpaint.com
SummerStage holds its Dreamland: Pride in Central Park benefit at Rumsey Playfield tomorrow — Purple Disco Machine, Kungs, and Dani Brasil starting at 3pm; Gorgon City, Anne Louise, and Hayla follow Monday evening. cityparksfoundation.org
Coming Up
- A Walk on the Moon — Official press opening Monday, June 29 at the Laura Pels Theatre; Talia Suskauer leads Roundabout’s off-Broadway musical through August 22. awalkonthemoonmusical.com
- Giulia: The Poison Queen of Palermo — World premiere tonight (June 28) at PAC NYC, Tribeca; Jennifer Nettles and Mary Zimmerman run through July 26. pacnyc.org
- Birthright — Jonathan Spector’s play about six friends after a Birthright trip to Israel in 2006 opens June 29 at MCC Theater (Newman Mills Theater); Zoë Winters, Eli Gelb, and Hale Appleman lead; runs through July 26. mcctheater.org
- Honeyjoon — Director Lilian T. Mehrel Q&A at IFC Center after the 7:45pm screening, Monday June 29. ifccenter.com
- SummerStage Pride — Gorgon City, Anne Louise, and Hayla at Rumsey Playfield, Central Park, Monday June 29 at 7pm. cityparksfoundation.org
- Habibi Festival at BRIC Celebrate Brooklyn! — July 10 at the Lena Horne Bandshell; Tunisian artist EMEL headlines a free outdoor bill with Sudanese artist Mai Elgizouli, Nesrine, and Yacine Boulares. bricartsmedia.org
Takeaway
Takeaway
June 28 will clear out more stage real estate in a single afternoon than the city usually loses in a month — and what’s strange is that it doesn’t feel like loss. The shows already opening around those curtain calls are, almost without planning, asking a different kind of question than the spring did. A Walk on the Moon is about a Brooklyn wife who misses the revolution while it’s happening around her; Giulia is about a Sicilian woman who built her own underground system to circumvent the one she was born into. What the city’s stages seem to be reaching for, as Pride month’s visibility peaks and begins to recede, is something older and more structural than identity politics: the mechanics of how women find movement inside confinement. In New York in late June 2026, this is what follows.