The Second Time Around: A Week of NYC Homecomings, From Forest Hills to the Giglio's Lift
Paul Simon returns to the ballfields of his Queens adolescence, Ross McElwee returns to the film that made him thirty years ago as an elegy for his son, and Williamsburg gets ready to lift the Giglio again — a week when the city's arts scene kept returning to itself on purpose.
This was a week the city spent looking backward without ever slowing down. Paul Simon played two nights at Forest Hills Stadium, two subway stops from the house he grew up in, closing the second with a solo “The Sound of Silence” he hadn’t played stripped-down in years. At Film Forum, Ross McElwee marked the 40th anniversary of Sherman’s March by opening a new film that tries to finish what the old one started — dedicated to the son he lost. Jennifer Nettles resurrected a 16th-century Sicilian poisoner as an off-Broadway anti-heroine, and critics spent the week arguing over whether she earned the Sondheim comparison she invited.
Review
“a 16th-century Sicilian poisoner” — Giulia Tofana is consistently dated to the 17th century (born c. 1620 in Palermo, executed 1659); multiple sources including the show’s own press coverage describe her as 17th-century. This is a factual error in the lede. Suggested action: fix — change “16th-century” to “17th-century.”
In Williamsburg, the Giglio went up for the 139th time, exactly where it always does. None of this reads as nostalgia so much as a city checking in on what it already built.
Theater
Off-Broadway’s big swing of the week, Jennifer Nettles’s Giulia, The Poison Queen of Palermo, had its official opening July 10 at PAC NYC, and the reviews split along a predictable fault line. New York Theatre Guide called Nettles’s lead performance and Mary Zimmerman’s staging — three transforming medieval archways — a genuine alchemy of “deadly history into a killer musical.” TheWrap, headlined “She’s No Sweeney Todd,” and TheaterMania largely agreed: the show invites the comparison and doesn’t survive it, “overflowing with ideas that aren’t fully developed” and never settling on whether Giulia is avenging angel or murderer. Worth seeing for Nettles alone, if not for the book — it runs through August 2.
Smaller and further out: Soho Rep and INTAR opened César Alvarez’s The Potluck on June 30 at Playwrights Horizons’s Peter Jay Sharp Theater, a musical about the 1979 Greensboro massacre that Alvarez, born into the survivor community a year later, has carried for years. sohorep.org And in Williamsburg, the Brick Theater opened Goodbye Horses, Michael Kinnan’s solo, unauthorized retelling of The Silence of the Lambs, running through July 25. bricktheater.com
Ahead: Lincoln Center Theater’s The Whoopi Monologues, a new ensemble staging of Whoopi Goldberg’s 1984 solo show with Kerry Washington, Kara Young, Dominique Fishback, and Kecia Lewis, opens July 14. Playbill Cherry Lane gets its own import July 15, when Benedict Lombe’s Shifters, fresh off its London run, opens in North American premiere with Heather Agyepong and Daniel Ezra. BroadwayWorld
Independent Film
Highlight
Ross McElwee’s Remake opened at Film Forum July 10 — his first film in fourteen years, an attempt to finally turn Sherman’s March into the fiction film he once imagined, and, unavoidably, an elegy for his son Adrian. It arrived days after a 40th-anniversary restoration of the original played to a sold-out house, McElwee in conversation with Ira Glass one night and Mira Nair the next. Film Forum Slate
Review
[!highlight] is not a defined callout type — BRIEF_TEMPLATE.md permits only [!unverified], [!takeaway], [!human], [!correction], and [!review]. Suggested action: convert this block to plain prose (its content is well-sourced and doesn’t need a callout) or propose adding [!highlight] to the template first.
IFC Center’s “Declaration of Independents!” retrospective closed out its nine-day run July 9 with a rarity: Jessie Maple’s 1989 Twice as Nice paired with Aarin Burch’s newly restored short Dreams of Passion, Burch introducing in person. ifccenter.com Metrograph opened Lana Daher’s Do You Love Me July 10, a 75-minute archival-footage portrait of Beirut built from seventy years of Lebanese audiovisual memory. Icarus Films The New York Asian Film Festival’s 25th edition opened the same night across five venues, Yeon Sang-ho in person for the North American premiere of his zombie thriller Colony. Deadline Uptown, the Museum of the Moving Image closed its “By the People, For the People” series July 5 with Salt of the Earth, a fitting bookend to a run that also included The Exiles and Nothing But a Man. movingimage.org
Ahead: IFC opens Carolina Cavalli’s Italian drama The Kidnapping of Arabella July 17, with Chris Pine and Cavalli both in for Q&As. ifccenter.com BAM’s “Contemporary Arab Cinema” series runs July 15–23. bam.org
Music
Paul Simon played Forest Hills Stadium July 8 and 9 — his first hometown shows in a decade, in the borough where he went to high school — and closed the second night with a solo “The Sound of Silence.” JamBase Jack White opened a two-night stand at Brooklyn Paramount July 11, timed to Frozen Charlotte, his seventh solo LP, out the day before on Third Man. Live Nation Ultimate Classic Rock SummerStage drew a packed Central Park crowd July 8 for Spoon, Ratboys, and Brooklyn’s own BODEGA, City Parks Foundation while Herbert Von King Park in Bed-Stuy hosted MIKE’s Young World V July 11, Max B headlining a bill built around New York rap’s current underground. The FADER Union Pool’s free “Summer Thunder” series opened its Sundays with Joe Bataan sharing a bill with the Sun Ra Arkestra, still led by 102-year-old Marshall Allen. BrooklynVegan
Unverified
The Brooklyn Cumbia Festival’s five-day run (July 6–10) across Good Life Garden, House of Yes, and Barbès appears to have gone forward as planned, but no independent press recap had surfaced by publication — details here come from the festival’s own listings.
Ahead: Union Pool’s Angel Du$t and No Idols play July 12, and Flushing Meadows Corona Park gets a SummerStage bill worth the trip to Queens July 17 — De La Soul, Pete Rock, and Hannibal Buress, hosted by Queens Borough President Donovan Richards. QNS
Visual Arts & Other
Gabriel Orozco’s Public Nature opened July 8 as promised: twelve photographic works installed as trompe l’oeil interventions across 300 bus shelters in three cities, his first U.S. public art commission and a genuinely strange way to encounter a major artist — on the way to the train, not in a gallery. Public Art Fund Artdaily In Chelsea, Anton Kern Gallery opened Lloyd Foster’s Spiritual Technology July 7, paired with Peter Acheson and Lin May Saeed, Artforum and Higher Pictures gave Diné photographer Dakota Mace her first solo show with the gallery the same day. Artdaily
The bigger story is in Williamsburg, where Our Lady of Mount Carmel opened its 139th annual feast July 8 — twelve days of zeppole and processions running through July 19. olmcfeast.com The main event lands just past this week’s edge: the Dancing of the Giglio, a three-ton tower carried by more than a hundred men through the neighborhood’s streets, on Sunday, July 12. Brooklyn Downtown Star
Coming Up
- Dancing of the Giglio — Williamsburg’s 139-year-old street feast reaches its centerpiece Sunday, July 12, when more than a hundred men lift and carry the three-ton Giglio tower through the neighborhood. olmcfeast.com
- The Whoopi Monologues — Kerry Washington, Kara Young, and an ensemble cast open Lincoln Center Theater’s new staging of Whoopi Goldberg’s 1984 solo show, July 14. Playbill
- The Kidnapping of Arabella — Chris Pine and director Carolina Cavalli appear in person as IFC Center opens her Italian drama, July 17. ifccenter.com
- De La Soul, Pete Rock & Hannibal Buress — a free SummerStage bill lands in Flushing Meadows Corona Park, July 17. QNS
- NYC Poetry Festival — its 15th year brings 100+ poetry organizations to five stages on Governors Island, July 18–19. Poetry Society of New York
Takeaway
Takeaway
A city this dense doesn’t usually get the luxury of repetition — everything new crowds out what came before. This week argued the opposite: that return is its own kind of arts practice. Paul Simon didn’t play a nostalgia show at Forest Hills, he played a hometown show. McElwee didn’t remake Sherman’s March to top it, he made a new film to sit beside it, in honor of someone he lost. The Giglio goes up every July because a neighborhood decided a century ago that it should, and decided again this year. New York’s arts calendar likes to sell itself on newness. What actually holds the city together, most weeks, is the stuff people keep coming back to on purpose.
Review Notes
Review
Body runs ~1,270 words (excluding frontmatter), roughly double the 450–650 word budget in BRIEF_TEMPLATE.md. Suggested action: trim — the budget note calls this “a review-capacity constraint, not a writing target,” so cut the weakest items (candidates: the “Ahead” sub-items, which read as lower-priority previews) rather than expanding further.