Tuning Up for the Parkway: SocaFest, Robyn, and a Free Molière Ahead of Labor Day
SocaFest fills the Brooklyn Museum, Robyn packs Barclays with Yaeji opening, and Molière in the Park premieres a free Don Juan in Prospect Park — all in the final stretch before Carnival takes Eastern Parkway. Metrograph closes out two series it promised last week, and a Bushwick gallery keeps the small rooms in the conversation.
The week before Labor Day usually means the city is winding down, but Brooklyn spent it winding up. SocaFest turned the Brooklyn Museum into an all-night fete, Robyn brought arena pop back to Barclays with Yaeji opening, and Molière in the Park pitched its stage at Prospect Park’s Lakeside for a free, R-rated Don Juan — three very different rooms, all pointed toward the same Monday, when Carnival finally takes Eastern Parkway. Metrograph, meanwhile, made good on what it promised last week: the Hyenas restoration ran its course and the Ulrike Ottinger retrospective opened on schedule. Nothing this week was really an ending. It was staging.
Theater
Molière in the Park opened its 2026 season Sept. 5 with Don Juan, staged outdoors at the LeFrak Center at Lakeside in Prospect Park — free, as the company’s signature series always is, through Sept. 27. Lucie Tiberghien directs Stephen Wadsworth’s translation, with Keshav Moodliar as the title libertine and Kaliswa Brewster as his long-suffering Sganarelle; three other actors, Naomi Lorrain, Daniel Pearce, and Michelle Veintimilla, shape-shift through the rest of the cast across the run. BroadwayWorld, Prospect Park Alliance An official opening-night benefit follows Sept. 10, but the show itself has already been running to the public for five nights by then — the kind of quiet-launch, real-benefit-later scheduling that free outdoor theater in this city increasingly relies on to fund itself.
Review
The Prospect Park Alliance link is dated 2026-09-08 in its URL, a date this passage never mentions (it cites Sept. 5 opening, Sept. 10 benefit, Sept. 27 close) — PPA’s event pages are per-performance-date, so this link likely lands on a different show date than any claim it’s attached to. Suggested action: verify / swap in a link matching one of the cited dates.
Independent Film
Metrograph closed the loop on both series flagged here last week. Hyenas, Djibril Diop Mambéty’s 1992 restoration, played its promised run Sept. 1 through 4, with scholar Boukary Sawadogo’s introduction drawing a crowd for a film about a village that sells out one of its own for a fortune — a fable that has aged into something closer to prophecy. Metrograph The Ulrike Ottinger retrospective opened as scheduled Sept. 3 with Freak Orlando, Ottinger’s carnivalesque, gender-bending riff on Virginia Woolf, starring Magdalena Montezuma and Delphine Seyrig; the series runs into October. Metrograph
Unverified
Metrograph’s own listings don’t specify whether the full Ottinger series plays theatrically or streams digital-exclusive on the platform — worth confirming before planning around a specific screening.
Elsewhere, The Sun Never Sets, Joe Swanberg’s Alaska-set love triangle with Dakota Fanning, Jake Johnson, and Cory Michael Smith, picked up its first wide reviews this week after last week’s IFC Center Q&A send-off — mixed but Fanning-forward, with Variety calling her “the real star” of an otherwise “unsatisfying” romcom. Variety
Music
Robyn brought her pop tour to Barclays Center on Sept. 4, with Brooklyn’s own Yaeji opening — a pairing that read less like an arena bill and more like two different eras of dance music agreeing to share a room for a night. Songkick, Barclays Center
Visual Arts & Other
The Brooklyn Museum handed its plaza and galleries over to SocaFest on Sept. 4 and 5, an eight-p.m.-to-three-a.m. Caribbean music takeover headlined by Kes the Band, Bunji Garlin, Fay-Ann Lyons and the Viking Band, and WCK — the loudest possible overture to Monday’s parade. Time Out New York A quieter, smaller room told a related story: at Tiger Strikes Asteroid in Bushwick, Jacquenette Arnette and Jodie Lyn-Kee-Chow’s two-person show Rock, Stone, Steel and Rope, curated by Aisha Tandiwe Bell, continues through Sept. 27 — a reminder that the borough’s artist-run spaces keep working the same week its biggest institutions throw festivals.
Coming Up
- West Indian American Day Carnival Parade — the parade itself takes Eastern Parkway on Labor Day, Sept. 7, capping a week of Carnival programming that began Sept. 3. FOX 5 NY
- The Ford/Hill Project — Elizabeth Marvel and Lee Sunday Evans’s verbatim staging of the Hill and Ford Senate testimonies, with Gabby Beans and Marvel leading a four-person cast, opens Sept. 8 at BAM Fisher, running through Sept. 20. Hoodline
- In Honor of Jean-Michel Basquiat — Roger Guenveur Smith’s one-man tribute to his friend and collaborator opens Sept. 9 at New York Theatre Workshop, following a sold-out Under the Radar run. New York Theatre Workshop
- Garry Starr: Classic Penguins — the Melbourne Comedy Festival prize-winner makes its U.S. premiere at Studio Seaview, opening Sept. 8 after previews from Sept. 3. Playbill
- West Harlem Summer Jazz Festival — the season’s closing installment plays Morningside Park on Sept. 12 at 5 p.m., free and outdoors. NYC Parks
Takeaway
Takeaway
A pop star at an arena, a penniless outdoor Molière company, and a Caribbean street parade that shuts down a mile of Brooklyn are not usually filed under the same cultural moment, but this week they were rehearsing for the same thing: a city that still believes its biggest stage is public. Eastern Parkway on Monday won’t need a ticket, a lobby, or a review — just a sidewalk. Everything else this week, from the museum lawn to the free amphitheater, was warming up the same muscle.