It’s Cinco de Mayo weekend, and if you’re looking for some fun before or after your celebrations, you’re in the right place. Keep reading for the upcoming week’s best bets, including a world premiere play, the return of a popular festival, and much more.
If you’re a fan of The Princess Bride – and who isn’t? – we’ve got a recommendation for you. On Thursday, May 4, at 7:30 p.m. Mildred’s Umbrella will present the world premiere of playwright Elizabeth A.M. Keel’s Tooth and Tail, a two-act, approximately 100-minute play for theatregoers of all ages that features princesses and witches, dragons and curses. Keel recently told the Houston Press that she “wanted to put a female friendship at the heart of a fantasy story,” adding that she thinks “there is a real beauty and delicacy to female friendships that is not as often explored as a traditional love story and an adventure quest.” Performances are scheduled for 8 p.m. Thursdays through Saturdays at The Deluxe Theater through May 13. Tickets are pay-as-you-can and can be purchased here.
The first Pakistani film to be screened at Cannes, which is also the first Pakistani film to win the Jury prize, comes to the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston on Friday, May 5, at 7 p.m. Saim Sadiq’s Joyland, a film temporarily “banned by the Pakistani government due to its ‘highly objectionable material’,” is a “tender love story set in Lahore” about a man who falls in love with a transgender woman he meets after taking a job at an erotic dance theater. Sadiq told The Guardian that though the film features a trans character, the director was “using the love triangle premise to talk about what I really want to talk about – which is patriarchy.” The film will be screened again at 7 p.m. on Saturday, May 6, and 5 p.m. on Sunday, May 7. Tickets to any of the three screenings can be purchased here for $7 to $9.
Performing Arts Houston will bring “an exuberantly staged performance” to the Wortham Theater Center – Metamorphosis: Third Coast Percussion – on Friday, May 5, at 7:30 p.m. Third Coast Percussion will play “an appealing, near-seamless sequence (without intermission)” that includes Philip Glass, Sonny X and Tyondai Braxton “interlaced with the seven sections of Jlin’s ‘Perspective’ weaving in and out.” Set to the music will be “choreography by multidisciplinary dance organization Movement Art Is,” performed and interpreted by Trent Jeray and Cameron Murphy. After stopping in Chicago, the Chicago Tribune declared that the “evening’s biggest letdown” was that the show was booked “for just a single evening, and a tight one, too.” Tickets can be purchased for the program here for $34 to $94.
The American Film Institute (AFI) topped their list of the 25 greatest movie musicals of all time with the 1952 MGM film Singin’ in the Rain, and on Friday, May 5, at 8 p.m., you can see if the Gene Kelly classic made the cut over at Jones Hall when the Houston Symphony performs Broadway Hits Go to Hollywood. The program, led by conductor Lucas Waldin and featuring vocalists Nikki Renée Daniels and Hugh Panaro, will feature tunes from films such as My Fair Lady, Funny Girl and West Side Story – all of which also made AFI’s list. The concert will also be presented on Saturday, May 6, at 8 p.m. and Sunday, May 7, at 2:30 p.m. In-hall tickets to any of the three shows can be purchased here for $35 to $125, or you can livestream Saturday night’s concert for $20 here.
It’s been a long four years, but this weekend Japan Festival Houston 2023 returns to Hermann Park for its 30th anniversary from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. on Saturday, May 6, and Sunday, May 7. The festival, which marks the 30th anniversary of the Japanese Garden and the 50th anniversary of the Houston’s sister city relationship with Chiba, will feature a full slate of activities to enjoy, including the state’s first official kendama competition, sumo wrestling, a samurai theater company and, of course, plenty of food. The Japan-America Society of Houston’s Executive Director Patsy Brown told Great Day Houston that the festival will have “a wonderful lineup of various vendors who will be serving some very special foods, from the traditional yakisoba that you typically see at a Japan festival in Japan to some of the traveling Japanese kitchens who are well known across the U.S.”
We say what better way to celebrate Cinco de Mayo weekend than by visiting the 11th Annual East End Street Fest on Saturday, May 6. All afternoon, from 12 to 6 p.m. at Navigation Esplanade, you can experience art, music and more with an emphasis on Mexican and Chicano artists. Joining the more than 30 vendors is a lowrider car collection, a play area for the kids, and a main stage with performances from acts like “mariachi prodigy” Eduardo Treviño, Las Americas Ballet Folklorico, Sandy G y Los Gavilanes, and Nick Gaitan. Admission to the celebration is free.
Dorothy Fields is “one of the few women included in The Great American Songbook and one of the most prolific contributors to classic American music.” In fact, she contributed “over 400 songs” over the course of 45 years, “making her one of the biggest — and yet, largely unacknowledged — names in 20th century musical theater and beyond.” Fields will get her due on Monday, May 8, at 7:30 p.m. when Paul Hope Cabaret presents Sunny Side of the Street: Lyrics of Dorothy Fields at Ovations Night Club. The program is sure to include “the defining song of her career,” “The Way You Look Tonight,” a tune written in 1936 with Jerome Kern that won the pair an Oscar for Best Original Song. The show will also be performed on the following Mondays, May 15 and May 22, at 7:30 p.m. Tickets are available here for $15 to $130.
Abraham Verghese will join Houston writer-physician Ricardo Nuila to close the 2022/2023 Inprint Margarett Root Brown Reading Series on Monday, May 8, at 7:30 p.m. when the bestseller swings by the Alley Theatre to read from his latest novel, The Covenant of Water. NPR has said “the literary feats” of the novel, “about the ebbs and flows of lives across three generations,” “deserve to be lauded as much as those of such canonical authors” as Anton Chekhov, Charles Dickens and George Eliot. The novel also features “reflective musings about what genetic inheritance means beyond the body, the necessary place of art in our lives, how social hierarchies determine far-reaching life trajectories, and how we must understand the past to live in the present.” Tickets for the reading can be purchased here for $5. If you can’t make the event, you can instead buy access to the online rebroadcast here for $5.
This article appears in Jan 1 – Dec 31, 2023.
