Today is National Skipping Day, and you will want to skip yourself to any and all of this week’s best bets. You’ll find a playful lampooning of Broadway, two popular comedians stopping by on tour, a not-oft-seen opera, and more. Keep reading to see how you might want to spend your time this weekend.
The Forbidden Broadway series has been skewering the Great White Way since the 1980s, and tonight, Thursday, April 24, at 7 p.m., you can catch the latest revue, Forbidden Broadway: Merrily We Stole a Song, at the Hobby Center for the Performing Arts. The title refers to the recent revival of Merrily, We Roll Along, which will be parodied alongside shows like Back to the Future, & Juliet, and Gypsy. Creator, writer, and director Gerard Alessandrini has said, “Most stars who have come to see what we do with them say nice things, at least publicly. The way I see it, whatever we say is never as bad as some of their reviews.” Performances are also scheduled for 7:30 p.m. Friday and 1:30 & 7:30 p.m. Saturday through April 27. Tickets are available here for $34 to $79.
Following their successful comedy tours in 2023 and 2024, comedians Tina Fey and Amy Poehler are once again on tour – The Restless Leg Tour – and they will be bringing their act to the Smart Financial Centre in Sugar Land on Friday, April 25, at 7 p.m. Despite their busy schedules – including Fey’s new Netflix show The Four Seasons and the launch of Poehler’s new podcast – the Saturday Night Live alums will be in town to perform a bit of standup (together and separately), do a little improv (a throwback to their days at Second City), answer audience questions and, of course, revisit the Weekend Update desk, which they both did a stint behind on SNL. Though VIP tickets are no longer available, regular tickets can still be purchased here for $94 to $321.
For the first time in almost 25 years, Houston Grand Opera will present Tannhäuser, Richard Wagner’s three-act opera about a man looking for redemption – here set in a place resembling New York City’s Gilded Age – at 7 p.m. on Friday, April 25, at Wortham Theater Center. Tenor Russell Thomas, who plays Tannhäuser, recently told the Houston Press that through the opera isn’t often performed in the United States due to its “challenging” vocals, it is “a complete opera with conflict [between ideas of what love should be], redemption and a broken hero. All those things we want to have in an opera.” Performances will continue at 7 p.m. April 29 and May 3 and 8, and at 2 p.m. May 11. Tickets are available here for $25 to $210.
Though “the tale of a caregiver melting the heart of a cantankerous senior is practically its own genre by now,” Ana Endara’s Beloved Tropic (Querido Trópico) finds a “compelling jumping off” to create a “good old-fashioned tearjerker with some enlivening flourishes.” Endara will introduce the film, the first to be shown in this year’s Latin Wave, a celebration of Latin American filmmaking at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, on Friday, April 25 at 7 p.m. The festival continues with seven more films scheduled throughout the weekend and culminates with a screening of this year’s Oscar winner for Best International Feature, Brazilian filmmaker Walter Salles’s I’m Still Here. You can view the full lineup here. Tickets to any of the screenings can be purchased here for $8 to $10.
If acrobats, contortionists, and strongmen are your thing, you’ll want to head over to Jones Hall on Friday, April 25, at 7:30 p.m. for Cirque Rocks! This weekend, with Conductor Jason Seber holding the baton, the Houston Symphony and vocalists Chloe Lowery and Dan Domenech will provide a soundtrack of hits from artists like The Eagles, Cyndi Lauper, The Beatles and more while performers from Cirque de la Symphonie put on a show of death-defying feats on stage above and around the orchestra. Performances continue at 7:30 p.m. Saturday, April 26, and 2 and 6:30 p.m. Sunday, April 27. In-hall tickets to any of the shows are available here for $39 to $169. If you have little ones, you can also check out Cirque for Kids happening this weekend, too.
Inspired by a dream where “a chosen sacrificial virgin danced herself to death,” Igor Stravinsky composed The Rite of Spring, which became “one of the 20th century’s most important musical works.” You can hear the premiere of Marlijn Helder’s re-score of Stravinsky’s classic during ROCO In Concert: Optimistic at 5 p.m. on Saturday, April 26, at the Brockman Hall for Opera on the Rice University campus. ROCO’s 40-piece chamber orchestra will perform the work, along with the Texas premiere of Dai Wei’s ROCO co-commissioned Invisible Portals, Keane Southard’s Lamentation for String Orchestra, and the world premiere of Vincent Gardner’s The Mancini Mashup!, performed in collaboration with the Jazz Houston ensemble. Tickets are pay-what-you-wish with a suggested price of $35 here. You can also livestream the performance for free at ROCO.org, Facebook, YouTube, or Twitch.
See the Broadway show Stephen Sondheim famously called his favorite – besides his own – The Wiz when it opens here in Houston at 7:30 p.m. on Tuesday, April 29, courtesy of Memorial Hermann Broadway at the Hobby Center. Sondheim said of the show, celebrating its 50th anniversary this year, that “it’s the one show which makes you feel better when you come out of it than you did when you walked in.” Based on L. Frank Baum’s classic children’s book The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, William F. Brown’s book and Charlie Smalls’s score situate Dorothy’s adventures in Oz within “Black culture of the time.” Performances are scheduled for 7:30 p.m. Tuesday through Friday, 2 and 7:30 p.m. Saturday, and 1:30 and 7 p.m. Sunday through May 4. Tickets are available here for $40 to $275.
