Best Bets: Viva Italia, Mulholland Drive and The Wanderers

It’s Pay a Compliment Day, and we think you’ll definitely want to compliment the talents you’ll find across this week’s best bets. We’ve got multiple theater productions, the music of famous Italian composers, and much more. Keep reading to see our picks for the next week.

The Hart-Celler Act of 1965 lends its name to playwright Lloyd Suh’s The Heart Sellers, which opens at Stages on Thursday, February 6, at 7 p.m. The act ended the quota system that limited non-white, non-European immigration and sets the stage for the two women in the play – one an immigrant from Korea and the other from the Philippines – to bond in their new homeland on Thanksgiving. Director Miranda Cornell recently described the play to the Houston Press as “a beautiful love letter to friendship, to trying to figure out oneself in a new place,” noting that for the play’s “heavy themes, it is so funny and really tender and touching.” Performances will continue at 7 p.m. Wednesdays through Saturdays and 2 p.m. Saturdays and Sundays through February 23. Tickets are available here for $34 to $79.

Celebrate the dearly departed David Lynch on Friday, February 7, at 7 p.m. when the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, screens the film that won Lynch a Best Director award at the Cannes Film Festival in 2001, Mulholland Drive, on 35mm. In the movie, a Hollywood newbie looking to become a star meets an amnesiac while a director attempts to cast his latest project within what Roger Ebert called “a surrealist dreamscape in the form of a Hollywood film noir.” Ebert also said, “If you require logic, see something else,” adding that for others, “the less sense it makes, the more we can’t stop watching it.” The film will screen a second time on Sunday, February 9, at 2 p.m. Tickets to either screening can be purchased here for $7 to $9.

You may know Gioachino Rossini’s William Tell Overture more from The Lone Ranger than the entire four-act opera it’s from, but on Friday, February 7, at 7:30 p.m., you can know it from the Houston Symphony’s performance of the famous work during Viva Italia! Opera Beyond Words at Jones Hall. Music Director Juraj Valčuha will lead the Symphony is a program that delves into the aria-less works of musical greats like Rossini, Alfredo Casella, Ottorino Respighi, Giuseppe Verdi, and Giacomo Puccini, whose Intermezzo from Madama Butterfly will be featured. The concert will be performed a second time on Sunday, February 9, at 2 p.m. Tickets to both in-hall performances can be purchased here for $40 to $120. Sunday’s show will also be livestreamed, and access can be purchased here for $20.

It’s been said that the opening movement of Florence Price’s String Quartet No. 1 in G Major “is almost a textbook of her style: frequent key changes, a great variety of musical themes and shorter ideas that flow quickly from one to another.” The piece, “informed by the style of American folk songs” in parts and featuring a “bright ending,” will be played on Friday, February 7, at 7:30 p.m. when DACAMERA presents the New York Philharmonic String Quartet (comprised of violinists Frank Huang and Qianqian Li, violist Cynthia Phelps, and cellist Carter Brey) at the Hobby Center for the Performing Arts. Price, the first African American woman to have a composition performed by a major orchestra, will be on the program alongside Antonin Dvořák and Joseph Haydn. Tickets can be purchased here for $46 to $76.

In Candice D’Meza’s Miss Laraj’s House of Dystopian Futures, which will open at The Catastrophic Theatre on Friday, February 7, at 8 p.m., audiences will see a post-apocalyptic world and meet the Mutha of the New World Order, Miss Laraj. Abraham Zeus Zapata, who plays the show’s title character, spoke with the Houston Press and said the two-act show is told “through a very natural and queer lens” and asks audiences to see nature and ask questions like, “What if humans were a link in this chain that we’re all connected by? Not the owner of the chain. What if we’re just a part of it?” Performances will continue at the MATCH at 7:30 p.m. Thursdays, 8 p.m. Fridays and Saturdays, and 2:30 p.m. Sundays through March 1. Tickets are pay-what-you-can (with a suggested price of $35) and are available here.

A group of assassins gather to mourn the death of a fellow assassin in Dain Geist’s Seven Assassins Walk into a Bar, a one-act play that will make its world premiere at Main Street Theater on Saturday, February 8, at 7:30 p.m. Geist explained to the Houston Press that the show has “a lot of anticipation” and “a lot of macabre humor that takes place as these folks are sitting there complaining about the best place to dispose of a body and how they feel about dating other assassins,” adding, “If I have done my job well, people will both like and despise each one of them for different reasons.” Performances will continue at 30 p.m. Thursdays through Saturdays and 3 p.m. Sundays through March 2. Tickets can be purchased here for $40 to $63.

Anna Ziegler explores the dynamics found within two marriages, one an Orthodox Jewish couple and the other more secular, in The Wanderers, which will open at 8 p.m. on Saturday, February 8, at the Evelyn Rubenstein Jewish Community Center of Houston. The play, the first of two co-productions between Mildred’s Umbrella and Evelyn Rubenstein JCC, will be directed by Jennifer Decker, the artistic director of Mildred’s Umbrella. Decker recently told the Houston Press she thinks the play’s themes are “universal,” adding that the relationships in the play ask the same questions: “What responsibility do we owe to groups we are in? In that responsibility, how much do we sacrifice?” Performances will continue at 7:30 p.m. Thursdays, 8 p.m. Saturdays, and 2 p.m. Sundays through February 23. Tickets are available here for $18 to $29.

On Wednesday, February 12, at 7:30 p.m., professional beatboxer and breath artist Dominic “Shodekeh” Talifero will join Sō Percussion, who just won a Grammy on Sunday for Best Chamber Music/Small Ensemble, for Vodalities (i.e., vocal modalities), a collaborative performance dedicated to Bobby McFerrin, Ella Fitzgerald, and Doug E. Fresh at Wortham Theater Center. The two-movement vocal work, composed by Talifero, features beatboxing, breath art, and vocal percussion. If breath artistry is new to you, Talifero has said, “It’s more than just making cool sounds,” saying too that he’s “really interested in what happens when you isolate just breathing as a modality beyond functionality and expressivity. And then it enters the room of kinesthetic embodiment, artistic embodiment.” Tickets to Sō Percussion with Shodekeh Talifero, presented by Performing Arts Houston, can be purchased here for $19 to $59.