Start the new year with a look back at the work of a classic director, a look around the musical world with a visiting “little orchestra,” or a look inward with an evening of personal stories. All these and more make this week’s list of best bets, so read below before you solidify your weekend plans.
The filmmaker behind macabre masterpieces like Rear Window and Psycho with a voice like “a droll bloodhound trying to hypnotize you over tea” is the subject of Mark Cousins’s 2022 documentary My Name Is Alfred Hitchcock, which the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, will show on Friday, January 3, at 7 p.m. The film “is a study of Alfred Hitchcock’s work” broken down into six themes and “illustrated with clips chosen with tremendous insight and connoisseurship – and supposedly narrated from beyond the grave by Hitchcock himself.” The voice actually belongs to impressionist Alistair McGowan. The film will be screened on Saturday, January 4, at 7 p.m. and Sunday, January 5, at 2 p.m. Tickets to any of the screenings can be purchased here for $7 to $9.
On Friday, January 3, at 7:30 p.m., genre-hopping “little orchestra” Pink Martini, a band capable of performing music in more than two dozen languages, will swing by Jones Hall during Pink Martini with China Forbes: 30th Anniversary Season. The program is likely to include their popular rendition of “Amado Mio,” from the 1946 film Gilda; Maurice Ravel’s “Bolero”; and “Aquarela do Brasil,” known simply as “Brazil.” The concert will be performed at 7:30 p.m. Saturday, January 4, and 2 p.m. Sunday, January 5. Tickets to any of the in-hall performances can be purchased here for $58 to $142. If you can’t make it to Jones Hall, the Saturday night performance will be live-streamed, and access can be purchased here for $20.
First, forget all about the Nicolas Cage-led remake of 2006 and focus on the original, a folk horror film that’s been called “so much better and more distinctive” than any other that “it’s virtually a one-movie genre in itself.” It’s director Robin Hardy’s 1973 film The Wicker Man, which will be shown at Alamo Drafthouse on Friday, January 3, at 10 p.m. as part of their Graveyard Shift, a monthly series that screens the best horror films past and present. The “brilliant conspiracy-chiller,” presented as a “final cut” restoration, stars Christopher Lee and Edward Woodward, who plays a pious officer led to the May Day celebrations on a fictional island off the coast of Scotland in search of a missing girl. Tickets to the screening are available here for $13.25.
If you can’t get enough Alfred Hitchcock, you can also catch one of his personal favorite films, Vertigo, which also formerly held the No. 1 spot on the British Film Institute’s influential Sight and Sound poll (before it was bumped from the top spot by Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles 2022) at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, on Saturday, January 4, at 2 p.m. The film, notable for inventing a camera trick to mimic the titular condition, stars Kim Novak and James Stewart, who plays a cop who retired because of his vertigo hired to investigate a friend’s wife (played by Novak). Vertigo will screen a second time on Sunday, January 5, at 5 p.m. Tickets to either screening can be purchased here for $7 to $9.
Apollo Chamber Players will continue their “We the People”-themed season at the MATCH on Saturday, January 4, at 7:30 p.m. with Opportunity, a multi-discipline program featuring both music and dance by special guests from the Houston Ballet. First Soloist Mónica Gómez and Demi Soloist Estheysis Menendez will contribute choreography to works by fellow Cuban artists Ernesto Lecuona and Leo Brouwer. The program will also feature Hungarian-American composer Miklós Rózsa’s String Quartet No. 1 from 1950 and Turkish-American composer Erberk Eryilmaz’s 2015 work “Thracian Airs of Besime Sultan,” a Roma-inspired piece previously commissioned by the Apollo Chamber Players. General admission tickets can be purchased in advance here for $35 or at the door for $40. Student tickets are also available for $10 with a valid ID.
If you’ve got a true story you can tell in five minutes with stakes and a great opening line, you might want to try your luck on Tuesday, January 7, when The Moth StorySLAM pays a visit to the Grace Event Lawn at Discovery Green. You can sign up to tell a story at the open-mic storytelling competition or just enjoy it – and, perfect for the start of a new year, the evening’s theme is “reset.” Doors for the event open at 6:30 p.m., with stories starting at 7:30 p.m. General admission tickets are available here for $15. The event will be outdoors, and, in case of rain (this is Houston, after all), a rescheduled make-up date is set for Wednesday, January 8.
South Park creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone’s “wickedly caustic bout of good musical fun,” The Book of Mormon, will return to Houston for the first time since 2019 when Memorial Hermann Broadway at the Hobby Center opens the touring Broadway production on Tuesday, January 7, at 7:30 p.m. The show, which won nine Tony Awards in 2011 (including Best Musical), follows two missionaries from The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints who travel to Uganda to convert villagers with more pressing issues than their immortal souls. Performances will continue at 7:30 p.m. Wednesday through Friday, 2 and 7:30 p.m. Saturday, and 1:30 and 7 p.m. Sunday through January 12. Tickets are going fast, but some are still available here for $60 to $185 (not including resale).
Two women with the same birthday, one a journalist with a successful podcast and the other a wife and mother with some dark secrets, meet by chance while celebrating at a pub in Lisa Jewell’s “deftly plotted and gripping psychological thriller,” None of This Is True. Since her debut novel in 1999, Ralph’s Party, Jewell has published 21 more novels and sold more than 10 million copies worldwide, and on Wednesday, January 8, at 6:30 p.m., the New York Times bestselling author will stop by Murder By The Book to talk about the book (soon to made into a feature by Netflix) with Abby Endler, Penguin Random House marketing manager and creator of a site and Instagram account specializing in crime fiction reviews called Crime by the Book.
