Spring is officially here, and what better way to celebrate than to take in one of the many arts offerings available over the next several days? This week, we’ve got fairytale-tinged music, a regional theater premiere, and some pretty entertaining cats. Keep reading for these and more.
This year, Nowruz, or Persian New Year falls on March 20, and you can celebrate with the Apollo Chamber Players as they present their latest multicultural concert Diversity – headlined by a world premiere from Reza Vali featuring percussionist Pejman Hadadi called Bandari – at the Hobby Center for the Performing Arts on Friday, March 21, at 7 p.m. In addition to the premiere, the program includes composer and violinist Daniel Bernard Roumain’s activist-inspired String Quartet No. 5, called Rosa Parks; Palestinian American Muyassar Kurdi’s Lullaby for the Children of the Sun, which “calls attention to Israel’s attacks on Palestinian civilians”; and Gilad Cohen’s Three Goat Blues, which draws from the popular Jewish song “Chad Gadya.” Tickets to the program are available here for $10 to $75.
The second installment of The Voice of Brubeck series, a project to shine a light on jazz great Dave Brubeck’s non-jazz works, will be presented on Friday, March 21 at 7:30 p.m. at Moores Opera House. The program, titled The Voice of Brubeck: Themes and Explorations, will feature jazz and sacred vocal pieces, along with the titular five-movement work, which was originally commissioned for the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra. The Houston Chamber Choir, Chris Brubeck, the Moores School of Music Symphony Orchestra, soloists Simone Gundy and Horace Alexander Young, the Paul English Quartet, and pianist and bandleader John Cornelius will participate in the concert, which will be recorded for an album set to be released later this year. Tickets are available here for $10 to $20 (with student tickets free with ID).
Fairytales continue to dominate the Theater District this weekend – this time, with the Houston Symphony’s latest concert Rachmaninoff’s Rhapsody & The Little Mermaid on Friday, March 21, at 7:30 p.m. at Jones Hall. The program includes Anatoly Liadov’s “marvel of mystical serenity,” The Enchanted Lake; Sergei Rachmaninoff’s Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini, a “cornerstone of the repertoire” since its 1934 premiere; and Alexander von Zemlinsky’s Hans Christian Andersen-inspired The Mermaid. The concert will be performed again on Saturday, March 22, at 7:30 p.m. and Sunday, March 23, at 2 p.m. Tickets to any of the in-hall performances can be purchased here for $40 to $125. Saturday night’s show will also be livestreamed, and access to the stream can be purchased here for $20.
It’s 1997, and the members of a girls basketball team, The Lady Train, from a rural Arkansas high school navigate more than just their coach’s playbook in Flex, a two-act play by Candrice Jones that will make its regional premiere on Friday, March 21, at 7:30 p.m. at The Ensemble Theatre. Krystal Uchem, who plays Cherise in the play, recently told the Houston Press that audience members will see actors who have spent time in the gym training as well as “somebody they know in all of these girls. It’s really relatable. It’s a story about life, about love, about self-awareness, about challenging yourself, about empowerment.” Performances will continue 7:30 p.m. Thursdays through Saturdays, 2 p.m. Saturdays, and 3 p.m. Sundays through April 13. Tickets are available here for $35 to $50.
John Patrick Shanley’s Doubt, A Parable, set in the Bronx circa 1964, is “a clash of wills and generations between Sister Aloysius and Father Flynn, the young priest who may or may not be too fond of the schoolboys in his charge.” On Friday, March 21, at 8 p.m., The Garden Theatre will open Shanley’s play, which The New York Times described as “written with an uncanny blend of compassion and detachment” upon its opening in 2004, at the MATCH. Performances will continue at 2 and 8 p.m. Saturdays, 2 p.m. Sundays, 7:30 p.m. Monday and Thursday, and 8 p.m. Friday through March 30. Tickets are available here for $25 to $30, with pay-what-you-can performances (with a minimum ticket cost of $10) scheduled for Monday and Thursday nights.
If you’re not familiar with Passion music, it refers to a genre of music that centers around the suffering and crucifixion of Christ. On Saturday, March 22, at 8 p.m., Mercury Chamber Orchestra will perform a classic example of Passion music during Bach’s St. John Passion at the Wortham Theater Center. Joining the musicians from the orchestra on Johann Sebastian Bach’s Passion story, which premiered on Good Friday in 1724, will be four vocalists – tenor Stephen Ash, bass Daniel Boyd, soprano Briana Kerner, and mezzo-soprano Abigail Lysinger – to handle the sacred oratorio. Tickets to the in-person concert are available here for $25 to $79 (with $10 student tickets also available). If you can’t make it, then you can purchase access to a livestream here for $20.
A radicalized young woman plans to detonate a bomb on a train headed for the City of Light in Emma Donoghue’s “propulsive and thought-provoking” novel The Paris Express, which shows “the problems plaguing 19th-century France appear not so different from our own.” The Irish-born Donoghue, who is also the author of Room (which became an Oscar-nominated film in 2016) will stop by Congregation Emanu El on Monday, March 24, at 7:30 p.m. as part of the 2024/2025 Inprint Margarett Root Brown Reading Series to read from her latest novel before engaging in an on-stage conversation with Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, a fellow author and a professor at the University of Houston. Tickets to the event, which will end with a book sale and signing, can be purchased here for $5.
Straight from The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, CBS News Sunday Morning, and the Netflix series Cat People, the Amazing Acro-Cats will return to Houston for an eight-show run at the MATCH starting on Tuesday, March 25, at 7 p.m. The former strays, rescues, and orphans will put on a 90-minute show, presented by Rock Cats Rescue, featuring skateboard riding, hoop jumping, and balancing acts that culminates in a performance by Tuna and the Rock Cats. Performances continue at 7 p.m. Wednesday through Friday, 2 and 7 p.m. Saturday, and 1 and 6 p.m. Sunday through March 30. General admission tickets are available here for $40 to $50, with VICP (very important cat people) also available for $55 to $75, which includes closer seats, a playbill, and first access to a post-show meet and greet.
