Best Bets the Week of September 19-25, 2024

Though it may not feel quite like it, fall officially begins on Sunday. The seasons may change (literally, if not in terms of temperature), one constant is that the arts organizations always have plenty to offer. This week, we’ve got a classic opera, a celebration of local dance companies, and much more. Keep reading for these and our other best bets.

Hal Ashby’s 1979 satire, Being There, “has the appeal of an ingenious intellectual game, in which the hero survives a series of challenges he doesn’t understand.” The hero, played by Peter Sellers, is a “pure-hearted, childlike” gardener whose “simplicity is mistaken for profundity” in the “carefully modulated examination of the ideals, anxieties, and media-fueled delusions that shaped American culture” in the ‘70s. On Thursday, September 19, at 7:15 p.m., Arthouse Houston (formerly Friends of River Oaks Theatre) will present a free outdoor screening of Being There with Buffalo Bayou Partnership on The Water Works lawn in Buffalo Bayou Park. Ukrainian cellist Larysa Horichenko-Balema will begin the evening with a solo performance at 6:15 p.m. before artist and researcher Jake Eshelman introduces the film at 7 p.m. You can RSVP for the screening here.

A lonely widow in Wisconsin during the pandemic finds that the local sheriff thinks her only companion is the same person who’s been stealing tools from her in Rebecca Gilman’s Swing State, which 4th Wall Theatre Co. will open on Friday, September 20, at 7:30 p.m. at Spring Street Studios. Jennifer Dean, the production’s director and 4th Wall’s artistic director, recently told the Houston Press the play explores “how we as a country continue to swing between hope and despair and connection and disconnection whether it’s politically or health or personal life…It’s a really beautiful picture of this moment in time.” Performances will continue at 7:30 p.m. Thursdays through Saturdays and 3 p.m. Sundays through October 5. Tickets are available here for $17 to $62 with a pay-what-you-will night scheduled for Monday, September 30 (minimum $7 and suggested price $27).

On Friday, September 20 at 7:30 p.m., Ars Lyrica will open their season at the Hobby Center for the Performing Arts with In Praise of Virtue, a program that features solo cantatas from Johann Sebastian Bach and George Frideric Handel as well as excerpts from Johann Adolph Hasse’s Marc-Antonio e Cleopatra, a serenata the ensemble recorded in 2011 that nabbed them a Grammy nomination for Best Opera. Ars Lyrica Artistic Director Matthew Dirst recently told the Houston Press that the performance marks the first time the ensemble has “revisited Marc Anthony and Cleopatra in 13 years,” and that he thinks countertenor Aryeh Nussbaum and soprano Hannah De Priest, who will be making her Ars Lyrica debut, will “pair together well” on the work. Tickets can be purchased here for $15 to $80.

In Gaetano Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor, the heroine falls in love and finds herself caught in the middle of feuding families, something that drives her to insanity. On Friday, September 20, at 7:30 p.m. Opera in the Heights will perform Donizetti’s 1835 tragic opera at Lambert Hall with soprano Oriana Falla singing the role of Lucia. Falla recently told the Houston Press she thinks the piece’s relevance is still in “the feelings of someone having to have duty to their family versus marrying who they are in love with or upholding certain societal pressures,” noting that heartbreak is “something everyone can relate to.” Additional performances are scheduled for 2 p.m. Sunday, September 22, and 7:30 p.m. Friday, September 27, and Saturday, September 28. Tickets are available here for $35 to $85.

The Pilot Dance Project will host its first invitational dance festival, Bayou City Dances, at Miller Outdoor Theatreon Friday, September 20, at 8 p.m. The company will perform Executive and Artistic Director Adam Castan͂eda’s Purple Bromeliads alongside Houston Contemporary Dance and Open Dance Project, who together will premiere a new work from Annie Arnoult; NobleMotion Dance’s Plato-inspired response to the rise of AI, Stalactites; a reimagined selection of Nao Kusuzaki’s Barbara Jordan/Harper Lee-centric piece The House; and more. Tickets can be reserved here today, September 19, at 10 a.m., or you can plan to sit on the Hill without a ticket. As always, shows at Miller are free, but if you can’t make it, you can livestream this one on the Miller Outdoor Theatre website, YouTube channel, or Facebook page.

Playwright Mickle Maher turns his eye to fundraising for the arts, with a good dose of William Shakespeare and superheroes thrown in, in Spirits to Enforce, which The Catastrophic Theatre will open at 8 p.m. on Friday, September 20, at the MATCH. Catastrophic’s co-artistic director Jason Nodler, who is also directing the play, told the Houston Press that despite it all, “you don’t need to care about theater at all, you don’t need to care about Shakespeare, you don’t need to care about superheroes, nor about fund raising. You only have to be capable of laughing in order to enjoy this play.” Performances will continue at 7:30 p.m. Thursdays and September 30, 8 p.m. Fridays and Saturdays, and 2:30 p.m. Sundays through October 12. Tickets are pay-what-you-can with a suggested price of $35 and are available here.

In Zora Howard’s 2021 Pulitzer Prize finalist Stew, which you can catch making its regional premiere at The Ensemble Theatre on Saturday, September 21, at 2 p.m., a family’s matriarch is stressed because she’s got 50 people to need to feed at church soon and one burned dish. This is the jumping off point for a play that’s got “its eye on the generational strife perpetually coming to a full boil in a family of Black women,” chronicling their “everyday sorrows, disappointments and hopes” as well as “their stamina to survive a world of economic hardship, emotional neglect and chronic violence.” Performances will continue at 7:30 p.m. Thursdays and Fridays, 2 and 7:30 p.m. Saturdays, and 3 p.m. Sundays through October 13. Tickets can be purchased here for $35 to $50.

You can find a first-time collaboration, with Houston Symphony musicians, and a world premiere, “The Son of Man” from English composer Patrick Hawes, at 7:30 p.m. on Saturday, September 21, at South Main Baptist Church when Houston Chamber Choir opens its 30th season. Of Hawes’s biblically inspired piece, Choir Founder and Artistic Director Robert Simpson told the Houston Chronicle he feels he and Hawes “have a similar depth of appreciation for sacred works and that they tell truth and provide moments of insight for people of whether they consider themselves religious or not. There is something fundamentally, profoundly true about the movements that I think will appeal to everyone.” Tickets may be purchased here for $10 to $45 and you can learn more about Houston Chamber Choir’s 30th season in the Houston Press’ preview here.