Dance: Battery Park City Is Alive with Movement
Aug. 11-17; batterydance.org
The Battery Dance Festival ushers in its 38th year with a week of mainly free outdoor performances in which part of the pleasure is the glorious backdrop of the New York Harbor at Robert F. Wagner Jr. Park (Aug. 11-16). Offerings include local groups, such as Buglisi Dance Theater and Ballet Boy Productions, but the main draw is the range of international artists. On Aug. 15, the spotlight shines on Manipuri dance with Darshana Jhaveri & Drummers and Dancers of Manipur. For it, Rajika Puri will serve as the sutradhar, or narrator. The festival wraps up with a ticketed performance on Aug. 17 featuring the New York-based Battery Dance along with B ~ E, dance artists from Lithuania; Bodhi Project, the repertory company of the Salzburg Experimental Academy of Dance in Austria; and Reuel Rogers, from Curaçao, who goes by B-Boy Crunk. And if the mood strikes, you can move, too: Following each outdoor performance is a participatory movement event led by members of companies that performed that night. GIA KOURLAS
Theater: Tom Hiddleston in ‘Betrayal’ on Broadway
Aug. 14-Dec. 8, betrayalonbroadway.com
I don’t know about you, but when I first heard that Tom Hiddleston would star in Harold Pinter’s classic love-triangle drama “Betrayal,” I assumed he’d been cast as Jerry, a literary agent who carries on a yearslong affair with Emma, his best friend’s wife. But Hiddleston, the simmeringly charismatic British movie star best known for his role as the crafty villain Loki in Marvel’s big-screen universe, is instead playing the best friend, Robert — the betrayed, that is, not the betrayer.
A hit earlier this year in London’s West End, Jamie Lloyd’s spare revival alights on Broadway this week for a limited engagement, its plot winding backward through time, from the romance’s muted aftermath to its drunken prelude. Also starring Zawe Ashton (“Velvet Buzzsaw”) as Emma and Charlie Cox (“Daredevil”) as Jerry, it starts previews on Wednesday at the Bernard B. Jacobs Theater, where it opens on Sept. 5. LAURA COLLINS-HUGHES
TV: Oddballs in Paradise on ‘Lodge 49’
Aug. 12; amc.com
Last season, AMC conjured up some critical love with Jim Gavin’s “Lodge 49.” The modern-day fable stars Wyatt Russell as Dud, a sunny former surfer in Long Beach, Calif., whose mojo tanked after a snake bit him in Nicaragua and his father vanished into the Pacific.
Then serendipity landed Dud on the doorstep of the Ancient and Benevolent Order of the Lynx, where companionship and alchemy (yes, alchemy) gave him a new lease on life. At least until a shark took a chunk out of him in the finale.
More whimsy — prophecies, unicorns, encounters with the departed — ripples through Season 2 as Dud, his twin sister, Liz (Sonya Cassidy), and his mentor, Ernie (Brent Jennings), go in quest of fulfillment. For Dud, that means restoring the lodge to its former glory by putting the rightful ruler on the throne, as well as reclaiming his place cleaning the pools that were once the domain of his family when all was right in their oddball world. KATHRYN SHATTUCK
Pop: Beck and Cage The Elephant at Forest Hills Stadium
Aug 17; axs.com
It’s hard to classify Beck as anything other than a musical omnivore. A love of American roots music and a brief stint in New York’s anti-folk scene shaped the Los Angeles native’s sensibilities when he was cutting his teeth as a performer in the late 1980s. But “Loser,” the supremely catchy, supremely sardonic song that jump-started his career, was inflected with just as much hip-hop as blues, and in the intervening years, Beck’s roaming musical journey has taken him through psychedelia (“Mutations”) and serene, straightforward singer-songwriter musings (“Sea Change,” “Morning Phase”). More recently, his 2016 album “Colors” ventured into overt pop territory — a trend line that he followed to “Saw Lightning,” a Pharrell-produced single from his forthcoming 14th album.
At Forest Hills Stadium in Queens, Beck is slated to share a bill with Cage the Elephant, the alt-rock group from Kentucky, as part of a co-headlining tour. The tour, “Night Running,” takes its name from their woozy tag-teamed single released in March. OLIVIA HORN
Classical Music: An Exhaustive Exploration of Experimental Music
Aug. 10-28; timespans.org
Sponsored by the Earle Brown Music Foundation, the Time:Spans festival, an increasingly vital exploration of experimental music in the summer New York scene, presents its fifth iteration in the coming weeks. This year’s festival unfolds Aug. 10-28 at the DiMenna Center, with a seemingly exhaustive series of fascinating new works from musicians as wide-ranging as Matana Roberts, Marina Rosenfeld and the band Deerhoof. If the 13 concerts weren’t enough, for most of the festival, the pianist Marino Formenti will play for 12 hours each day at the Goethe-Institute New York Library. Don’t worry if you’re not in town, as Formenti’s quasi-installation, quasi-performance will be streamed live online. WILLIAM ROBIN
Art: An Army of Monkeys and Bears at the Met
Through Feb. 23; metmuseum.org
Combine the elegant restraint of a 16th-century Persian miniature with the baroque and boundless imagination of the Hindu epics and you get the jewel-box glories of the Indian court painting, a form which flourished in multiple schools and little courts from the 1500s into the British Raj. Portraits of Mughal rulers, or of nobles cavorting, can be lovely. But in “Sita and Rama: The Ramayana in Indian Painting” at the Metropolitan Museum, the subject of all 30 paintings (over two rotations) is the story of Rama leading an army of monkeys and bears over the sea to Sri Lanka to rescue his wife, Sita, from a kidnapper. This grand narrative background lends breathtaking excitement even to an image of the blue-skinned king relaxing in a forest glade. WILL HEINRICH
Film: I Remember When, in ‘After the Wedding’
Aug. 9 and Aug. 16
Mads Mikkelsen played the role first. As Jacob, a Danish orphanage worker in Mumbai, he is lured back to Copenhagen by a tycoon’s promise of a substantial donation, and nearly immediately encounters a quagmire: A surprise invitation to the nuptials of his benefactor’s daughter reveals that the bride’s mother is someone Jacob used to know.
“After the Wedding,” Susanne Bier’s 2006 dramatic foray into morals and money, was nominated for a best foreign-language Oscar. Now comes Bart Freundlich’s adaptation, which flips the genders and volleys between Kolkata and New York, where the American aid worker Isabel (Michelle Williams) has been summoned by the media mogul Theresa (Julianne Moore, Freundlich’s wife) with an offer of $20 million, to be bestowed after the wedding of her daughter (Abby Quinn). And where — no spoiler here — Isabel recognizes the bride’s father (Billy Crudup) as a ghost from her complicated past.
Bier stirred the emotions with fewer suds, but watch Freundlich’s for the strength of its women: a raging Moore (and her envy-inducing waterfront estate), a beatifically brooding Williams and Quinn, trapped somewhere in between.
“After the Wedding” opens on Aug. 9 in New York and Los Angeles before a wider rollout on Aug. 16. Stream Bier’s original on Amazon.com. KATHRYN SHATTUCK
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