Pop
Karen O of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, one of the bands scheduled to perform Friday at the All Points West festival in Jersey City.
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Camille Pissarro’s “Louveciennes, Route de Saint-Germaine” (1871) is among the works in the French landscape exhibition at the Getty Museum.
The cast of “Reconstruction,” an interactive work being presented this week at the Ohio Theater in SoHo as part of the Ice Factory festival.
Toni Servillo with Anna Bonaiuto in “The Girl by the Lake.”
Jon Pareles
Even the best-planned rock festivals are part bargain, part tease.
They offer more worthwhile bands in one place than in weeks of club- and concertgoing, but with shorter sets, simpler staging and more distracted audiences. With all those musicians on the site, there’s also the possibility of synergy: collaborations or stray insights produced by the juxtaposition of so many bands.
While some festivals seem merely to be booked, latching on to an assortment of available touring bands, more now strive for themes and synergies. All Points West, which starts on Friday in Jersey City, is definitely that kind.
Each of its three days has its own conceptual bent. Friday is headlined by arty New York City party bands: the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, mixing defiance and glimmers of angst behind stomping guitar or synthesizer riffs and Vampire Weekend, whose collegiate chronicles are perked up by African-tinged guitar. The rest of the bill has ambitious hip-hop — from Q-Tip, the Pharcyde, Organized Konfusion and the Knux — as well as thoughtful indie rock from Ra Ra Riot and Shearwater.
Saturday brings guitar ferocity and noise, headlined by the meticulously composed aggression of Tool and the eruptive post-punk of the reunited My Bloody Valentine, along with the manic Gypsy-rock of Gogol Bordello. The lineup also includes the torchy, elemental roots-rock of Neko Case and the brittle post-punk of Arctic Monkeys.
And Sunday looks toward Britain and pomp, with the self-important treacle of Coldplay and the synthesizer-driven gloom of Echo and the Bunnymen along with MGMT, whose pulsating dance-pop should lighten things up. The bill also offers the burgeoning instrumental crescendos of Mogwai, the grungy anthems of Silversun Pickups, the latter-day hippie celebration of Akron/Family, the synthesizer-driven dance tunes of Ghostland Observatory and the sly, cleverly perky pop of Lykke Li.
All Points West has sketched out connections and contrasts; festivalgoers can add their own.
Noon to 11:30 p.m., Friday through Sunday, Liberty State Park, Jersey City, apwfestival.com; single-day tickets $89, three-day tickets $219.
Theater
Jason Zinoman
When Robert Lyons, artistic director of the Soho Think Tank and producer of the annual ICE FACTORY festival, signed a lease for another year at the Ohio Theater, many in the downtown theater world breathed a sigh of relief. There had been rumors that the new owners of the building would force the theater to close to make way for the kind of high-end shopping outlet for which SoHo, once a bohemian neighborhood, is now known. Instead, after an aggressive fund-raising drive, a deal was signed to keep the grungy performing space through next August, guaranteeing that the superbly programmed Ice Factory has a home for at least two more summers.
Presenting a new show every week through mid-August, this collection of adventurous work has long been one of the most underrated festivals in the city. Among the highlights this year is next month’s “SPACE/SPACE,” a low-tech science fiction story about two brothers hurtling through space, by the Brooklyn experimental company Banana, Bag & Bodice (“Beowulf: A Thousand Years of Baggage”). But this week offers an adventure of its own: “RECONSTRUCTION,” the latest topical interactive extravaganza from Josh Fox’s International WOW Company. With the help of a 30-member ensemble and a bluegrass band, it addresses the housing crisis by imagining the rebuilding of a town destroyed by foreclosures and evictions. In the show a house is actually built onstage by actors and audience members. So be ready to get your hands dirty. Wednesday through next Saturday, Ohio Theater, 66 Wooster Street, (212) 868-4444, sohothinktank.org; $15.
Television
Ginia Bellafante
Well timed to the post-Bernie Madoff, post-meltdown era, “THE YES MEN FIX THE WORLD” (9 p.m. Monday, HBO) is a documentary made by, and starring, two professional pranksters who masquerade their way into American corporate life to expose chicanery and fraud. Hybrids of Sacha Baron Cohen and Michael Moore, the filmmakers, Andy Bichlbaum and Mike Bonanno, the so-called Yes Men, pose as executives of corporations they hate. The film was a hit at Sundance and has drawn praise from the social commentator Naomi Klein, among others.
“THE REAL HOUSEWIVES OF ATLANTA” may not sufficiently get you through your mourning period for their sisters to the north — here I speak, needless to say, of “The Real Housewives of New Jersey” — but the Southern faction of the Bravo franchise returns Thursday at 10 p.m. This season the show adds a new housewife to the mix: Kandi, former member of the vocal group Xscape, Grammy winner, single mother and songwriter for artists like Alicia Keys and Mariah Carey. That is more than we can say for Dina and Caroline Manzo.
Film
Mike Hale
It’s probably safe to say that in America TONI SERVILLO — who, with his remaining hair mostly white, looks older than his 50 years — would not be a movie star. In Italy, though, he has won the Donatello award (the equivalent of the Oscar) for best actor three times in the last five years. And that doesn’t even count his performance as a corrupt businessman in “Gomorrah,” Matteo Garrone’s much-honored examination of the Sicilian Mafia. The ensemble nature of “Gomorrah” worked against individual awards, but no matter: Mr. Servillo won this year anyway, for playing the former prime minister Giulio Andreotti in “Il Divo.”
Beginning Monday the Film Society of Lincoln Center is showing those two films along with Mr. Servillo’s two other Donatello-winning performances in a minifestival called FIRE AND ICE; Mr. Servillo will appear in person before Monday’s 6 p.m. screening of “Il Divo.” Also included: his breakout film role (he had been a leading Italian stage actor for 30 years) as a Mafia accountant in “The Consequences of Love” (2004), directed, like “Il Divo,” by Paolo Sorrentino; and his portrayal of a provincial detective in “The Girl by the Lake” (2007), directed by Andrea Molaioli.
Mr. Servillo is “considered the best actor in Italy,” Mr. Sorrentino told The New York Times in 2005, “and was even before he did my films.”
Monday through Wednesday, Walter Reade Theater, Lincoln Center, (212) 975-5600, filmlinc.org; $11.
Dance
Roslyn Sulcas
The Joffrey Ballet seems an unlikely source of inspiration for BRENDAN KENNEDY and NEAL MEDLYN, well known in downtown circles for (among other things) “Our Hit Parade,” their monthly variety show at Joe’s Pub. But their latest venture, “WHY WON’T YOU LET ME BE GREAT!!!” — a group show set to Kanye West’s 2008 album “808s & Heartbreak” — was directly inspired by the Joffrey’s 1993 “Billboards,” an evening-length work by four choreographers to the songs of Prince.
“Why Won’t You Let Me Be Great!!!” (the title comes from Mr. West’s fabulously uninhibited all-caps blog) is the downtown version. Originally Mr. Kennedy’s idea, the show took shape when he asked Mr. Medlyn and the directors of the Catch performance series, Jeff Larson, Andrew Dinwiddie and Caleb Hammons, to collaborate on it. Together they approached a number of choreographers (and, for variety, Kenny Mellman, from Kiki and Herb, and the video artist Myles Kane), asking each to choose a favorite song from Mr. West’s album, the product of a difficult year in his personal life. The result is a wildly intriguing mix of performers: Justin Jones and Elliott Durko Lynch, Karinne Keithley, Mr. Medlyn, Christine Elmo, Jennifer Monson, Ann Liv Young, Mr. Kane, the Varsity Interpretive Dance Squad, Mr. Mellman, Dance Gang, the duo Asubtout, and Juliana F. May. And of course Mr. West himself. Perhaps he’ll even show up. Thursday through Saturday at 8 p.m., Performance Space 122, 150 First Avenue, at Ninth Street, East Village, (212) 477-5829, ps122.org; $20, $15 for students and 65+, $10 for members.
Classical
Daniel J. Wakin
Not in Vail, Colo., with the New York Philharmonic? Staying away from Tanglewood and the Berkshires? In New York this week the big event is the opening of the MOSTLY MOZART FESTIVAL.
The first program, on Tuesday and Wednesday, covers the classical repertory’s Gang of Three — Beethoven, Mozart and Haydn — with an interesting twist. Conducted by LOUIS LANGRÉE, the festival’s music director, the Mostly Mozart orchestra will accompany Leif Ove Andsnes in a performance of Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 3. Mozart’s familiar “Jupiter” Symphony, No. 41, is also on the program, but Haydn is represented by a more unusual work, a late secular cantata called “Berenice, che fai?” It is a virtuosic and harmonically daring exercise for mezzo-soprano, in this case Alice Coote.
On Friday and Saturday EDWARD GARDNER, who has been garnering attention for his work as music director of the English National Opera, takes over the baton and Piotr Anderszewski takes over the keyboard in a program of Mozart’s overture to “The Magic Flute,” Piano Concerto No. 18 and Symphony No. 39. The programmers have also snuck in a little Benjamin Britten in the form of his gorgeous Serenade for Tenor, Horn and Strings. The soloists are Toby Spence, tenor, and Lawrence DiBello, French horn. 8 p.m., Avery Fisher Hall, Lincoln Center, (212) 721-6500, lincolncenter.org; $35 to $90.
Art
Randy Kennedy
In the middle of summer a trip to the J. PAUL GETTY MUSEUM in Los Angeles is a good way to experience a more perfect union with nature, in air-conditioned comfort.
“CAPTURING NATURE’S BEAUTY: THREE CENTURIES OF FRENCH LANDSCAPE,” which opens Tuesday, delves into the Getty’s renowned drawing collection to examine how artists like Nicolas Poussin, Claude Lorrain, Jean-Honoré Fragonard, Vincent van Gogh and others helped elevate the status of pure landscape, a genre that languished below history painting and portraiture in academic importance until the early 17th century. The exhibition, organized by Édouard Kopp, the museum’s assistant curator of drawings, focuses in part on the idealizing tendencies of the French landscape tradition, encouraged by theorists of the time like Roger de Piles, who urged artists to represent nature not so much as they saw her but “as we think she ought to be.”
The drawings, many of which are not often exhibited because of their delicacy, pull the eye into an Arcadian fantasy of feathery trees and noble crumblings that by the early 1800s had given way to a greater realism and directness with artists like Jean-François Millet and Théodore Rousseau. By the time of Georges Seurat and the post-Impressionists at the end of the century, nature could become sepulchral, lost in a fog between figuration and abstraction, seeming to foreshadow the horrors of the First World War just around the corner and the contradictory power of landscapes themselves. As Paul Cézanne observed in a 1902 quotation used as the catalog’s epigraph: “Today our sight is a little weary, burdened by the memory of a thousand images. We no longer see nature; we see pictures over and over again.” Through Nov. 1, (310) 440-7330, getty.edu.
