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Alex Barasch
Culture editor
It seems fitting that John Wilson, after four years spent depicting New York in all its eccentricities, has become a hyper-local celebrity in his own right. In July, the Museum of the Moving Image heralded the return of his HBO docu-comedy, “How To with John Wilson,” with an hours-long, multi-season marathon. This week, a free advance screening of the finale drew an eager crowd to a public plaza in the meatpacking district. The formula for a given episode is, by now, well established: Wilson greets viewers, in voice-over, with a mild “Hey, New York,” and outlines his quest du jour before following strangers down increasingly absurd rabbit holes. The result is funny but also consistently empathetic; where Nathan Fielder, the creator of “The Rehearsal,” meets his subjects’ insane statements with a deadpan “Oh, O.K.,” Wilson responds with an earnest “Wow.” Through this lens, even tiny observations and trivial missions can become poignant. The show’s pilot, which aired in 2020, begins with a pledge to help the audience master small talk and ends with Wilson, in Cancún, as an unlikely confidant to a party boy grappling with the death of a friend. It’s not a spoiler to say that tonight’s finale, ostensibly about tracking packages, takes a hard turn into headier territory.
Image from “How To with John Wilson,” Season 3.Photograph by Thomas Wilson / Courtesy HBO
The onset of the pandemic led to a more insular second season; the third opens out again, but it also digs deeper. Knowing that it will be the last, Wilson seems prepared to tip his hand both technically and emotionally. If we still don’t see much of the man behind the camera, we do learn about his insecurities, his motivations, and how far he’s prepared to go for a joke (or, in the case of one elaborate stunt involving a malfunctioning toilet, a tax credit). The penultimate episode, “How to Watch Birds,” offers concrete revelations about how certain too-good-to-be-true shots have been constructed. But the most telling line comes early on, when a birder explains her own philosophy for surveying the mundane: “If we don’t happen to see much, just go ahead and go ‘wow’ anyway, and train yourself to be amazed at what’s here right now.”
Spotlight
Illustration by Bernardo Rodriguez
Broadway
Leslie Odom, Jr., has loved the Ossie Davis play “Purlie Victorious,” from 1961, since Odom began using its monologues for auditions; now, for his first nonmusical Broadway role, he stars in its long-in-coming revival, opposite the meteoric—and two-time Tony-nominated—Kara Young. In “Hamilton,” Odom played Aaron Burr, a man perpetually kept outside the room where policy was made, but in this comedy he plays a man making change without asking permission, a quick-witted preacher rewriting the unrighteous bargains of the Jim Crow South.—Helen Shaw (Music Box Theatre; previews begin Sept. 7.)
About Town
Classical
Before Tom and Jerry, there were the comic-strip stars Krazy and Ignatz. At a free picnic concert, the American Symphony Orchestra plays John Alden Carpenter’s “Krazy Kat: A Jazz Pantomime,” evoking the lovelorn feline and murderous mouse as they cavort through a score of ingenuous strings and slapstick horns. Reviewing the first performance, for Vanity Fair, in 1922, Deems Taylor wrote that he had “realized a little more clearly what ‘American’ means.” For Leon Botstein, the A.S.O.’s music director, “American” also means George Antheil’s prancing “Jazz Symphony” and the moody, teasing “Music for Small Orchestra,” by Ruth Crawford Seeger. The nineteen-twenties program, which includes additional pieces by Florence Price and by Aaron Copland, repeats at the Kupferberg Center for the Arts on Sept. 10.—Fergus McIntosh (Bryant Park; Sept. 7.)
Art Pop
The singer-songwriter Beck and the French indie-pop band Phoenix make an intriguing pair of defining art-pop acts. In 1994, Beck broke through with the twangy “Loser,” a folk-rap aberration that hinted at an experimental nature. In the years since, he expanded beyond hip-hop and alt-rock sampling, into mutations of funk rock, folk rock, R. & B., and trip-hop, with a career that culminated in a 2015 Grammy for Album of the Year. Phoenix, meanwhile, trafficked in a particularly beaming kind of pop rock throughout the two-thousands, peaking, in 2009, with the colorful “Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix.” After a detour into Italo disco, the band’s most recent album, “Alpha Zulu,” returns to familiar Phoenix delights: floating, lite yet sophisticated fun.—Sheldon Pearce (Madison Square Garden; Sept. 9.)
Dance
New York Theatre Ballet (pictured) also performs in the Kaatsbaan Fall Festival.Photograph by Rachel Neville
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