Best Bets: Latin Wave, California Gold and Philly Soul

It’s the last weekend of April and as we move into May, one thing’s for sure: There’s still plenty to do all around Houston. Ten acclaimed films from Latin America and a beloved musical-turned-opera are just a couple of things that have made this week’s list of best bets. Keep reading for these and more.

Brazilian filmmaker Kleber Mendonça Filho’s “exhilarating” Pictures of Ghosts, a film that unfolds “at the crossroads of fiction and documentary” will open the 17th Annual Latin Wave: New Films from Latin America at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. The 2023 film – “a cleareyed, deeply personal and formally inspired rumination on life, death, family, movies and those complicated, invariably haunted places we call home” – will lead off the series at 5:30 p.m. on Thursday, April 25, and the series will continue with nine more films from Latin America set to be screened through Sunday, April 28. You can view the complete schedule, which includes films like Felipe Gálvez Haberle’s The Settlers and Lila Avilés’s Tótem, and a list of invited guests here. Tickets can be purchased to any of the screenings here for $8 to $10.

For the first time ever, Houston Grand Opera will stage Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein’s ever popular The Sound of Music, which will open at the Wortham Theater Center on Friday, April 26, at 7:30 p.m. Just as the 1959 musical, the opera’s book, by Howard Lindsay and Russel Crouse, tells the story of the Von Trapp family, whose lives are changed with the arrival of new governess Maria – all against the backdrop of an expanding Nazi Germany. Sung in English with projected English text, the co-production with The Glimmerglass Festival will be directed by Francesca Zambello with HGO’s own chorus director, Richard Bado, conducting. Performances will continue at 2 p.m. Sundays; 7:30 p.m. April 30, May 4 and May 10; and 1 and 7:30 p.m. May 11 through May 12. Tickets can be purchased here for $25 to $210.

On Friday, April 26, at 7:30 p.m. 4th Wall Theatre Company will open Florian Zeller’s The Father, a one-act play about a man with dementia. Elizabeth Bunch, member of the Alley Theatre‘s Resident Acting Company and director of 4th Wall’s production, recently told the Houston Press that “the structure of the play not only leaves you with doubts about the narrator but doubts as an audience member about what you’ve seen, about what is true and not true,” adding “that ultimately you have to understand the play with your heart instead of your mind.” Performances will continue at 7:30 p.m. Thursdays through Saturdays and May 6, 3 p.m. Sundays and 2:30 p.m. May 11 at Spring Street Studio through May 11. Tickets are available here for $25 to $60, with the Monday, May 6, performance being pay-what-you-will starting at $5 at the door and $10 online.

It was in March 1934 that composer Carl Orff chose 24 poems from “an anthology of medieval poetry in Latin” and framed them by “O Fortuna,” which is “a fatalistic chorus in praise of Fortune, the cruel goddess who brings both pleasure and suffering” and “the most famous part” of Orff’s resulting work Carmina burana. On Friday, April 26, at 8 p.m. the Houston Symphony will present Carmina burana, along with a world premiere by Jimmy López Bellido, at Jones Hall. The concert will also be performed on Saturday, April 27, at 8 p.m. and Sunday, April 28, at 2:30 p.m. Saturday night’s concert will also be livestreamed and access can be purchased here for $20. An additional performance at 2:30 p.m. Saturday, April 27, will feature Carmina burana only. Tickets to any of the in-hall concerts can be purchased here for $36 and $160.

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Houston Chamber Choir tackles the music of California composers during California Gold.

Photo by Jeff Grass

The through line of California Gold, the program Houston Chamber Choir will perform on Saturday, April 27, at 7:30 p.m. at South Main Baptist Church, is composers from the Sunshine State. The University of Houston’s Dr. Betsy Cook Weber will serve as guest conductor, leading the 24 musicians of the choir in works by Eric Whitacre, Morten Lauridsen and John Cage, as well as the choir’s first performance of Igor Stravinsky’s Mass. It was in “a secondhand store in Los Angeles in 1942 or 1943” that Stravinsky, who would become a U.S. citizen with his second wife Vera in 1945, found “some Masses of Mozart,” which he described as “rococo-operatic sweets-of-sin,” and decided write a mass of his own. Tickets can be purchased here for $10 to $45.

It’s the 50th anniversary of Kenneth Gamble and Leon Huff’s “T.S.O.P. (The Sound of Philadelphia),” an “anthem for Philadelphia” and “an entire era of Black art and culture” that also lends its “name to an influential musical phenomena.” On Saturday, April 27, at 8:15 p.m. you can hear Philadelphia soul – or, as James Brown’s trombonist Fred Wesley called it, “putting the bow tie on funk” – at Miller Outdoor Theatre during The Philly Soul Sound Vol. 4 produced by Community Music Center Houston. Two four-part harmony groups, one male and one female, will join the show to perform iconic songs like “Love Train” and “Me and Mrs. Jones.” The show is free, and you can get reserve your tickets here starting at 10 a.m. on Friday, April 26, or you can take a seat on the no-ticket-required Hill. 

The music of Bob Dylan and the writing of Irish playwright Conor McPherson comes together in Girl from the North Country, a Tony Award-winning musical that will open on Tuesday, April 30, at 7:30 p.m., courtesy of Broadway at the Hobby Center. Jennifer Blood, who plays matriarch and boarding house proprietor Elizabeth Laine in the show, recently told the Houston Press that it “is like nothing you’ve ever seen,” noting that though Dylan’s songs may not be overtly connected to the musical’s story, “there is something sort of magical and hard to understand about why it is so moving and beautiful.” Performances are scheduled for 7:30 p.m. Tuesday through Thursday, 8 p.m. Friday, 2 and 8 p.m. Saturday, and 1:30 and 7 p.m. Sunday through May 5 at the Hobby Center for the Performing Arts. Tickets can be purchased here for $35 to $95.