Tag: Japanese culture

It’s Eat an Extra Dessert Day, so consider stopping on your way to, or on your way home from, one of our best bets for a sweet treat. This week, we’ve got a ballet returning to Houston after 17 years, two classic film restorations, and much more. Keep reading for these and all our picks of the best things to check out this week.

Go down the path of an alternate history, one where the January 6th attack on the U.S. Capitol was ultimately successful. In this world, a white supremacist, Christian nationalist government rules, and a father and daughter, Jewish, are living in upstate New York, hiding their identity when a 1,000-year-old Yiddish-speaking woman shows up at their door. That’s the premise of Deborah Zoe Laufer’s The Last Yiddish Speaker, a co-production between Mildred’s Umbrella Theater Company and the Evelyn Rubenstein Jewish Community Center of Houston, which will open tonight, September 4, at 7:30 p.m. at the Evelyn Rubenstein JCC. Performances will continue at 7:30 p.m. Thursdays, 8 p.m. Saturdays, and 11 a.m. Sundays through September 21. Tickets can be purchased here for $18 to $29.

For the first time since 2008, Houston Ballet will stage Onegin, a three-act ballet, choreographed by John Cranko to music by Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky and based on Alexander Pushkin’s verse novel Eugene Onegin, at 7 p.m. Friday, September 5, at the Wortham Theater Center. Aaron Robison, who will be dancing the titular role of a man hit by karma after cruelly rejecting a young woman in the production, recently told the Houston Press he thinks the show is “quite relatable to many people” because “the characters in the story are very strong and complex” as is the idea that “people can change because of events that happen in life.” Performances are scheduled for 7:30 p.m. Friday, 7:30 p.m. Saturdays, and 2 p.m. Sundays through September 14. Tickets are available here for $25 to $170.

Before DACAMERA officially opens its 2025-26 season with Other Worlds: Season Overture next month, it will present the Isaiah J. Thompson Quartet at Miller Outdoor Theatre on Friday, September 5, at 8 p.m. Thompson, a Juilliard graduate who made his recording debut with the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra with Wynton Marsalis, recently released The Book of Isaiah: Modern Jazz Ministry, a suite of music he has said is about his “coming to faith.” Of recent concerts, he’s said, “I think if you’re interested in the potential of what God can do through music, can do through jazz, through modern jazz, I think it might be worth you considering to come hear us.” The performance is free, and you can reserve a ticket here starting at 10 a.m. today, September 4. Or you can sit on the Hill – no ticket required.

Thirty-five years ago, in July 1990, Houston played host to the 16th G7 Summit, attended by then Japanese Prime Minister Toshiki Kaifu, who participated in the unveiling of a model for the Japanese Garden in Hermann Park. He also gifted funds to construct a garden pavilion, or azumaya. On Saturday, September 6, from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m., Japan Festival Houston will honor this history when it returns to Hermann Park for two days of Japanese food, cultural exhibits, family-friendly activities, martial arts demonstrations, cosplay, and traditional and contemporary performances, including two performances by alumni from Takarazuka, an all-female musical theatre troupe – one on Saturday, September 6, at 8 p.m. at Miller Outdoor Theatre. The free festival will continue Sunday, September 7, from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m.

There are numerous anecdotes about the release of Charlie Chaplin’s The Gold Rush in 1925: Ten minutes of “uninterrupted audience laughter” broadcast by BBC Radio when the film premiered in England. A demand to “rewind the film and screen an encore” in Berlin after the audience viewed “the film’s now-iconic ‘dance of the rolls’ sequence.” This year, the film, “the highest-grossing silent comedy in history,” received a 4K restoration in honor of its centenary that made its world premiere at the Cannes Film Festival. On Saturday, September 6, at 7 p.m., you can catch Chaplin’s Little Tramp in 4K on the big screen at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. If you can’t make it, the film will be screened a second time on Sunday, September 7, at 5 p.m. Tickets to either screening can be purchased here for $7 to $9.

The story goes that “his first glimpse of the New York skyline” inspired Fritz Lang to make his 1927 film Metropolis, a “hallucinatory” film thought to be “the first great science-fiction film” and “a seminal prediction of a megacity where the masses work as slaves for the good of a ruling elite.” In 1998, Roger Ebert declared that “few films have ever been more visually exhilarating,” and on Saturday, September 6, at 7 p.m., you can view a restoration of the film with an original score – featuring classical, metal, dance, and other elements – performed live by an Austin-based composer and multi-instrumentalist during The Complete Metropolis Live Score with David DiDonato at River Oaks Theatre. Tickets to the screening can be purchased here for $21.

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and the Haydn brothers, Franz Joseph and his younger brother Michael, were not only contemporaries, but at times neighbors, friends, collaborators, and rivals; Michael Haydn was once Mozart’s chief competition for the job of organist at one of Salzburg’s largest churches. Considering their intertwined lives, Houston Chamber Choir will open its season, its first conducted by new Artistic Director Dr. Betsy Cook Weber, at St. Luke’s United Methodist Church on Saturday, September 6, at 7:30 p.m. with Mozart Requiem, a program set to feature all three composers. During the concert, featuring members of the Houston Symphony, Mozart’s titular piece will be bookended by works by the Haydns: Franz Joseph Haydn’s Te Deum, which will open the program, and “Exsurge” from Michael Haydn’s cantata Applausus, which will close it. Tickets are available here for $10 to $50.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie will return to Houston on Monday, September 8, at 7:30 p.m. to open the 2025/2026 Inprint Margarett Root Brown Reading Series at the Wortham Theater Center with a reading from Dream Count, the Nigerian-born author’s first novel since 2013’s Americanah. Despite the passing decade, The Guardian deemed it “worth the wait,” calling the novel, “built around the friendship of three Nigerian women whose lives haven’t panned out as imagined with respect to marriage and motherhood,” almost “four novels for the price of one” and “a big book, richly marbled with criss-crossing storylines.” Following the reading, Adichie will join Rice University Assistant Professor of English Ragini Tharoor Srinivasan in conversation and end the evening with a book sale and signing. Tickets for the reading can be purchased here for $6.50.