HOW I SPENT MY SUMMER
Labor Day is tomorrow and you’ve nothing to show for your summer except that nasty sunburn. But it’s not too late: if you catch the Museum of Fine Arts’ screening of Sergei Bondarchuk’s celebrated adaptation of
WAR AND PEACE, you can at least pretend you spent the past three months reading Tolstoy’s epic on the beach. It’s showing in four parts (10:15 am; 1:30 + 3:30 + 5 pm), a total of some seven hours — but it would take you longer than that to read the 1200-page book. Besides, Bondarchuk himself is a heart-rending Pierre, and few movies since Gone with the Wind can match this one for action (the Borodino sequences are flabbergasting) and romance. That’s in the MFA’s Remis Auditorium, 465 Huntington Ave, Boston | 617.267.9300 or
www.mfa.org.
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GOING INDYCompared with the summer blockbusters that have come and gone since it established the template (and that includes its most recent sequel), Steven Spielberg & George Lucas’s 1981
RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK now looks like a masterpiece of Hollywood filmmaking. But how close is Harrison Ford’s archæologist hero to the real thing? Boston University archæology professor Curtis N. Runnels will be on hand to introduce the film at this session of the Coolidge Corner Theatre’s “Science on Screen” series, so maybe he can clarify the whole whip-and-snakes business. The Coolidge is 290 Harvard St, Brookline | 7 pm | 617.734.2501 or
www.coolidge.org.
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WIKIPEDIA IRL?We don’t usually recommend walking tours of Boston to non-tourists, but Boston by Foot’s
“FRONT PAGE NEWS: EXPLORING 20TH CENTURY BOSTON” sounds pretty cool: a five-hour walk “through the 20th-century newspaper headlines of Boston . . . the places where the famous and infamous events took place that shaped a city and impacted the world.” Close out Wikipedia and check out the sites of the Cocoanut Grove fire, the Great Molasses Flood, and other notable events from not-so-ancient Hub history with your own eyes. Meeting place is outside the Boylston Street T station on the Green Line at 9:45 am | $15 | 617.367.2345 or
www.bostonbyfoot.org.
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PLAY DAY
It’s the wrong time of year for the Boston Theater Marathon, so how about a Lenox theater marathon? Shakespeare & Company makes today a labor day indeed as it fields its annual
STUDIO FESTIVAL OF PLAYS, a quick look at shows that may receive full production in the future. Between 11 am and 11 pm, you can see staged readings or workshop productions of J.T. Rogers’s White People, Pulitzer Prize winner John Patrick Shanley’s The Dreamer Examines His Pillow, Michael Elyanow’s The Children, German-bard-of-the-inarticulate Franz Xaver Kroetz’s Through the Leaves, and Sonia Pilcer’s The Holocaust Kid, which she adapted from her novel. Start carbo-loading for a day in Shakespeare & Company’s Elayne P. Bernstein Theatre, 70 Kemble St, Lenox | September 1 | $15 suggested donation per show; $60 suggested donation festival pass | 413.637.3353 or
www.shakespeare.org.
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CASE OF THE TUESDAYSWe gotta be honest: there isn’t much to do tonight, aside from wallowing in post–Labor Day depression. Maybe commiserating with a roomful of “post-hardcore” (read: emo) fans will prove therapeutic: freshly back from a two-year break, So-Cal faves
FINCH head a show with
FROM FIRST TO LAST, TICKLE ME PINK, and
OUR LAST NIGHT downstairs at the Middle East, 480 Mass Ave, Cambridge | 7:30 pm | $16 | 617.864.EAST or
www.mideastclub.com.
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GOING SOUL-OHaving shed the Wooden Wand handle — and most of the “freak” of that project’s folk — Tennessee-based singer-songwriter
JAMES JACKSON TOTH has embarked on a tour in support of his soulful solo debut, Waiting in Vain (Rykodisc). With the
DUTCHESS AND THE DUKE and
WRONG REASONS, he plays T.T. the Bear’s Place, 10 Brookline St, Cambridge | 9:05 pm | $10 | 617.492.BEAR or
www.ttthebears.com.
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ALL TOGETHER NOWIt’s September and the Sox could use a lift, so for their last Hatch Shell concert of the summer,
CHARLES ANSBACHER and the
BOSTON LANDMARKS ORCHESTRA are serving up
“RED SOX AND APPLE PIE,” with a mess of Leroy Anderson numbers including “The Typewriter Song,” “You’ve Gotta Have Heart” from Damn Yankees (Damn Rays? And what the devil happened to the “Devil” in Tampa Bay Devil Rays?), and a recitation of “Casey at the Bat” (“Mighty Manny has struck out”?). Red Sox Nation will gather on the Esplanade | 7 pm | 617.547.0079 or
www.landmarksorchestra.org.
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STAYING THIN
You might have thought that by 1944, 10 years after the first Thin Man movie, the franchise would be exhausted — especially since the actual thin man was not detective Nick Charles but Clyde Wynant, the murder victim in the original. In
THE THIN MAN GOES HOME, however, Nick (William Powell) is alive and well and headed back to Sycamore Springs — along with wife Nora (Myrna Loy) and lovable wire-haired fox terrier Asta (Asta) — to visit his parents and try to explain why he hasn’t become a doctor like his dad. He tells everyone he’s on holiday and not on a case, but that changes when a stranger rings the doorbell and then is shot just as Nick opens the door. Find out whether Asta solves this one before Nick at the South Boston Branch Library, 646 East Broadway, South Boston | 6 pm | free | 617.268.0180 or
www.bpl.org.
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PILFER THE PASTA
Satire collides with farce as Nora Theatre Company kicks off its first season in the new Central Square Theater with Nobel Laureate Dario Fo’s anarchic combination of I Love Lucy and socialist revolt,
WE WON’T PAY! WE WON’T PAY! Associate director Daniel Gidron is at the helm of the Italian playwright and clown’s 1974 work, in a translation by Fo expert Ron Jenkins that had its premiere at the American Repertory Theatre in 1999. The incendiary craziness centers on a couple of housewives storming the grocery store as a protest against out-of-the-control inflation. They just don’t want their volatile menfolk to find out about the stolen spaghetti. The CST is at 450 Mass Ave, Cambridge | September 4-28 | $32; $22 seniors, students | 866.811.4111 or
www.centralsquaretheater.org.
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HAPPY BIRTHDAY, FREDDIE
Freddie Mercury’s birthday is tomorrow, and to celebrate, the fat-bottomed girls (sorry, it’s impossible to resist) of
BIG MOVES have put together a killer Queen tribute show for the second year in a row. Joining Big Moves’ burlesque troupe Thick and belly-dance ensemble Caravan of Curves in
“QUEEN FOR A DAY 2” are all-female Queen cover band
GUNPOWDER GELATINE, the
BABES IN BOINKLAND burlesque troupe, and “drag cowboy rockstar clown nerd burlesqueboi circusfreak ringmaster bump n’ grind mustachioed sir/ma’am” JOHNNY BLAZES. That’s at Church, 69 Kilmarnock St, Boston | 9 pm | $10 | 617.869.2970 or
www.bigmoves.org.
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