MUSIC
Mission of Burma Jonah Parzen-Johnson FESTIVALS
Baltimore Avenue Dollar Stroll TALKS
Stolen, Smuggled, Sold: On the Hunt for Cultural Treasures MOVIES
‘Tangerine’ ‘The Last Man on Earth’ ART
Legendary: Inside the House Ballroom Scene Matthew Hall: Fragments COMEDY
Alex Strang’s Movie Plotz DANCE
Leaps of Faith and Other Mistakes Supper, People on the Move THEATER
Hands Up: 6 Playwrights, 6 Testaments
Thursday, 8 p.m.
Boot and Saddle
1131 S. Broad St.
$15, 21+, 877-987-6487
www.ticketfly.com
Every year, the art-punk noise-pop squall of Mission of Burma seems to have been more and more influential on subsequent alternative rock. Of the many classic ’80s and ’90s indie band reunions in the last decade, theirs has been one of the most surprising and productive, with four new albums under their belt since 2004, all maintaining the quality of their legendary 1982 debut.
Saturday, 7 p.m.
First Banana
2152 E. Dauphin St.
$7, 917-488-2612
www.facebook.com/TheFirstBanana
Jonah Parzen-Johnson is a Brooklyn-based saxophone and synth player who makes all his sounds by himself. His songs tend to start with a lone, searching sax solo like one you might hear from a street performer. Then the keyboards come in, transforming the song into minimalist electronica. It’s rare to hear a sax in this context; after hearing Parzen-Johnson, you’ll wonder why.
Thursday, 5:30 p.m. to 8:30 p.m.
Baltimore Ave. between 43rd and 51st St.
Free, 215-243-0555
www.universitycity.org
It seems like you can barely get anything for just a dollar anymore, but that changes this evening, when local businesses will be offering all kinds of stuff for a lone buck —everything from food to gaming supplies to a two-minute martial arts lesson. There’s also a diverse selection of live music, jugglers (including fire jugglers), family-friendly entertainment, Polynesian dancing and other delights.
Thursday, 5:30 p.m.
Athenaeum of Philadelphia
219 S. Sixth St.
$10, 215-925-2688
www.philaathenaeum.org
Nancy Moses will deliver this lecture on lost and found cultural treasures like Gustav Klimt’s “Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer,” taken by the Nazis and not returned to Bauer’s family until 2006. That’s one of her more famous examples, but many others are less remembered, such as the theft of 4800 historical audio discs from the National Archives — an inside job, as it happens.
Thursday, 7:30 p.m.
Roxy Theater
2035 Sansom St.
$9-$10, 267-239-2941
www.filmadelphia.org
When transgender prostitute Sin-Dee reveals to her best friend and fellow transgender prostitute Alexandra that her pimp has been cheating on her with a cisgender woman while she’s been in prison, Alexandra vows revenge. Director Sean S. Baker’s creative impetus for comedy-drama was a Los Angeles doughnut shop. That’s an artist for you —usually those places just inspire us to eat doughnuts.
Saturday, 9 p.m.
Laurel Hill Cemetery
3822 Ridge Ave.
$10, 215-228-8200
laurel-hill-cemetery.mybigcommerce.com
Philadelphia Film Society has its “Graveyard Shift” series, but only Laurel Hill Cemetery shows movies in an actual graveyard. This year they present this 1964 Vincent Price film about, well, the last man on earth: The only holdout after a vampire apocalypse. It shares same source material (a Richard Matheson story) as the 2007 Will Smith vehicle “I Am Legend.”
Through Aug. 16
The African American Museum in Philadelphia
701 Arch St.
$10-$14, 215-574-0380
www.aampmuseum.org
This exhibit features photography by Gerard Gaskin, documenting the “house balls” of the black and Latino LGBT community — essentially costume/dancing competitions, sometimes gender-bending, sometimes not, usually held in DIY venues. Gaskin himself has never been a member of the scene, but he’s been shooting it for two decades, fascinated by the creativity and power of its participants’ self-expression.
Through Sunday
3rd Street Gallery
45 N. Second St.
Free, 215-625-0993
www.3rdstreetgallery.com
Local artist Matthew Hall imbues these pen-and-ink drawings with a tantalizing sense of narrative. We don’t know the whole story, and that’s just how Hall wants it, because he’s interested in what his viewer might infer from limited information. The show’s title brings to mind the fascination with the fragment that gripped both the Romantic poets and their successors, the Modernists.
Friday, 10:30 p.m.
Adrienne Theater
2030 Sansom St.
$10-$12, 267-233-1556
phillyimprovtheater.ticketleap.com
Game developer Alex Strang joins the Philly Improv Theater for this show, in which the performers, split into two teams, will take suggestions from the audience and create a pitch for a film, complete with a trailer, right on the spot — and unlike with this year’s slapped-together summer blockbusters, the results will be intentionally funny.
Through Sunday
Fleisher Art Memorial
719 Catharine St.
$15, 800-838-3006
almanac.brownpapertickets.com
Almanac Dance Circus Theater presents this outdoor show, mixing dance with circus acrobatics and theater. They describe it as “an absurd and contemplative tapestry of sublime human idiocy, isolationist seafarer cults and the kinds of people that devote their lives to becoming acrobats.” Eccentric? Perhaps, but the four heroes’ high-flying stunts should speak well enough for themselves.
Thursday through Sunday
Crane Arts Community Space
1400 N. American St.
$15-$20, cardellsilvana@yahoo.com
supper.ticketleap.com
Cardell Dance Theater performs this work by director Silvana Cardell, exploring the experiences of dislocation and migration — always a prescient theme in American life, with its ever-boiling melting pot. Cardell is herself an Argentine immigrant, and drew on her own experience as well as those of others to create this piece, illustrating both the internal and external senses of movement.
Through Sunday
Caplan Studio Theater
211 S. Broad St.
$22-$25, 215-997-3312
flashpoint.ticketleap.com
While there’s no solid evidence that Michael Brown ever said “Hands up, don’t shoot” before he was fatally shot by police, the phrase has become a rallying cry against police violence in America. For this show, six black playwrights offer their unique perspectives on a world in which, in the words of Flashpoint Theatre Company, “police violence is expected and commonplace.”
12 things to do in Philadelphia this weekend
Jenna Spitz
