THEATER
Jesse McKinley
The fall Broadway season has already taken on a slightly bizarre glow, what with the surprisingly bad reviews for the normally reliable Richard Greenberg, whose new play, "A Naked Girl on the Appian Way," was whomped by critics.
The seasonal sense of the absurd should be heightened this week with the opening of ALAN AYCKBOURN's 1972 farce called, well, "ABSURD PERSON SINGULAR." The revival, mounted by the MANHATTAN THEATER CLUB, has a bunch of solid actors whose names you probably know - PAXTON WHITEHEAD, ALAN RUCK, MIREILLE ENOS - but can't place. (The original Broadway production, which ran for a year and a half, featured Geraldine Page, Richard Kiley and Tony Roberts, among others.) For Mr. Ayckbourn, who seems to write a new play every hour or so, "Absurd" will be his first foray on Broadway since the short-lived musical "By Jeeves" in 2001. This time he is assured a decent run; the nonprofit theater club has penciled in his cocktail-party comedy for at least 12 weeks. Opens on Tuesday at the Biltmore Theater, 261 West 47th Street, (212) 239-6200.
Farther afield, at the Connelly Theater in the East Village, the reliably adventurous TRANSPORT GROUP is also pushing the envelope with "NORMAL," a musical about a somewhat unpalatable topic: eating disorders. The show, coming on the heels of the group's acclaimed 2004 musical revival, "First Lady Suite," has a cast of seven Broadway-tested singers and is based on the true story of Yvonne Adrian, the librettist (along with Cheryl Stern), who danced in Elvis Presley movies and whose daughter battled anorexia. Performances start Thursday at the Connelly Theater, 220 East Fourth Street, (212) 352-3101.
FILM
Manohla Dargis
Given the deplorable state of foreign-film distribution in this country, even dedicated moviegoers rarely get the opportunity to explore Chinese cinema in its full measure, to look beyond Johnny To's exploding squibs and Wong Kar-wai's deliriously beautiful mise-en-scène. This year marks the 100th anniversary of the first Chinese films, and the FILM SOCIETY OF LINCOLN CENTER is doing its part to celebrate the occasion and open up the archives with the 33-title program "A CENTENARY OF CHINESE CINEMA." The splendor of Chinese cinema - or, more precisely, the often interdependent cinemas of the mainland, Hong Kong and Taiwan - means that this series does little more than, as the program notes readily admit, scratch the surface of the topic.
To that self-limiting end, this series includes only titles produced in Shanghai, once known as the Hollywood of the East, before the revolution and after it in the People's Republic. Even so, there are treasures to be unearthed here, including "SPRINGTIME IN A SMALL TOWN" (1948), a delicate chamber piece about a woman, her husband and a former lover directed by FEI MU and remade more than a half century later by TIAN ZHUANGZHUANG, the greatest filmmaker of China's so-called Fifth Generation. Both films are on the program, although, alas, not on a double bill. The series begins Friday and runs through Nov. 10 at the Walter Reade Theater, 165 West 65th Street, Lincoln Center, (212) 875-5600.
Mr. Tian is also the focus of a related program, currently at the CHINA INSTITUTE, that includes a presentation (on VHS) of his magnificent Tibetan neo-western, "THE HORSE THIEF" (1988). Friday, 6:30 and 9:30 p.m., 125 East 65th Street, Manhattan, (212) 744-8181.
TELEVISION
Kate Aurthur
Funny white man alert: "THE COLBERT REPORT" makes its debut this week (COMEDY CENTRAL, Monday at 11:30 p.m.), taking the half-hour spot after its progenitor, "The Daily Show." Stephen Colbert will aim his arched left eyebrow at satirizing Fox News's "O'Reilly Factor," applying the same bullheaded bluster to analyzing current events that he perfected during his years with Jon Stewart on "The Daily Show."
Girls compete for a college scholarship, as well as an internship at Seventeen magazine, in a contest adjudicated by ATOOSA RUBENSTEIN, the magazine's youthful and culture-savvy editor. From the teaser clips, "MISS SEVENTEEN" (Monday at 10:30 p.m.) looks like MTV's next addictive reality show. Ms. Rubenstein gives them assignments, à la "The Apprentice," but she also gets to spy on the stylish aspirants when they don't know anyone is watching. How evil. "I don't want to be affiliated with a house of liars," one says tearfully in the trailer. How excellent.
In a different kind of costume drama, BBC AMERICA will broadcast the American premiere of "BYRON" (Saturday at 9), a 2003 biopic. JONNY LEE MILLER (Sick Boy from "Trainspotting") plays the saucy, sodomizing poet, whose dissolute lifestyle and enduring love for his half-sister (NATASHA LITTLE) are engagingly dramatized here. Also on BBC America is a marathon of the Season 2 episodes of "LITTLE BRITAIN" (Sunday, beginning at 2 p.m.), the sketch comedy show that hasn't lived up to the hype - it's not the next "Office" - but whose broad gross-out humor is funny nonetheless.
In "A WALK IN YOUR SHOES: KATRINA'S AFTERMATH" (THE N, Tuesday at 9 p.m.), the serious-minded teenage documentary series abandons its usual format of two kids swapping lives. Instead, it follows a day in the lives of five high schoolers from Metairie, La., 10 days after the hurricane decimated their homes and displaced them.
DANCE
Jennifer Dunning
AMERICAN BALLET THEATER always seems peculiarly at home at City Center, where the company opens its fall season on Wednesday at 7 p.m. So much American dance history has occurred in this smallish theater. There is an intimate feel to the repertory danced there. And the range of styles and eras of the first week's works is impressive.
A revival of Jerome Robbins's 1953 "Afternoon of a Faun" is the first ballet of the opening-night gala, with JULIE KENT and ETHAN STIEFEL dancing the self-absorbed young ballet students. The little cowgirl, danced by ERICA CORNEJO, will once again put on a dress in Agnes de Mille's 1942 "Rodeo." MARK MORRIS's iridescent "Gong" says much about the complex stew of ingredients that is dance today. The next night's highlight is a world premiere, "Kaleidoscope," by PETER QUANZ. And "The Green Table," a powerful antiwar ballet by KURT JOOSS, has its company premiere on Friday. 131 West 55th Street, Manhattan, www.abt.org or (212) 581-1212.
Exploration of the fascinating Japanese dance-theater form known as Butoh continues this week and next in the Second Biennial New York Butoh Festival at three Manhattan theaters. In addition to dance and music programs, workshops and a discussion, Butoh films are being screened on Sunday at 3:45, 6 and 8:30 p.m. at Anthology Film Archives, two of them about KAZUO OHNO, a founder of the form. 32 Second Avenue at Second Street, East Village, www.CAVEartspace.org or (212) 561-9539.
The modern-dance choreographer SAAR HARARI has drawn on physical instincts honed during his years as a commanding officer of a special combat unit of the Israeli army to create "Herd of Bulls," a world premiere that opens on Tuesday at 8 p.m. for a one-week run at P.S. 122. 150 First Avenue, at Ninth Street, East Village, www.ps122.org or (212) 352-3101.
CLASSICAL MUSIC
Allan Kozinn
You know the music season has kicked fully into gear when the choices, night by night, become more difficult. On Thursday, for example, two promising piano concerts beckon: the French pianist PIERRE-LAURENT AIMARD plays the Boulez First Sonata and what looks like a delicious and evocative selection of works by Debussy, Ravel and Schumann (8 p.m., Carnegie Hall, 212-247-7800). But the same night, Miller Theater offers almost irresistible competition: as part of the hall's important Composer Portraits series, URSULA OPPENS and MARILYN NONKEN are sharing a program of piano music by Frederic Rzewski, including his extraordinary set of variations on "The People United Will Never Be Defeated!" and a new one on an Irish antiwar melody, "Bring Them Home" (8 p.m., Broadway and 116th Street, 212-854-7799). This afternoon, early-music fans will want to catch the medieval-music specialists SEQUENTIA in "Lost Songs of a Rhineland Harper," a program of 10th- and 11th-century songs, at Music Before 1800 (4 p.m., Corpus Christi Church, 529 West 121st Street, Morningside Heights, 212-666-9266). Baroque opera and oratorio have been the great Italian mezzo-soprano CECILIA BARTOLI's passion in recent years, and she will be singing a program based on her latest recording, "Opera Proibita" (Wednesday at 8 p.m., Carnegie Hall).
Some great orchestras are pulling into New York as well. FRANZ WELSER-MÖST leads the Cleveland Orchestra in the Brahms First Symphony and Academic Festival Overture, as well as the New York premiere of "Si Ji" ("Four Seasons") by Chen Yi. (Monday at 8 p.m., Carnegie Hall). And the Royal Stockholm Philharmonic, with ALAN GILBERT on the podium and the mezzo-soprano ANNE SOFIE VON OTTER as his soloist, offers a hefty program devoted partly to Scandinavian works - music by Stenhammar, Sibelius, Alfven and others - and partly to the Mahler Fifth (Saturday at 8 p.m., Carnegie Hall).
POP/JAZZ
Jon Pareles
Rock's minimum daily requirement of irony has been dropping steadily. Unabashed, unguarded emotion is back in style: not just in pop, but from punky emo to arena rock.
THE FRAMES, an Irish band that has released one of the year's best albums, "Burn the Maps" (Anti), returns to New York this week. Their songs are craggy, pensive chronicles of love and loss; GLEN HANSARD, the band's singer and main songwriter, sounds more desolate than heroic as songs build a bleak grandeur around him. Onstage, the Frames have something extra: the Irish charm that lets them crack jokes between songs, then return to soul-baring drama. Sharing the bill is JOSH RITTER, who's not afraid to echo early Bob Dylan. His scruffy voice and folky, three-chord songs tell stories and conjure expansive, openhearted romance. Sunday at 8 p.m. Irving Plaza, 17 Irving Place, (212) 777-6800; $20.
DEATH CAB FOR CUTIE revolves around BEN GIBBARD's breathy, fragile voice and equally fragile heart. His songs can be impressionistic webs of metaphor or barefaced confessions, with titles like "I Will Follow You Into the Dark"; they might start with acoustic strumming, but they soon swell around him. Sharing the bill on Thursday is STARS, a band from Montreal that turns he-said, she-said battles into rich, jingling pop. Wednesday and Thursday at 6:30 p.m., Hammerstein Ballroom, 311 West 34th Street, Manhattan, (212) 777-1224, $25.50.
ART/ARCHITECTURE
Nicolai Ouroussoff
Architecture - serene or scary - is a big theme in New York this week. The METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART makes a rare venture into the field on Tuesday with "SANTIAGO CALATRAVA: SCULPTURE INTO ARCHITECTURE," a show of artworks and architectural designs by the Spanish maestro. Mr. Calatrava, who just witnessed the groundbreaking for his birdlike glass and steel transportation hub at ground zero, is known for creating buildings whose skeletal forms evoke living organisms: a pair of brises-soleil, for example, lift like elegant wings, or a bowed roof suggests a gigantic eye. His sculptures demonstrate that such works are more than metaphors; they are rooted in an exquisite understanding of materials and structure. Fifth Avenue and 82nd Street, (212) 535-7710.
"SAFE: DESIGN TAKES ON RISKS," opening on Sunday at the MUSEUM OF MODERN ART, explores the darker side of design with an eclectic mix of objects created to protect us from an increasingly terrifying world and our inner sense of dread. Among the objects on view are a refugee shelter and boots designed for marching through a minefield, as well as more commonplace objects like baby strollers. Though alluring, such items suggest a society that is armoring itself for Armageddon. 11 West 53rd Street, (212) 708-9400.
But for those seeking a more liberating experience - indeed, a spirit of all-out abandon - the most anticipated show may be "TROPICALIA: A REVOLUTION IN BRAZILIAN CULTURE," opening on Saturday at the MUSEUM OF CONTEMPORARY ART in Chicago. The show, which includes diverse works by the artist Hélio Oiticica, the pop singer Caetano Veloso and the Italian-born architect Lina Bo Bardi, documents the delirious creative explosion that Brazil experienced before the crackdown by a military dictatorship in the early 1970's. 220 East Chicago Avenue, (312) 280-2660.