2026 Sundance Film Festival Short Film Tour, The SNF Parkway, 5 W. North Avenue, July 31, 7:30 p.m.
The Sundance Film Festival might have left Park City, but it is arriving July 31 at the Parkway with a program of six award-winning shorts from this year’s festival. Based on a New Yorker story, Stephen Neary’s animation “Living with a Visionary” plumbs the relationship between the mundane and the visionary as a husband enters the hallucinatory world his wife of half a century dwells in as a result of drugs to treat her advanced Parkinson’s. Arielle C. Knight’s “The Boys and the Bees,” explores the world of Black beekeeping in rural Georgia. Scripted shorts such as “Margan en el DF” and “Pankaja” bring us through Mexico City and Bangladesh as “Crisis Actor” and “Sauna Sickness” promise to push their protagonists to the limit despite their limited run time.
Ghais Guevara: The Kayfabe Reveal Tour, The Depot, 1728 N. Charles Street, August 2, 7 p.m.
The music on “The Other ⅖’s or: The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Trench Baby” is as sly, bold, and audaciously idiosyncratic as its title. In interviews, Philly rapper Ghais Guevara says his parents met when one was at a rally for MOVE and the other at an anti-death penalty rally, and you can hear that lineage on much of his catalogue, including early records like “BlackBolshevik,” “There Will Be No Super-Slave,” and the more recent records on Fat Possum, such as “The Other ⅖” and “Goytard Ibn Said,” and “Goyard and the Kayfabe Reveal,” all of whose fierce flow and demanding rhythms could definitely act as a soundtrack for hooking up with someone you meet at a protest.
With as much emphasis on philosophy as on politics and erotics, Guevara’s wordplay repays careful listening, but it’s the kind of music you can also just put on and groove with. Performing with Student 1 and Father Sokka (see Best Beats), this will be a banger.
Shakespeare Beyond Presents William Shakespeare’s “Romeo & Juliet,” various locations, July 31 to August 11, 7:30 p.m.
Like eating juicy tomatoes, red-to-the-rind watermelons, and steamed crabs, one of the great joys of summer is sitting on a blanket on the glowing green grass in one of the city’s beautiful parks watching Shakespeare. A couple years ago, we caught an inspired performance of “Midsummer Night’s Dream” with a Motown theme at Carroll Park and a hearty, multiracial, intergenerational crowd laughed and sang along with the comedy as “fairy” children blew bubbles in the wind. It was glorious.
Tragedy is a little trickier to pull off — it’s easier to have some fun laughing along with lightly mystical, romantic misadventures that ultimately end well than to feel catharsis at the spectacle of young lovers lying dead in the dirt as the sun sets and dirtbikes whine in the distance.
But to meet our absurd historical moment of this sadsack bisesquicentennial of a bedraggled and divided America — and, perhaps, to draft off the success of “Hamilton” — Chesapeake Shakespeare tackles that most well-known of tragedies, “Romeo and Juliet,” staged with the warring families cast as Patriots and Loyalists during the American revolution.
Wherefore art these performances? With a show at Wyman Park Dell (2929 N. Charles Street) on July 30, Federal Hill Park (300 Warren Avenue) on August 1, Patterson Park (27 S. Patterson Park Avenue) on August 8, and Druid Hill Park (2100 Liberty Heights Avenue) on August 11, you’ve got plenty of opportunities to sit spread out under the sky and watch Chesapeake Shakespeare’s spectacular troupe cross the stars.
“The Records and The Ruse” by Andrea Conte, the Voxel, 9 W. 25th Street, August 15 to 16
Some of us at the Beat were lucky enough to work with Marshall “Eddie” Conway at The Real News after he was released from more than four decades as a political prisoner. Conway, who was a member of the Baltimore Black Panther Party, was charged and convicted of killing a police officer in 1970 on some pretty shady evidence. Conway, insisting that he was framed, continued his political organizing in jail and was ultimately freed in 2012.
In 2023, Andrea Conte uncovered records about the role of the FBI’s COINTELPRO operations within the Baltimore Black Panther Party — and Conway’s case — in a story for Baltimore magazine. More recently, he has been working out a documentary theater experience to present and address the materials he has uncovered. If you don’t know Eddie Conway’s story, this is a chance to learn some Baltimore history while engaging with a new way to present it.