Best of the Week: Our Picks for September 28-October 2, 2015

Welcome to Best of the Day, our recommendations for what to check out around town this week. If you’re wondering what to do in Boston this week, check out these events.

Crumb movie poster

FILM
Monday, September 28
Crumb

So you wanna be an artist? This fall’s installment of ArtWeek Boston gives you plenty of ways to do just that—but before you do that, maybe you should take a moment to get a sense of what being an artist is really like. For that, look no further than 1994’s Crumb, a glass-bottom-boat tour of the febrile mind and fertile imagination of underground comix legend R. Crumb, creator of Fritz the Cat and other ‘60s counterculture sensations. Before director Terry Zwigoff made Ghost World, he first trained his lens on Crumb (as well as Crumb’s profoundly eccentric family), painting an unprecedentedly vivid portrait of an artist already known for spilling his guts to the masses through his hallucinatory pen-and-ink drawings. This ArtWeek-aligned film screens at the Coolidge this Monday.

$9.25-$11.25, September 28, 7 p.m., Coolidge Corner Theatre, 290 Harvard St., Brookline, 617-734-2500, coolidge.org.

Rodgers & Hammerstein’s Cinderella / Courtesy photo

THEATER
Tuesday, September 29
Rodgers + Hammerstein’s Cinderella Opens

Shapeshifting trees, transmogrifying gourds, presto-change-o dresses—telling the tale of CInderella for a live audience requires a whole lotta stagecraft magic. Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II, titans of such mid-century theater hits as South Pacific and The Sound of Music, found this out in 1957, when they first staged their production of Cinderella starring Julie Andrews for TV audiences. Half a century later, playwright Douglas Carter Beane dusted off that old glass slipper to give the show its Broadway debut, which the New Yorker deemed “eye-poppingly opulent.” Now Rodgers + Hammerstein’s Cinderella graces the fittingly magnificent Boston Opera House. See it while you can—this show turns into a pumpkin on October 11.

$40-$125, September 29–October 11, Boston Opera House, 539 Washington St., Boston, 617-259-3400, boston.broadway.com.

Bravo Bar / Courtesy photo by Chuck Choi

DINING
Wednesday, September 30
Jeremy Sewall Dinner at Bravo

Lord knows it’s tough to squeeze into the uber-popular Row 34, the Fort Point oyster-and-beer bar whose appointment book is always full (and for good reason). But tonight, you can get some facetime with Row 34/Island Creek Oyster Bar chef Jeremy Sewall—not to mention his divine bivalves. This week, Sewall heads to the MFA, where he teams up with Bravo executive chef Brian Flagg for a four-course dinner featuring autumnal offerings adapted from Sewall’s James Beard Award-nominated cookbook, The New England Kitchen: Fresh Takes on Seasonal Recipes. On the menu: Island Creek oysters, snapper ceviche, roasted local tomato soup, and lobster crepes with smoked salmon caviar—and those are just the hors d’oeuvres.

$140 per person ($120 for MFA members), September 30, 7 p.m., Bravo Restaurant, Linde Family Wing for Contemporary Art, Museum of Fine Arts, 465 Huntington Ave., Boston, 617-267-9300, mfa.org.

Kansas City Choir Boy / Courtesy photo by Cory Weaver

THEATER
Thursday, October 1
Kansas City Choir Boy Opens

Courtney Love has enjoyed a quarter-century reign as a diva—so, really, it was only a matter of time before she ended up in an opera. This October, she co-stars in avant-garde opera Kansas City Choir Boy, appearing at Oberon alongside the decorated playwright and songwriter Todd Almond. The show (which premiered in New York earlier this year) is a murder mystery told in flashback, described alternately as “a theatricalized concept album about love altered by unexpected fate” and “a love song for the computer age and a product of the 24-hour news cycle.” Gracing a stage already devoted to weekly displays of bacchanalia, Love plays Athena, the protagonist’s long-lost teenage love and muse.

$20-$80, October 1-10, Oberon, 2 Arrow St., Cambridge, 617-547-8300, americanrepertorytheater.org.

Poster for Boston Lyric Opera’s La Boheme

OPERA
Friday, October 2
La Bohème Opens

Giacomo Puccini’s 1896 masterpiece La Bohème, a portrait of young bohemians living in Paris’s Latin Quarter, seems to lend itself to modern reworkings: In the ‘90s, Jonathan Larson turned it into the musical Rent. And now, the Boston Lyric Opera opens its fall season by setting this tale of struggling young French artists against the backdrop of the Paris student riots of 1968. Starring soprano Kelly Kaduce as Mimi and tenor Jesus Garcia as Rodolfo (a role he also played on Broadway for Baz Luhrmann’s staging), the production draws heavily from French New Wave cinema, transporting “one of the world’s greatest love stories to a mythological Paris, fueled by sexual liberation, intense passion, and burning idealism.”

$25+, October 2-11, Citi Shubert Theatre, 265 Tremont St., Boston, 617-482-9393, blo.org.