SATURDAY-JAN.22
Films from India offered at museum
The Honolulu Museum of Art celebrates the buoyancy of Bollywood with the annual Bollywood Film Festival, starting Saturday through Jan. 22. The festival, now in its 10th year, will screen nine films, ranging from traditional dance musicals to romantic comedies to crime procedurals.
Opening night Saturday, which includes a reception with Indian food by India Cafe and a performance by Bollywood dance troupe Aaja Nachle Hawaii, features the coming-of-age film “Dear Zindagi,” a story about a promising filmmaker forced to relocate to her family home in Goa, where a meeting with an eccentric psychologist sends her into a voyage of self-discovery. “This is a movie that drops quotations from Faulkner and Einstein, but it rarely feels pedantic or platitudinous,” wrote The New York Times. The film also screens at 1 p.m. Sunday and 1 and 7 p.m. Tuesday.
Other highlights:
“Baar Baar Dekho” (pictured): A mathematician marries his “perfect” girlfriend but then travels into the future and sees turbulent times for them, forcing him to travel back in time to fix things before they happen. Screens at 1 p.m. Thursday and 7 p.m. Jan. 13 and 14.
“Shivaay”: This action-adventure movie is about a mountaineer whose belief in the Hindu deity Shiva (aka the Destroyer) is tested when his daughter is kidnapped. His idol seems to come to life within him as he battles to save her. Screens at 1 p.m. Jan. 20 and 21.
“Sultan”: Bollywood’s turn to sports as the setting for movies was inevitable. “Sultan” was one of the most popular in the genre this year, telling the story of two wrestlers whose dreams of glory clash and coalesce when they fall in love. Screens at 7 p.m. Jan. 20 and 21.
Also join in closing-night festivities at 6 p.m. Jan. 22, when Aaja Nachle Hawaii will give a full-length performance.
>> honolulumuseum.org or 532-6097
FRIDAY-SUNDAY
Symphony gets busy on ‘Potter’ and Barber
The Hawai‘i Symphony Orchestra makes magic with a double-duty shift this weekend in three concerts, performing two separate programs.
Friday and Saturday the orchestra will provide the accompaniment to “Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone,” the origin film of the popular franchise. Led by Australian maestro Nicholas Buc, acclaimed for conducting film scores, the orchestra will play as the movie is screened in high definition above the stage.
On Sunday the symphony presents the Masterworks concert “Made in America.” Symphony Artistic Director JoAnn Falletta, pictured, will present American composers in all their moods, from the lovely “The School for Scandal” overture, by Samuel Barber, to the eerie “Phantasmagoria,” by John Corigliano, and the energetic symphonic dances from Leonard Bernstein’s “West Side Story.”
Noted pianist William Wolfram, who gave a lovely rendition of Beethoven as a last-minute substitute in a 2012 concert, will perform the jazzy Concerto in F by Gershwin, a composition good enough to show that his “Rhapsody in Blue” was no flash in the pan.
>> ticketmaster.com or 800-745- 3000
JAN. 12-13
Young the Giant
Young the Giant, an alternative-indie band from Southern California, brings its mostly acoustic sound and moody lyrics to The Republik for two performances starting Thursday.
Frontman Sameer Gadhia comes from a family of musicians trained in Indian classical music. Enticed by the passions of indie rock, he abandoned his premed studies at Stanford to put together a band made up of friends and fellow travelers who’ve known each other since childhood. Many of his band-mates — Jacob Tilley, Eric Cannata, Payam Doostzadeh and Francois Comtois — play acoustic guitar, giving their sound an organic quality echoed in the band’s videos, which often depict the band surrounded by nature. Their songs often take on a world-weary, melancholy tone, as represented by songs like “Nothing’s Over.”
The band can take a harder edge as well, as in the title track of their latest album, “Home of the Strange,” released in August, which peaked at No. 12 on the Billboard 200.
With the album’s release, the band showed off its determination to connect with fans by putting out a series of behind-the-scenes videos, illustrations and missives from members, explaining just what Young the Giant was trying to accomplish. “Titus,” a song and a character, is the young boy, “giant in his capacity for wonder and optimism,” that the band envisioned in telling its musical stories. Over the course of the album, he encounters the highs and lows of life in “Amerika,” a song based on an unfinished Kafka novel. The story reaches its peak — of popularity, at least — in the band’s high-energy hit “Something to Believe In.”
>> seetickets.us or 941- 7469
JAN. 12-JAN. 15
Fringe festival offers arts smorgasbord downtown
Oahu Fringe Festival returns Jan. 12 for four days of original performance art.
The festival, now in its fifth year, will present 13 short programs at four Chinatown venues. The programs are timed so that visitors can stay in one venue or change locations as they please.
Festival organizer Misa Sione promises a unique collection of works, from music, theater and dance to improv, burlesque and puppetry. “To me that’s the beauty of it,” he said. “Anybody can join.”
Sione describes one of the programs, “Thin Skin,” pictured, as “an exploration of the layers we put on and take off over the course of a lifetime.” “When you go inside the venue, the whole studio is part of the performance,” Sione said. “The work that they’ve put there comes to life, so the space is part of the performance.” The show will be staged at Studio 114 at 7:30 and 9 p.m. from Thursday through Jan. 14.
Another program, “Game of Thrones: The Musical,” by the Minnesota-based Really Spicy Opera, has ties to Hawaii. Basil Considine, artistic director and founder of the company, has relatives in Hawaii and has visited the islands many times. His show won several theater awards in the Twin Cities and is described as “a massively inappropriate children’s show featuring vocabulary lessons, spoilers, incest, moral lessons, betrayal and terrible puppet-on-puppet violence.” Check it out at 9 p.m. at Nextdoor from Thursday through Jan. 14.
>> oahufringe.com or 550-8457
— Steven Mark
