 The New Orleans Museum of Art (NOMA) presents a new film series, in collaboration with award-winning producer and filmmaker Meryl Poster. Each film screening at NOMA will be accompanied by a conversation with Poster and other leading figures. Discussions will draw connections to art more broadly and celebrate cinema as an essential art form.
The museum kicks off the series on Wednesday, May 21, with a screening of director Anthony Minghella’s The Talented Mr. Ripley (1999) followed by a conversation with actor Jude Law and producer Meryl Poster. Full schedule:
A limited number of tickets are available for each screening. Tickets are $10 for NOMA members and $15 for the general public. More information is available at noma.org/producerschoice. 
The cast of Doubt: A Parable @ Le Petit Theatre (photo: Brittney Werner)
Doubt: A Parable @ Le Petit Theater Review by David Lewis When Doubt: A Parable debuted on Broadway in 2005 it immediately won four Tonys and the Pulitzer, which seems like a striking feat for a four-character one-act play about suspected sexual abuse by a Catholic priest. John Patrick Shanley’s examination of a New York catholic school navigating the possible misdeeds of an affable young priest chose for setting and environment an incredibly loaded situation, but the play isn’t entirely “about” the high-stakes situation it tees up, but rather the dire processes behind the internal decisions faced by its four characters. When principal Sister Aloysius, deeply mistrustful of both the secular and the overly informal, fences with Father Brendan Flynn over her suspicions about his conduct, we wonder whether her struggle is actually more with her own faith. Actor Leslie Nipkow finds humor in the character, delivering some of the nun’s most acerbic lines with wicked timing, but also seems to establish herself with the eager and optimistic younger nun Sister James such as to remind you that “grooming” isn’t limited to sinister priests or male abusers. Elizabeth McCoy’s Sister James slowly unravels under the constant accusations and cynicism of her superior, until the shell that’s left is almost identifiable as a younger Aloysius. If there’s a close but reluctant alliance between the two nuns, the distant alliance of actors David Lind and Queen Shereen Macklin is more haunting and complex. Lind plays Father Flynn, the priest accused of abusing the school’s only African American student; Macklin portrays the boy’s mother, Mrs. Muller. Although the two won’t share a scene, they together explore complicity and deniability, two actors giving strangely corresponding performances, both characters with shockingly parallel agency. Macklin’s Mrs. Muller reminds me of the Greek chorus: it’s the most passive role of the four. These things are happening to her and her family, but we’re still never given the option to acquit her. Like the chorus, she in this way provides the most direct bridge to the audience. The dialogue is tense, but director Ashley Santos senses the play’s real tension stems from the unsaid implications in a narrative that coldly withholds resolution. We are forced to assess disparate themes as though they are truly natural contrasts: The tension between redemption and safety; “cancel culture” social reactions and the very real threat of child abuse by trusted adults in ostensibly safe places; the injurious certitude of the blindly faithful and the crippling risk-avoidance of those waiting for someone else to solve the problems. Shanley’s masterpiece is well positioned in our current social moment – and in the theater, you’ll find that the distance between yourself and the players is insufficient insulation from the invariable weakness of your own convictions. Doubt, A Parable plays at Le Petit Théâtre through May 18th. Click here for information and ticketing. Subscribe to our free weekly newsletter for more arts and culture:  Costera has announced a new Bar Tasting, The Magical Mystery Pour, and a refreshed Happy Hour Menu for this spring and summer.
Aimed at solo diners, date nights, or small groups (up to 4 guests), Costera’s Bar Tasting (available at the bar only), crafted by Chef de Cuisine Kathryn Searcy, offers a two-course curated journey through the kitchen’s most beloved dishes. For just $55 per person, guests will enjoy a spread of signature tapas and a rotating selection of small and large plates, tailored to party size. For guests seeking an even more expansive offering, Costera’s $75 Four-Course Family-Style Tasting Menu remains available year-round to all guests. The newly launched Magical Mystery Pour is a wine experience for adventurous sippers. For $20 a glass, enjoy a blind pour from a rotating selection of rare and limited wines that typically wouldn’t make it to the by-the-glass list. This special offering features higher-end bottles in small quantities. Reintroducing Happy Hour from 4PM–6PM, Wednesday through Sunday, Costera’s bar team is shaking things up with a rotating selection of $10 classic cocktails, $6 Costera originals, and an expanded menu of Tapas favorites. New to the Happy Hour menu are both half and full-size portions of popular dishes. Costera is located at 4938 Prytania Street. For reservations, call 504-302-2332. READ OUR INTERVIEW WITH KATHRYN SEARCY READ OUR REVIEW OF COSTERA  The New Orleans Wine & Food Experience announces its 2025 Labs & Experiences as part of its 33rd annual event, scheduled for June 11 - 15. NOWFE will present fifteen unique wine and food labs and hands-on experiences throughout the five-day event. Additionally, NOWFE will host its Wine Dinners, Vinola, Tournament of Rosés, The Grand Tasting, and Burlesque, Bubbly, and Brunch. 2025's Labs & Experiences (all LABS will take place at the New Orleans Marriott Warehouse Arts District Hotel)
Wednesday, June 11, 10 am – 1 pm, Gonzo’s Smokehouse & BBQ, 12325 River Rd, Luling, LA EXPERIENCE: Masterclass: Smoking Secrets with Award-Winning BBQ Master Jason Gonzales Friday, June 13, 10 am – 11 am LAB: Farming for Flavor: Oregon Wines Friday, June 13, 10 am – 12 pm, The Exchange Club, 2120 Rousseau St., New Orleans EXPERIENCE: Pickleball & Prosecco Friday, June 13, 11:15 am – 12:15 pm LAB: Passport Lab: Around the World in One Hour: 8 Countries/8 Wines with Sommelier Marika Vida Friday, June 13, 12:30 pm – 1:30 pm LAB: Stag’s Leap Wine Cellars: Iconic Estate Cabernet Sauvignon Friday, June 13, 1 pm – 3 pm, The Tchoup Yard, 405 Third St., New Orleans EXPERIENCE: Food Truck Funk Friday, June 13, 1:45 – 2:45 pm LAB: Natural Wine Decode with RedThumb Natural Wines Friday, June 13, 3 – 4 pm LAB: New Mexico: The Unexpected Wine Country Saturday, June 14, 10 am – 11 am LAB: EHRET Winery & Nonna Randazzo’s Bakery: The Art of Wine & Pastry Pairing Saturday, June 14, 11 am – 1 pm, Brennan’s Restaurant, 417 Royal St., New Orleans EXPERIENCE: Sabering Experience at Brennan's Saturday, June 14, 11:15 am – 12:15 pm LAB: Contemporary Rioja with Master Sommelier Evan Goldstein Saturday, June 14, 12:30 pm – 1:30 pm LAB: Southern Hemisphere: Old World Viticulture, New World Wines with Marika Vida Saturday, June 14, 2 pm - 4 pm, Cure, 4905 Freret St., New Orleans EXPERIENCE: Cure Presents Cocktails of the World Saturday, June 14, 3 pm - 5 pm, Ogden Museum of Southern Art, 925 Camp St., New Orleans EXPERIENCE: Art & Wine: An Inspirational Afternoon at Ogden Museum Saturday, June 14, 7:30 pm – 9:30 pm, Paradigm Gardens, 1131 S. Rampart St., New Orleans EXPERIENCE: Shuck n’ Jive: Drink, Eat, Dance For more info and ticketing, go to NOWFE's website  At James Beard nominated GW Fins, Executive Chef Michael Nelson’s relationship with local fishermen secures some of the Gulf's freshest fish. The restaurant is now offering a new Catch & Cook program, in which fishing enthusiasts can bring their own catch to GW Fins, where Chef Michael will prepare the fish caught earlier that day.
GW Fins can recommend charter companies that will take guests out for a day of fishing, and some will even clean your catch and drop them off at the restaurant. Simply make a reservation for dinner later that evening, note that you will be bringing in your own fish, and show up to enjoy your meal (Chef Michael requests that all fish be dropped off at GW Fins by 3pm on the day that guests would like to dine). The cost is $35, plus tax and gratuity, per person for Chef Michael to create an entrée from the catch. The way he prepares the fish depends on the variety of the fish and which local ingredients are at their seasonal peak. Recent dishes include Drum with a Redfish cracklin' crust, Crawfish maque choux, sweet corn spoonbread and roasted corn butter; pan seared Red Snapper served with Louisiana Shrimp Creole, long grain rice and crispy okra; and Sheepshead with a parmesan crust along with jumbo lump crab, asparagus, truffled potatoes, crispy capers and a Meyer lemon beurre blanc (pictured). GW Fins, located at 808 Bienville Street, is open for dinner seven nights a week. For reservations, visit the restaurant's website or call 504 581 3467 to secure reservations.  After a successful regional premiere of Adam Szymkowicz’s CLOWN BAR ten years ago, the itinerant theatre company is returning to their clown roots with a sequel – this time trading a saloon for a twilight room.
In this follow up to Szymkowicz's long-running comedy, two years have passed since the events of CLOWN BAR, and Happy Mahoney – the new clown-crime boss – is missing. Foul play is suspected, so two cops from the “beige life” are enlisted to go deep undercover and solve the mystery. The NOLA Project’s Khiry Armstead directs ensemble members Natalie Boyd, Keith Claverie, Matthew Thompson, Alex Martinez Wallace, Megan Whittle and Kristin Witt with Benjamin Dougherty, Jessica Lozano, David Sellers and Joe Signorelli completing the cast. Please note that CLOWN BAR 2 is intended for mature audiences – must be 21+ to attend. For schedule, tickets and more, visit NOLAProject.com.  Selected works from Nicolas Floc’h: Fleuves-Océan, Mississippi Watershed @ The New Orleans Museum of Art Nicolas Floc’h: Fleuves-Océan, Mississippi Watershed @ The New Orleans Museum of Art Review by Jamie Chiarello Upon walking up to the stairs of the NOMA, there is no missing the new work by Nicolas Floc'h. Without any further explanation, I would have assumed I was looking at a gigantic value study stretched from floor to ceiling. In some respects that is exactly what it is. Of course, aesthetics are very a personal thing, and I'm sure that many people will find this piece charming and spirited. Personally, it struck me as simple and confusingly large. In an increasingly desensitized and overwhelmed world, large scale works hope to snatch our eyes for a moment. The paragraph on the wall informs us that each color swatch is actually a photo taken at various locations and depths along the Mississippi. The array of colors are influenced by sediment, plant life and various chemical contents. There is implied a sense of revelation here, that water can be red, green, yellow or blue. It encourages us to look beyond our initial assumptions about the world around us, provoking curiosity before leading us further along the journey of the watershed. Moving through the rooms we follow Nicolas on his venture along the river. The color swatches from various locations are interspersed among black and white photos. The photos really had an effect on me that was somewhat the opposite of the color swatches. Vast landscapes with peaks of tired industry give the feeling of aging Americana, of infrastructure quietly fading in the sun. The photos are powerful and beautiful in their own right. It made me wonder what it would have been like to simply witness the photos and feel the sensations stirred without the geography lesson. I imagine if I had encountered this show in a science museum I would have absolutely loved it. The stress on reiterating the importance of water in our lives (particularly in relation to climate change) feels a bit redundant for a place like New Orleans. Between losing homes to hurricanes, clearing catch basins of beads and debris by hand and facing $6000 bills from sewage and water, locals know too well what intense effects water can have on our lives. Overall, though, this show does offer educational insights into how water is optically perceived and the effects of humanity trying to simply exist amongst natural resources. I hope the questions raised by the exhibit are being addressed by engineers, politicians and those with the power to affect how much water affects our lives in coming years. Nicolas Floc’h: Fleuves-Océan, Mississippi Watershed runs at NOMA through February 22nd, 2026. Click here for more information.  The Last Showgirl
Streaming Veteran Vegas dancer Shelly, in increasingly threadbare garters, wilting feathered headdress and frayed silk wings, radiates a thousand-watt smile as she gears up for one exhausting last lap of the showbiz track. The camera is soft, vaseline-smeared around the edges, framing unsaturated hues of faded glamor. Her job, her life, is performing in ‘The Razzle Dazzle’, a creaking fixture at a resort in transition. Even the name feels out of time. The implied missing word, ‘old’ (as in, “Give ‘em the old razzle dazzle”), hangs limply in the air, like a deflating disco ball. Pamela Anderson stars as the aging optimist, juggling past mistakes with a blinkered positive attitude that gets bolted on every day as she repairs her weathered costumery. The Razzle Dazzle is coming to an end, being replaced by bawdy circuses with ever more lurid acrobatics. 18 punters a night cannot sustain this ungainly throwback - “We were like rockstars, a spectacle!” says Shelly, defending its legacy. But, like the song says, that was thirty years ago, when they used to have a show. It’s a firecracker of a performance by Anderson, the parallels to the injustices and seedy manipulations of her own career presumably weighing on her mind in every take. We could reference Demi Moore in The Substance, or Micky Rourke in The Wrestler, the clinging onto the grubby coattails of an industry with desperate fingertips, a business that has drained them of what was once needed, but which now distances itself from them at light speed. We’re given vignettes rather than real story arks. There’s the emotional wreckage of courting an estranged daughter, and a half-hearted attempt at romance with the socially-awkward, aging stage manager (played with moving empathy by Dave Bautista), but director Gia Coppola keeps us involved enough in this rhinestone-clad existential crisis. Shelley argues with her much younger dancer cohorts (the excellent Kiernan Shipka and Brenda Song) that The Razzle Dazzle has class, honoring a long line of French tradition. “It’s Parisian Lido culture,” she announces to a mostly-bored dressing room. For them, it’s just another softcore nudie gig with a paycheck: “It’s just a job that pays American dollars!” replies Song as she applies the cumbersome upholstery of her trade. At home, Shelly dances along balletically to old 16mm projections. In her mind, she’s a cultured entertainer, the most glamorous artiste in the trailer park, but it’s an increasingly debilitating delusion. She’s not Margot Fonteyn, she’s Tawdry Hepburn. I mean that less cruelley than it reads, because in many ways, she’s admirable, supportive and, as she maintains throughout, just doing the best she can (-can). The most memorable scenes, though, come with the whirlwind support of Jamie Lee Curtis. Her fake-tan-daubed Annette is a hard-as-iron cocktail waitress in a downbeat casino, withered by decades of sulphuric lighting and cigarette smoke, but gamely punching her way through every single shift. Both Curtis and Anderson have euphoric solo dance scenes that let the light shine out of their hearts, if only for one last song. They may be crying every night into their homemade margaritas, but The Old Razzle Dazzle can still sometimes paste on a smile, flip off the world and hold its head high. (PO)  Harold and Saint Claude
Review by Dorian Hatchett In theatre, we seek truth. The universal human experience, writ large in lights and choreography. Those of us who spend a lot of time in dark auditoriums, though, we know a secret. The secret is pain. That great equalizer that pulls every successful script together, that unites every frenzied backstage quick-change, or last second lightboard fix is pain. The shoes that don’t quite fit and the rehearsals late into the night on twisted ankles and costumes that pinch. Play through the pain. And if you do it just right, and all those elements coalesce, it’s magic. You get to make the audience feel that pain, too. If the universal human experience is pain, then the exceptional human experience is joy. Across thousands of years of human history, we repeat ourselves, with the same casual cruelties and tragedies big and small. Again and again, the man made horrors persist. We can draw parallels, and translate across cultures, and the pain is all so poignant, and true. But in the periphery of pain lies joy, and the people who are exceptional, who perpetuate it, despite knowing far too much about the flip side of their shiny coins. Harold and Maude, a movie that premiered in 1971, to a loathsome critical response, is a dark comedy about death, and the life that people may choose in spite of it. It rose to cult status several years after its initial debut, where it remains to this day. An exaggerated may-december romance, Harold Chaisson is a very young man who is obsessed with death. Maude is an old woman who has seen death, and has chosen instead to live in every sincere sense of the word. At its root, it’s the story of generation separation from tragedy. Maude is a Holocaust survivor, and Harold is too young to understand what that means. The film coalesces with Maude choosing to embrace death on her own terms, and Harold, horrified, finally understands her lessons completely. In Harold and Saint Claude, we move the settings forward two decades, and to New Orleans, where young, sheltered Harold is still death obsessed, but is struggling with his sexuality in addition to his desire to feel anything at all in a life dominated by his overbearing mother. Doing perfect justice to the original material, director and adaptor Thugsy DaClown honors the struggles of youth and attachment, while shaping the motivations of the characters to a slightly more modern struggle. Saint Claude is an aging drag queen who has seen the worst parts of the rise of the AIDS epidemic, has not remained untouched herself by the virus, and has chosen to live, despite the ticking clock she feels over her own life. Like many people affected by the virus in the time before effective treatment, dying by choice is preferable to wasting away alone at the end, and she must teach Harold how to live before her life ends, on her 66th birthday. Bizzy Barefoot, in the role of Saint Claude, is stunning. She conveys the joy and heartache of aging, the fear and elation of being alive in every moment, in a way that had the audience hanging on her every word and grand gesture. Rose Falvey as Harold is earnest; the folly of youth personified, and the agony of watching them learn these hardest lesson is palpable and uncomfortable. The entire supporting cast is superb, a comic relief beacon in the darkness. As the play reaches its climax, there’s not a dry eye in the house. They were reciting a script, but the audience found the truth inside of themselves, and it spilled out in laughter and tears. It would be a grave error not to comment on the presentation style. The director created an immersive experience, with a live band covering and adapting popular music and an accompanying film reel to add depth and scenery to an already vibrant set. At the end, filing out full of smiles, it can be safely assumed that the audience felt another altogether different universal human experience: wanting more.  Adapted by Nia Vardalos from Cheryl Strayed's deeply personal book, Crescent City Stage presents Tiny Beautiful Things, "a raw and honest exploration of the human experience".
Tiny Beautiful Things personifies the questions and answers that the publication “Sugar” was publishing online from 2010-2012. When a struggling writer was asked to take over the unpaid, anonymous position of advice columnist, Strayed used empathy and her personal experiences to help those seeking guidance for obstacles both large and small. Tiny Beautiful Things is billed as 'a play about reaching when you’re stuck, healing when you’re broken, and finding the courage to take on the questions that have no answers'. It stars Tenet Intriago, Steve Zissis, Helena Wang and Rashid Ali. Michael A. Newcomer directs. The production runs from May 8 - 25th at the Marquette Theatre. Click here for ticketing and more information. |
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