Ballet Festival, Penn & Teller on Broadway, Simon Denny at Moma PS1, and more New York events.   (Photo: Patrick McMullan (Lovett); Charlotte Rutherford (Little Boots); Joan Marcus (Teller); Rosalie O’Connor (Ballet); Holly Andres (Tune-Yards))

TV
1. Watch Wet Hot American Summer: First Day of Camp
Back in short-shorts.
Michael Showalter and David Wain have recaptured the weird magic of their 2001 spoof of �early-’80s sniggering teen-sex comedies, even reuniting Amy Poehler, Bradley Cooper, Elizabeth Banks, Janeane Garofalo, and Paul Rudd. The trick to enjoying it is to just shrug at the elapsed time and plunge ahead: This is a prequel even though all the characters are clearly 14 years older, and the show just expects us to accept this. It’s the right approach for a follow-up to a film that prided itself on a sort of deadpan near surrealism. —Matt Zoller Seitz
Netflix, July 31.

Pop
2. See Rakim
He plays for keeps.
�Follow the Leader,� �I Ain’t No Joke,� �Don’t Sweat the Technique�: all classics from the legendary New York MC whose dexterity at rhyming within verses redefined how to rap. His longtime DJ Eric B won’t join him for this free concert, but an appearance by Rakim alone is reason enough to indulge your rap nostalgia.
Marcus Garvey Park, August 11.

Books
3. Read Mary Kubica’s Pretty Baby
Suspense done well.
The author of intricately wrought suspense had the misfortune of publishing her first novel, The Good Girl, just as a similarly named best-selling mystery was becoming a movie. Maybe it’s just as well, because Pretty Baby has even better stuff. Do-gooder Heidi and her mismatched husband take in a homeless boarder and her newborn. As disaster ensues, the narration alternates among the couple and their new charge. But this is no familiar game of psychopaths; everyone is deeply flawed but deeply human. —Boris Kachka
Mira/Harlequin.

Movies
4. Watch Metropolitan
The titled aristocracy in all their glory.
On the occasion of the film’s 25th anniversary, �Rialto Pictures will rerelease Whit Stillman’s 1990 debut, an endearingly pointy-headed comedy of manners set in the parlors of Manhattan’s affluent 20-somethings. The butt of the film is a rigid young idealist who discovers that his philosophy barely covers the real world � but you’ll probably end up wistful for a pre-selfie era. —David Edelstein
Film Society of Lincoln Center, opens August 7.

Classical Music
5. Hear Written on Skin
A step in the right direction.
George Benjamin’s opera, which sent critics into rhapsodies at its world premiere in Aix-en-Provence in 2012, finally makes it to New York in the Mostly Mozart Festival; Alan Gilbert conducts the three-night run. —Justin Davidson
David H. Koch Theater, August 11, 13, and 15.

Art
6. See Michael Smith
An odd-man-great-artist-out.
For more than 35 years, Smith has been the eagle-eyed Buster Keaton of the art world. Excuse me!?! � I’m looking for the �Fountain of Youth� includes video clips that could be modern GIF-emojis, like a hapless middle-aged man looking for his glasses, trying to untangle his earbuds. In a multipart operetta, we see Smith in a theatrical Florida, a walking metaphor in motion. —Jerry Saltz
Greene Naftali, through August 14.

Theater
7. See Teller in Penn & Teller on Broadway
Pay attention to the little guy.
Penn Jillette’s the one who does the big talk and the boffo tricks; Teller, despite not speaking, does the poetry. In both apparently simple and obviously complicated bits, he restores to magic tricks the quality of wonder that Penn’s antihuckster harangues can sometimes make you forget. —Jesse Green
Marquis Theatre, through August 16.

Dance
8. See Ballet Festival
Bringing it into the 21st century.
The entrepreneurial choreographic minds and troupes of the future � like Emery LeCrone and Amy Seiwert, plus the Ashley Bouder Project (led by the New York City Ballet principal) � get the spotlight at this mini-smorgasbord of contemporary ballet. —Rebecca Milzoff
Joyce Theater, through August 16.

Books
9. Read Speak
Louisa Hall’s cross-century chorus.
The structure of Hall’s second novel � six narratives scattered across four centuries � has already drawn obvious comparisons to Cloud Atlas. But Hall’s voices are more earthbound than David Mitchell’s; explorers of all kinds are overheard speaking into the void, ruminating on lost memories, missed connections, and the fatal flaws of men and their machines. —B.K.
Ecco.

Pop
10. Hear Highway 61 Revisited
Who gets to sing �Like a Rolling Stone�?
Only an ambitious crew would dare take on Dylan’s landmark going-electric album in its entirety; Sean and Sara Watkins, co-founders of bluegrass-folk revivalists Nickel Creek, and �musical-storyteller friends like Aimee Mann, Shawn Colvin, and Fiona Apple are up to the task.
Damrosch Park, August 8.

TV
11. & 12. Watch Save My Life: Boston Trauma and Boston EMS
At the front lines.
Terence Wrong is one of the unsung heroes of American documentary cinema. Over the last decade-plus, he’s worked almost exclusively for ABC, cranking out subdued and intelligent nonfiction about Boston-area public servants, mainly doctors, nurses, medical students, and EMS workers. This summer he’s got two new shows, both worth watching for their detail and compassion: Boston Trauma, a six-part series set in the emergency and operating rooms of three hospitals, and Boston EMS, about ambulance workers. —M.Z.S.
ABC, Saturdays at 9 p.m. and 10 p.m.

Theater
13. See Grey Gardens
Won’t you, darling?
A musical about the eccentric-bordering-on-crazy Beales seemed like a sure misfire when it was announced in 2006. But Doug Wright figured out how to fracture the story to make it theatrical, and Scott Frankel and Michael Korie gave it one of the best scores of the new century. Still, the Broadway transfer lasted only nine months, so a trip to the Hamptons (where the tale takes place, and where Betty Buckley and Rachel York will star) seems, as Little Edie might say, de rigoor. —J.G.
Bay Street Theater, Sag Harbor, August 4 through 30.

Movies
14. See A Hard Day
A bloody good indulgence.
When was the last time you saw a thriller with real narrative and visual wit? There’s one in theaters now from South Korea: Kim Seong-hun’s twisty, riotous bloodbath A Hard Day, which covers approximately 24 tumultuous hours in the life of a police detective (the marvelous Lee Sun-kyun) who attempts to dispose of a body he hit while driving from his mother’s funeral. What begins as a black farce becomes a cat-and-mouse game of escalating insanity. —D.E.
In theaters.

Pop
15. See Lyle Lovett
Just don’t touch his hat.
As willowy as his voice, Lovett has never looked like much, but once he starts singing, he easily holds the stage, a big-band maestro and Texan poet in one; he’ll perform with his rollicking Large Band.
Damrosch Park, August 9.

Theater
16. See Preludes
Art isn’t easy.
Dave Malloy’s follow-up to Natasha, Pierre and the Great Comet of 1812 is ostensibly about the depression and writer’s block Rachmaninoff experienced after his first symphony flopped (and the hypnotherapist who helped him get over it). But it’s really a vivid examination of the torturous process of creation, anchored by Gabriel Ebert’s shivering, manic portrayal of the composer and pianist Or Matias’s impassioned playing.
Claire Tow Theater, through August 2.

Art
17. See Simon Denny
Ironic ideas.
Simon Denny’s huge installation The Innovator’s Dilemma is like walking into the most overcrowded trade show, job fair, and high-tech gadget display. This canny 32-year-old New Zealander twists our TED-talk minds, letting us know that all we’re really doing is reveling in the weeds, telling each other what other people have told one another, but trying to do it in a more snazzy way. —J.S.
Moma PS1, through September 7.

Pop
18. Listen to Little Boots
Dancing queen.
If Chromeo and Kylie Minogue had a love child raised on Confessions on a Dance Floor, she would become Victoria Hesketh, a.k.a. Little Boots. �Specifically, she’d be Little Boots’s new album, Working Girl; those first two influences are the foundation for �Get Things Done,� a bass-heavy disco blessing with an ultrapunchy hook.
On Repeat/Dim Mak.

Classical Music
19. Hear A Little Night Music
Neither �Eine Kleine� nor Sondheim.
One of the most delightful elements of the Mostly Mozart Festival is the postconcert after-party called �A Little Night Music,� where the soloists pop upstairs for an hour-long recital for a small audience seated at café tables. Pianist Emanuel Ax appears at the opening-night gala, then joins two younger colleagues, Orion Weiss and Anna Polonsky, who trade off in four-handed piano music by Schumann and Brahms. —J.D.
Stanley H. Kaplan Penthouse, July 29.

Books
20. Read Joe Pepitone’s Joe, You Coulda Made Us Proud
More than a Seinfeld punch line.
Yes, yes, the hair. But the first-baseman and outfielder was an integral part of the team’s Mickey Mantle era, and his memoir, rereleased 40 years on, is a portrait of a complex man who endured an abusive father, destructive vanity, and a predilection for the sexual fringes.
Sports Publishing.

Movies
21. See Richard Lester
From the ’60s and beyond.
We don’t hear much anymore about Richard Lester, whose fractured directorial syntax defined the puckish side of counterculture cinema � beginning with his exhilarating Beatles docu-comedy A Hard Day’s Night. So you should run to this retrospective and jump at the chance to see The Bed Sitting Room, The Four Musketeers, the bomb-on-a-ship thriller Juggernaut, as well as the U.S. theatrical premiere of 1989’s The Return of the Musketeers � after which Lester abandoned filmmaking upon the death of beloved actor Roy Kinnear. —D.E.
Film Society of Lincoln Center, August 7 through 13.

Art
22. See Laurie Simmons
Signature, strange surreality.
Simmons brings her expansive uncanniness of being and implacable sense of eerie, irradiating color to a series of large-scale photographs, each picturing a giant face with eyes painted on closed lids. We’re in the presence of real puppets and unreal blind people, creatures who are seen but cannot see. —J.S.
Jewish Museum, through August 16.

Pop
23. See Tune-Yards and Shabazz Palaces
Wonderful weirdos, together.
Two bona fide experimental artists share the open air: Merrill Garbus, whose whirl of DIY recordings complement her massive voice, and the alternative-rap group that syncs space-age melodies with Ishmael Butler’s silky vocals.
Prospect Park Bandshell, August 8.

Books/Theater
24. Read The Book of Broadway
Remember me to Herald Square.
The latest entry in the Great White Way Coffee Table Book genre offers itself not as a collection of the best works or the biggest hits but the 150 �definitive� plays and musicals of the past 150 years. So Eric Grode gives us Captain Jinks of the Horse Marines (1901) instead of, say, Caroline, or Change (2004), and lets the (beautifully illustrated and explained) chips fall where they may. —J.G.
Voyageur Press, August 1.

Movies
25. See Mr. Holmes
Beyond elementary.
Ian McKellen gives one of his greatest performances as an elderly Sherlock Holmes, reminiscing about the final case of his career while fighting his decaying mind and body. Bill Condon’s elegant film is less a mystery and more a sad meditation on human memory, historical memory, and the impenetrable nature of grief. —Bilge Ebiri
In theaters.