Highlights

Youssou N' Dour's Great African Ball

Fri., July 9

When asked to describe the Great African Ball, Youssou N' Dour's management described it as an all-night dance party "inna Senegalese style," unhinged performances typical of the surreal West African nightclubs of N'Dour's homeland.

"Youssou's African fans become, for one night, his co-star, their celebratory verve finding expression in an extraordinary community spectacle."

Oh. The whole Super Etoile roots vibe, right? Although guest musicians have been known to pop up and join in/him/them, Youssou is the only act on the bill. Is that enough to last until dawn? Indeed. Having witnessed the dance don of Dakar, the balladeering spirit-king of Senegal, it's impossible for N'Dour to not take an entire evening with his endurance-level tests of protean Afro-pop and such.

Yet, unlike those Western collaborations with Neneh Cherry and Peter Gabriel, as well as world-silken soulful CDs hinting at a purist's past, N'Dour's new CD, Egypt, goes indigenous toward Arabic ambience. The music of Senegalese Sufism is a skin for N'Dour, whose moans, yelps and hollers throughout self-penned tracks like "Allah" and "Mahdiyu Laye" are the most passionate of his career. Backed by the 14-person-strong traditional Sufi music ensemble, the Fathy Salama Orchestra, the Islamic cultural call of Egypt is startling, strange and devastating to the ear, whether you find its charms sacred or secular.

How then will N' Dour base a party on the haunted vaunted holiness of tunes like "Tijaniyya" and "Touba"? By ushering in to the mix "Africa's most popular international touring band," the "Super Etoile" with whom he's gigged for 25 years. This is the sound of abandon, of brutal buoyant polyrhythms and supple, blustering African highlife guitar flickings.

Roseland Ballroom, 239 W. 52nd St. (betw. B'way & 8th Ave.), 212-247-0200, 10, $50.

A.D. Amorosi

Mouse on Mars

Tues. & Weds., July 13 & 14

With its wiggly Kraftwerk-meets-Krautrock experimentalism backed into a corner of spacey-dub spaciousness and messy jazz, Mouse on Mars' debut Vulvaland was miles beyond its ambient house categorization at the time. Rereleased in time for Rick Rubin's American Recordings's Too Pure division to put out the equally challenging charge of Iaora Tahiti's Morricone-jungle groove, the quirky, irksomely provocative sound of Vulva, Tahiti and Autoditacker (along with an instrumental vinyl or two in between) created a bleak yet buoyant trio of terror, kitsch and invention unseen since Roger Corman and AIP tackled Poe with Vincent Price on board.

By the time Mouse on Mars found French philosopher Gilles Deleuze, Chicago's Thrill Jockey label was ready, and two millennial CDs soon endeared them to devotees of the intricate (Matmos, Slint, Tortoise). Yet there's a chilly, childish riskiness to the danse macabre of Mouse on Mars that's akin to kids playing on Trance European Express train tracks, maintaining the simplicity of past ethos. Though radiant with growth and careful, cautious planning, Toma and St. Werner (who've done solo gigs like Microstoria and such) still come off like rad Krautrockers at a rave. Their due-soon new album, Radical Connector, promises much the same slipperiness.

Tues. at Mercury Lounge, 217 E. Houston St. (betw. Ludlow & Essex Sts.), 212-260-4700, 10, $12; Weds. at Table 50, 643 B'way (Bleecker St., 212-253-2560, 10, $15.

A.D. Amorosi

The Mystery Plays

Through Sun., July 11

Cast in the horror-film genre mold, Mystery Plays reveals the inexplicable death of 57 passengers on a train. Fortunately, before the story derails, we meet the two central characters, Joe (Gavin Creel), a successful writer/director who adapts H.P. Lovecraft's horror novels for the screen, and Nathan West (Scott Ferrara), who picks him up on a train ride from New York to Virginia.

In the play's first act, entitled "The Filmmaker's Mystery," filmic elements play out against the realism of this simple dialogue between two gay men. But the action turns surreal, almost like a thriller, when Nathan's ghost haunts Joe, demanding at knifepoint that he relieve him of his sins.

It's an interesting concept, albeit implicitly religious: sin as a metaphysical existence rather than a pathological one. In this respect, the first act of Mystery Plays is totally magnetic, creating a stylistic drama that takes morality out of the predictable psychological realm. Unfortunately, Act II drags some of the characters from "Filmmaker" into an entirely new story, "Ghost Children," shifting the play's focus. In this tale, a young man murders his abusive parents, while his surviving sister is called on to reveal her own history in a deposition 16 years later. With its focus on morality, guilt and responsibility, it is a typical American story, and as narrated, nearly banal—even grueling—to sit through.

But what should one expect of Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa? The playwright, who's penned Marvel Comics' The Fantastic Four, is deft in creating a crazy sci-fi existence that derives drama from the very fact that it is only incidentally human. In working from the inner life of the characters and their psychological motives, as in the second act, the playwright clearly lacks finesse and direction, rendering the tale with a moralistic edge.

The director, Connie Grappo, does a remarkable job of focusing the acting on this nearly bare stage, smoothly working through multiple locations and diverse literary genres. But the most exciting aspect of this production is Gavin Creel's Joe, the sensitive soul who evokes the play's theme of forgiveness, allowing us to imagine this abstract issue without sentimentality. His transformation in Act II into a brittle, illiterate man living in the back woods, entirely the opposite of the filmmaker of Act I, is impressive. The rest of the cast, while less convincing, is also sadly laden with less fortunate material.

Second Stage Uptown Series at McGinn/Cazale Theatre, 2162 B'way (76th St.), 212-246-4422, Mon.-Fri. 8, Sat. 2 & 8, $25.

Isa Goldberg

Carnival Girls

Fri.-Sun., July 9-11

The carny resurgence has brought us burlesque at the Slipper Room, the Carnival Knowledge of Todd Robbins and, of course, the continuing Coney Island's Sideshow by the Sea Shore. Though the history of this particularly American form of entertainment has been outlined and the acts are flawlessly reborn, few of us have come any closer to understanding the lives of the performers after the curtain is drawn. In particular, we don't know much of the lives of carny women.

Playwright Christie Perfetti adapted her own thesis on women in American carnivals in the 20th century to give us Carnival Girls, a behind-the-curtain look at working carnies. She combines poetry, monologues, dialogue and dance to portray the struggles and independence of fictional young women working America's midways.

In one portion, "Isadora," Perfetti considers how the carnival simultaneously traps and offers freedom. The sense of independence, adventure and freedom of the nomadic carny traveler is compared to the stereotypes of working girls and the lack of a solid homestead that normal living can bring. Because constant travel rules every aspect of these women's lives, they keep their occupations secret and their romances short. Some characters are lucky enough to travel with their families—or a group that acts as surrogate—but that inevitably leads to hardship when one show thinks about splitting up. What will happen to the 600-pound woman? What of the dwarf?

Carnival Girls also touches on what it means to grow from girl into woman, which also points to the difference between men and women. In the monologue "The Change and the Difference," a girl gets her period and proclaims that she doesn't want to be a carnival girl, but a real showman. Once you're a woman, she says, "No matter how hard you try, you're a woman first, then you're the star showman of three purebreds."

Another young woman feels the same separation from youth after losing her virginity to her cousin. When she has to leave the show, she asks that she be allowed to take her dog; when it's forbidden, she begs desperately and threatens suicide. Witnessing this, her younger, less-experienced cousin asks, "Is that what happens when you become a woman? You go crazy?"

Dance and live music play an important part in the production; they portray the pace and feel of carny life. Live guitar, midway organs and sultry dance numbers keep the play rolling—credit to composer Colleen Culhane and choreographer Allison Winters, who created the original movement and music. Along with stage manager Dorie Holst and writer/director Christie Perfetti, they are among the more than 40 participants of this all-female cast and crew.

Pantheon Theater, 303 W. 42nd St. (betw. 8th & 9th Aves.), 212-591-2740, Fri. & Sat. 8, Sun. 2, $15.

Laura Hibit

Gillian Welch

Tues. & Weds., July 13 & 14

The work of Gillian Welch and collaborator David Rawlings invokes a patience completely out of step with our jittery, overstimulated times. Listeners should welcome the feeling of slowing down that Welch's music brings on. Even people old enough to remember the early 90s, before the internet and cellphones boomed, know that so-called "communication" technology has brought us little more than useless, distracted chatter. Gillian Welch may provide respite.

When they play as a duo, as on 2001's Time (The Revelator), Welch and Rawlings craft songs with such stark immediacy that you could literally hear a pin drop. And even with the backing of other players, the pair's brand of roots music is subtle and understated, crackling with eerie shadows of feeling rather than heavy brush strokes of overt drama. The songs just seem to roll by at their own pace, as if the players were letting the music speak through them rather than rushing it out into the world.

On the other hand, though Welch and Rawlings prefer to lilt you with this deliberate, reflective approach, their work is no less emotionally urgent or raw, their tasteful restraint casting a tight, absorbing tension over the music. In spots, Welch is even able to let her guitar stand in for her voice, as if the guitar itself were taking over the telling of the story, her voice waiting for its turn.

Leave your cellphone at home and take Welch up on her invitation to revisit a slower time and place. The Rawlings-produced quintet Old Crow Medicine Show opens and also backs Welch and Rawlings for the headlining set.

Bowery Ballroom, 6 Delancey St. (betw. Bowery & Chrystie St.), 212-533-2111, 9, $25.

Saby Reyes-Kulkarni

Every Man for Himself: The Films of Maurice Pialat

Fri.-Mon., July 9-12 & Mon.-Thurs., July 19-29

Like a spiritual heir to Eric Rohmer, the great French filmmaker Maurice Pialat, who died last year at the age of 77, dedicated his films to the close study of his characters. Eschewing grandiose political or spiritual themes, Pialat was the poet of the everyday, whose camera trailed its subjects through their emotional and sexual triumphs and tribulations. Even Van Gogh (1991), one of Pialat's last films, concentrates on the day-to-day struggles of the great painter for recognition, love and money, revealing Van Gogh as frustrating, needy and brilliant. Unlike Rohmer, whose films document bourgeois characters whose impeccable lifestyles are rarely mussed by their predicaments, Pialat's films, while nominally following a similar grouping of French middle-class lovers and families, exist on the edge of a precipice. Their shock value (and shocking they are) derives from this initial and deliberate confusion between his work and that of other, ostensibly similar filmmakers.

Pialat's sympathies are with the iconoclasts, those who ache to break free from society's strictures and live honestly, and his films watch these dissenters without blinking. Loulou (1980) stars a young Isabelle Huppert as a woman trapped in a bad marriage who drops all for an unemployed hunk (Gerard Depardieu). What begins as a sex romp, dosed with the excitement of the well-educated middle-class woman thrilled by the unabashedly erotic nature of her new relationship, imperceptibly grows darker. Lust becomes love; the flight from responsibility becomes the quest for new order.

A Nos Amours (1983) depicts the unraveling of the family unit as well, but its gradual progression allows for a substantially more disturbing analysis of familial relationships. Suzanne (Sandrine Bonnaire) is a headstrong 15-year-old discovering her sexuality, to the distress of her parents and older brother. Suzanne is a standard-issue adolescent until faced with the unyielding, incomprehensible hostility of her family, obsessed with her sexuality and simultaneously not wanting to hear about it. The rule of bourgeois order trumps any familial bond.

Still, the film is not Suzanne's alone. Pialat has mastered the law of human nature discovered by the godfather of French film, Jean Renoir: "The awful thing about life is this: everyone has their reasons." Each family member comes into clear focus as suffering in their own vacuum-sealed world of pain, striking out at each other as a result. The two confrontations between Suzanne and her father (played by Pialat himself), which bookend the film, are among the most intimate depictions of the parent-child relationship ever put on screen. Simultaneously violent and tender, intimate and impossibly distant, her father oscillates between acceptance of his daughter and outraged paranoia. That Pialat chooses to end on a note of optimism could be understood as arbitrary, given the hideously brutal warfare just witnessed. Or maybe it's just his gift to us, his audience.

Walter Reade Theater at Lincoln Center, 165 W. 65th St. (betw. B'way & Amsterdam Ave.), 212-875-5600, call for times, $10, $7 st.

Saul Austerlitz