Play it again, Hershey
A runaway hit last summer, Hershey Felder’s George Gershwin Alone gets a reprise, courtesy of the American Repertory Theatre, July 5 through 26. Felder’s gimmick is that he’s both an actor and a concert pianist and therefore can both play and play Gershwin in the biographical piece, which he’s dubbed an "imagination with music." Set in a ghostly approximation of the composer’s last apartment, on New York’s Upper East Side, the show presents its subject as a guilelessly egotistical figure whose deepest emotions and enthusiasm surface not in conversation but in music. There’s even a post-performance sing-along in which Felder, as himself, coaxes a little warbling from the audience. George Gershwin Alone will be followed by the world premiere of Felder’s newest creation, Romantique, an "imagination" in which the versatile performer tickles the ivories as Frédéric Chopin. That one plays August 1 through 17, with Stephanie Zimbalist, of Remington Steele fame, as the novelist George Sand and Tony Award winner (for Kiss of the Spider Woman) Anthony Crivello as the painter Eugène Delacroix. Helmed by My Big Fat Greek Wedding director Joel Zwick, both shows are at the Loeb Drama Center, 64 Brattle Street in Harvard Square. Tickets are $45, or see Gershwin and come back for Chopin for $65. Call (617) 547-8300.
Prickly pair
The Swedish death-metal band Opeth had a breakthrough year stateside in ’02, thanks to their pulverizing epic Deliverance (Koch), a collection of 10-minute-and-longer songs displaying the kind of extended conceptual complexity and technical mastery that went out of style after Metallica’s . . . And Justice for All. The band’s new Damnation (also Koch), appearing less than a year after its predecessor, comes as a bit of a non sequitur: it’s a distortionless, psychedelic progressive-rock album produced by neo-prog master Steve Wilson of the British band Porcupine Tree, who also plays mellotron on the disc. And its release sets the stage for one of the weirder concert billings you’re likely to come across this summer: Porcupine Tree and Opeth, together at last, at the Berklee Performance Center, 136 Massachusetts Avenue in Boston, on July 19. It’s an 8 p.m. show, and tickets are $22.50 and $25.50; call (617) 931-2000.
Candid camera
We all know that a picture’s worth a thousand words — but how many albums is that? Last year, Boston singer-songwriter Karaugh Brown released her debut disc, One Round Orange (One Room Records), with the Twinemen’s Billy Conway behind the boards and New England folk luminary Bill Morrissey producing. Now she’s welding image to song — not with a video but with an exhibit titled "The Photographer Revealed: A Songwriter’s Lens," her first photo show, which also doubles as a concert. Check out her pics and her tunes on June 29 at 7:30 p.m. at Club Passim, 47 Palmer Street in Harvard Square. Tickets are $10, $8 in advance; call (617) 492-7679.
Lunacy
For an indie-rock titan, Luna’s Dean Wareham is a sucker for a good cover — even if it’s Guns N’ Roses’ "Sweet Child o’ Mine," which popped up back on 1999’s The Days of Our Nights. This time around, Wareham is giving the Luna moniker a rest and teaming up with his gorgeous bassist, Britta Phillips, for L’Avventura (Jetset), an album of duets that includes tunes by Madonna (the recent "I Deserve It"), the Silver Jews ("Random Rules"), and Buffy Sainte-Marie ("Moonshot"), as well as a few new originals. They’ll stop by T.T. the Bear’s Place, 10 Brookline Street in Central Square, on June 25; call (617) 492-BEAR.
