E-Mail This Article to a Friend Overgrown Vines The Aussies invade, Carmen comes back, and more

Down Under

Just in time for summer vacation (well, if you’re from Sydney), Australia sends forth from its shores almost every band the casual MTV viewer might want to see. But whether anyone can sit through an entire helping of the "Aussie Invasion Tour" without a long roll of the eyes is up for debate. Despite a couple of pretty good radio singles, we’re still inclined to think of headliners the Vines less as Australia’s answer to the Beatles than as its Bush (the band, not the presidents). IPod-peddling Stones wanna-bes Jet have suffered the double indignity of being overexposed and overhyped; we’ve never heard of Neon; and we’ll be happier to catch our fave of the bunch, the rabid punk trio with stand-up bass the Living End, opening for No Doubt and Blink-182 this summer. Be that as it may, the Vines, Jet, Neon, and the Living End will all be at Avalon, 15 Lansdowne Street in Boston, on March 19. Tickets are $20.25; call (617) 423-NEXT.

Common’s Carmen comes back

Rising opera star Jossie Pérez raised her profile considerably with her knockdown star turn before some 140,000 concertgoers in Boston Lyric Opera’s free Carmen on the Common in September 2002, and in the interim, she’s been tearing up the Met and trading bellows with Plácido Domingo at the Washington Opera. On March 14, she’ll get her own spotlight in Remis Auditorium at the Museum of Fine Arts — in advance of her return as Dorabella in BLO’s Cosí fan tutte, which opens April 28 at the Shubert — with a solo program titled "My Latin Soul" for which she’ll sing material by Enrique Granados, Maurice Ravel, Carlos López Buchardo, and others. The concert starts at 3:30 p.m., but it’ll be preceded at 2:45 p.m. by a screening of "Becoming a Diva," a WGBH profile of Pérez’s Carmen run. Tickets are $24; call (617) 369-3306.

Yid vicious

Jackie Mason, the diaspora’s pre-eminent Borscht Belt tummler, returns to town May 1 for a one-nighter at the Orpheum, where he’ll present the local debut of his latest one-man Broadway show, Politically Incorrect. Long a self-described "equal opportunity offender," Mason is said to close this particular effort with a punch-line-less "impassioned defense" of free speech. The Orpheum is at 1 Hamilton Place in Boston, it’s an 8 p.m. curtain, and tickets are $45 to $65; call (617) 679-0810.

Boston Ballet’s school days

The Boston Ballet School, which has trained many company members as well as venturing into the community to instruct inner-city public-school students, turns 50 this year, and it’ll celebrate the half-century mark on March 6 with a benefit performance at the Boston Center for the Arts, 539 Tremont Street in the South End. On the program: students and alumni, including several company members, performing the first movement from Balanchine’s Concerto Barocco, the peasant pas de trois from BB artistic director Mikko Nissinen’s staging of Swan Lake, and a new work by BB senior artist Viktor Plotnikov, plus a tribute to founding faculty member Sydney Leonard. It’s a 7:30 p.m. performance, and tickets are $75 to $250; call (617) 456-6257.