Welcome back to The Big To-Do. As August has unfolded in a plume of smoke, being outdoors hasn’t held its usual appeal. Two consolations: It’s sales tax holiday weekend, and the weekend weather looks fantastic. Back indoors, the Globe’s culture experts have a ton of entertainment suggestions, including streaming picks from Matt Juul (“Hard Knocks” is back). And if you’re headed to the shore for the first time in a while, brace yourself for “cabanas and tents and canopies and umbrellas, and more cabanas and tents and canopies and umbrellas.” The Globe’s Beth Teitell reports from the Cape on the trendy contraptions overshadowing local beaches.

Movies

Jamie Lee Curtis (left, as Tess Coleman) and Lindsay Lohan (as Anna Coleman) in Disney's "Freakier Friday." GLEN WILSON/DISNEY

“Freaky Friday” stars Jamie Lee Curtis and Lindsay Lohan are back for the 22-years-later sequel, but “Freakier Friday” can’t recapture the magic. Even though twice as many characters switch bodies, “[s]o many scenes, actors, and subplots are lifted from the earlier film that this one feels redundant,” Globe film critic Odie Henderson writes in a 2-star review.

The 2003 “Freaky Friday” was a remake of the 1976 original, which starred Barbara Harris and Jodie Foster. It’s one of the live-action Disney features that filled summers in the ’70s, when Henderson was an impressionable young cinephile. “Most were mediocre at best, if not downright awful,” he writes. But he’s rooting for a remake of “The Computer Wore Tennis Shoes.”

Kristin Scott Thomas plays the mother in “My Mother’s Wedding,” which she co-wrote and directed. Scarlett Johansson, Sienna Miller, and Emily Beecham play the titular bride’s daughters. The result earns 3 stars from Henderson, who praises the way the screenplay “neatly juxtaposes its subplots with the joyous event that serves as its centerpiece.”

TV & Streaming

Chris Vognar has joined the Globe as TV/pop culture critic. SARAH HOFFMAN/STAFF PHOTOGRAPHER

The Globe’s new TV/pop culture critic, Chris Vognar. introduces himself this week. He says he aims “to see the pop culture forest for the trees — how this or that new series connects to this or that movie, or why everyone seems to be talking about that new song, or which books might touch on where we are as a culture.” Click through to learn more.

“Alien: Earth” takes “the gooey, over-extended ‘Alien’ [film] franchise” and delivers “gripping science fiction — and carefully layered drama." Creator Noah Hawley “uses some of the themes and ideas (and aliens) from the movies but never succumbs to the overtired cliches that freighted some of the later installments,” Vognar writes.

In its second season, “Wednesday” continues to turn Charles Addams’s brilliant intellectual property into fodder for a “generic supernatural teen drama.” Jenna Ortega remains “the best possible choice to play a modern Wednesday, and she makes some of the show’s wan attempts at humor palatable,” writes Globe correspondent Josh Bell.

The TV curmudgeon is a classic for a reason: “they react as many in the audience would react.” The Globe’s Don Aucoin considers “one of the most durable character types in all of television.” From two of the four “Golden Girls” to Harrison Ford’s character on “Shrinking” to Murphy Brown, “who fired nearly 100 secretaries,” it’s a delightfully dyspeptic bunch.

The Big Day

Boston residents Sapan Shah and Sai Strujan Guddibandi wed May 25 at the Huntington Theatre in Boston. J. NICHOLE CAPTURES

The Globe’s weddings column, The Big Day, tells stories of how couples found each other, fell in love, and said “I do.” Sapan Shah and Sai Srujan Gudibandi met on Tinder in 2022, and sparks flew. “I was expecting a long line of kissing frogs before I found a prince,” says Sapan, who had come out only recently. “But I started realizing that I had gotten really lucky.” Globe correspondent Rachel Kim Raczka has the lowdown on their “beautiful and brilliant” May wedding at Boston’s Huntington Theatre.

To apply to be featured, recently married and engaged couples (vow renewals and commitment ceremonies, too!) with ties to New England can click here for the application form.

Fan Expo Boston

Cosplayers gather at Fan Expo Boston. FAN EXPO

The closer you get to the convention center this weekend, the better you’ll understand that “fan” is short for “fanatic.” Fan Expo Boston unites fandoms for everything from “meeting your favorite celebrities to partying with other cosplayers.” The Globe’s Matt Juul spotlights five types of experiences, including foam fighting and celebrity meet-and-greets.

Jennifer Beals is on the Fan Expo schedule, having overcome her initial reluctance to appear in front of large crowds. Her first big fan event for “The L Word,” she tells Juul, “was extraordinary, like the love and care that the fans had for the show, the way they shared how much it meant to them.” And the Yale grad is no stranger to Boston — she’s a Celtics fan from way back.

Music

Author Peter Guralnick in his West Newbury home. JESSICA RINALDI/GLOBE STAFF

Both “The Colonel and the King” — Colonel Tom Parker and Elvis Presley — “believed there were no limits to what the two of them could achieve together.” In his new book, author Peter Guralnick “shows a Parker far more complex and creative than commonly understood,” writes the Globe’s Mark Feeney. Their Q&A offers an inside look.

This weekend sees the return of the “underground heavy music and arts festival” Somergloom to Medford and Somerville. “You hear people talk about ‘the metal community’ or ‘the hardcore community,’ and it really is this community that’s so much broader than any local scene,” founder Stephen LoVerne tells Globe correspondent Victoria Wasylak, writing for Sound Check.

If you hear “Nick Lowe” and think “Cruel to Be Kind,” he’s fine with that — “it’s actually fantastic just to have had a hit.” Ahead of a date next week in Natick, the 78-year-old chats with Globe correspondent Stuart Miller about his “Jesus of Cool” era, his latest album, and the “revelation” he experienced with an assist from Elvis Costello.

The Japanese art of taiko drumming “combines dynamic movement, compelling rhythms, and grace.” Odaiko New England, a small group with big drums and bigger sound, “is having a tough time finding a long-term rental space where they won’t annoy neighbors.” Globe correspondent Karen Feldscher looks at the organization’s search for a new home.

News that renaming Washington’s Kennedy Center is under consideration got the Globe’s A.Z. Madonna thinking. “What operas would [’the First Lady Melania Trump Opera House’] actually be able to stage?” One featuring “a leader who thinks he’s a god”? Or another about “the dangers of trusting quack doctors”? Or Mozart’s “Don Giovanni” — for reasons I won’t spoil.

Theater

Cal Mitchell as The Lion, Dana Cimone as Dorothy, D. Jerome as The Tinman, and Elijah Ahmad Lewis as The Scarecrow in the North American tour of "The Wiz." JEREMY DANIEL

The national tour of “The Wiz” is Boston bound, and superfan Odie Henderson has questions. He chats with director Schele Williams and Amber Ruffin, who updated the book, about what’s new in the 50-year-old musical, their favorite songs from the show, and Ruffin’s wish for “a full list of every Black person who is famous now, and has been in any production of ‘The Wiz.’”

Reminder: You have until Sunday to catch “As You Like It” on Boston Common. Globe reviewer Bob Abelman said Commonwealth Shakespeare Company’s production “stays true to Shakespeare’s prose and poetry.” And it’s free!

“The Meeting Tree,” by B. Elle Borders, closes Saturday. Globe theater critic Don Aucoin called the Company One Theatre production “a small gem of a play that deserves a much bigger audience.”

Museums & Visual Art

Constantine Manos, "Girls with Baby Carriages at Neighborhood Grocery, Mattapan, Boston, MA," 1976. COURTESY ROBERT KLEIN GALLERY

“Seeing Across Generations” brings together photographs by Constantine Manos, his student Stella Johnson, and her student Iaritza Menjivar. The 15 images by Manos, a longtime Boston resident who died in January, “give an exciting sense of how varied and expressive his work was,” writes the Globe’s Mark Feeney. At the Leica Gallery in the Back Bay.

Wild Knoll, in York, Maine, is a garden and “sanctuary for artists.” This week’s Working Artist, Carly Glovinski, planted it on the site of author May Sarton’s longtime home. “Wild Knoll has been a springboard for ambitious new artworks” by Glovinski, reports Globe correspondent Cate McQuaid, including one in Boston’s Seaport that incorporates glass mosaic and live plants.

Three photography exhibitions at the Bowdoin College Museum of Art capture Maine in all its variety — “coastal, agricultural, industrial, rural, urban, vacationland.” Images by Gordon Parks, John McKee, and Rudy Burckhardt, all outsiders to some degree, represent “[a]ll of those Maines,” Feeney writes from Brunswick.

Books

Jessica Francis Kane and the cover to her novel “Fonseca.” PENGUIN/BEOWULF SHEEHAN

“Fonseca,” by Jessica Francis Kane, is “a book brimming with entangled fiction, history, and biography.” Based on a visit by British author Penelope Fitzgerald to Mexico in 1952-53, it’s “a fable with heart and a searching investigation into what makes a marriage endure,” Globe reviewer Hamilton Cain writes.

Michael Thomas’s new memoir, “The Broken King,” required him to “say what I thought and felt directly without artifice.” The Hunter College English professor “paints a vivid, indelible portrait of growing up in Boston in the ’70s,” writes Globe correspondent Jeffrey Kelly. Says Thomas, “I think I’ve had a full and strangely absurd life.”

 View in Browser | Unsubscribe |  Manage Your Account | Terms of Service | Privacy Policy | Help Center

You're receiving this because you signed up for the newsletter or attended a related Globe event.