Opens Friday: Mindplay at Arena Stage

“You can do terrible things with this,” Vinny DePonto shares about his skills as a mentalist. “Or you can make people feel less alone in their own heads, a sort of collective catharsis. That’s what the show is an attempt to do.” We are discussing Mindplay, which takes Arena Stage following rave reviews from the production’s run at Geffen Playhouse in Los Angeles. In our interview DePonto repeatedly says he doesn’t want to give too much away when he’s pressed for specific questions about the show. A mentalist never gives away his tricks, fair enough. But he’s personable, soft-spoken, and charming, all seen in various clips of his mind reading available online. Mindplay is partially autobiographical: DePonto shares how he inherited a magic kit from his paternal grandfather who passed away when his father was still young, how he learned more about his grandfather through the process and enjoyed performing illusions to entertain his family, and how he delved into the psychology of the mind and memory during his maternal grandfather’s battle with dementia. DePonto, who studied theater and psychology, has found a suitably unique way of intertwining the two (he’s also been an illusion consultant for the recent Angels in America revival on Broadway). It’s no surprise really that he thinks a little bit of everyday magic is important for the psyche. “Mysteries help us to expand ourselves, our minds and our souls,” DePonto says. “We live in an age of certainty when we have every answer at our fingertips. I’m proposing that we carve out more ways that we can stumble into wonder and mystery.” One way to approach Mindplay is not as a one-man show, but as a two-hander with each audience member becoming an integral player. He admits that a mind reader without a participatory audience is just speaking questions and commands from a stage. (Even over the phone, he offers to perform a small feat of mind control by coaxing my fingertips to slowly converge as he repeatedly suggests invisible threads pulling them together.) Unlike a comedic hypnotist, he promises not to embarrass participants by snapping his fingers and turning anyone into a clucking chicken, but rather to meaningfully engage with audience members, developing an easy rapport and suspending disbelief, sharing some of his own stories of wonder and connection, reminding us of the forgotten senses of awe and curiosity, and together creating a bit of magic. Mindplay opens Jan. 19 and runs through March 3 at Arena Stage, 1101 6th St. SW. arenastage.org. $41–$95. —Colleen Kennedy

Saturday: Making Memories: A Journey Through Dementia at Dance Place

Music, dance, and memory are somehow tied together. Harvard recommends dancing for reducing dementia risk. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention suggests that dancing improves brain health. And who could forget the viral video of an elderly woman with memory loss hearing the Swan Lake score and dancing the choreography once more from her chair? Choreographer Mark Tomasic, whose mother has Alzheimer’s disease, created “Proof” to stir his mother’s memory, the way Swan Lake stirred the former ballerina. The choreography in “Proof” tracks his parents’ courtship, focusing on a day Tomasic’s father, a pilot, took her up in a plane. “He reenacted some of those moments and a movement structure that he recalled alongside her,” says Mary Verdi–Fletcher, president and founding artistic director of the Dancing Wheels Company. “Proof” is part of the company’s upcoming program at Dance Place called Making Memories: A Journey Through Dementia, which also includes a second Tomasic piece, “Three 4 Ann.” To build the program, Verdi-Fletcher wanted to weave in the stories of people like Tomasic who care for loved ones with Alzheimer’s and dementia. So they pulled together a community group in Cleveland, Ohio—where Dancing Wheels is based—of families, health providers, and community volunteers. “We created video montages with interviews from these families and the caregivers and medical staff,” says Verdi-Fletcher. “We created classes to work with both the family members and patients together.” The dances and the stories will be presented alongside one another and the show will also include a live testimonial from choreographers, resources from local D.C. and national memory care organizations, and a postshow talk with memory care professionals. Making Memories: A Journey Through Dementia starts at 4 p.m. on Jan. 20 at Dance Place, 3225 8th St. NE. danceplace.com. $10–$30. —Mary Scott Manning

Sunday, Monday, and Tuesday: Cowboy Bebop at AFI

Pop culture works in mysterious ways. For instance, the Cowboy Bebop TV series was initially green-lit to make a quick buck off the space opera renaissance that was supposed to accompany the release of The Phantom Menace in the late ’90s. But instead of ending up in the bargain bin of history with all the other Star Wars knock offs, Bebop ended up doing more to influence the future of sci-fi and action than George Lucas’ whole prequel trilogy. (If you said “what about Clone Wars?” after reading the previous sentence, you need to rethink your media diet and life choices.) Created by anime legend Shinichiro Watanabe, Bebop is a galaxy-spanning adventure story featuring space battles, superweapons, and the one element that almost all sci-fi, even really good sci-fi, lacks: a sense of effortless cool, infused into the show via Watanabe’s love of noir, westerns, and, as the title promises, jazz. The plot of the Cowboy Bebop movie, which was released in 2001 and takes place between episodes 22 and 23 of the show, finds bounty hunters Spike and Jet looking for a job that will expand their diets beyond a daily wet-feeding of cup of ramen. In pursuit of their new bounty, they and their fellow passengers on the spacecraft Bebop (Faye Valentine, their sometimes-accomplice, and technology expert Edward) end up tangled in a bloody dispute between a pharmaceutical company and an ex-military bioterrorist. From there, the story plays out pretty much how you’d expect … But you don’t watch Cowboy Bebop for the story. You watch it for the action, for the vibes, for the gorgeous ship designs from Kimitoshi Yamane. You watch it for futuristic cities, where Blade Runner skylines loom over Taxi Driver alleys that give way to Raiders of the Lost Arc bazaars. Above all, you watch it for the interplay between the animation and the music, untouched to this day by imitators destined to clog the bargain bins of history while our titular space cowboy flies off into the sunset. Cowboy Bebop plays at 4:45 p.m. on Jan. 21, 7 p.m. on Jan. 22, and 9:15 p.m. on Jan. 23 at AFI Silver, 8633 Colesville Rd., Silver Spring. silver.afi.com. $8–$13. —Will Lennon

Tuesday: Hotline TNT at the 9:30 Club

One of the biggest disappointments of last year’s Riot Fest was the last-minute cancellation of New York’s Hotline TNT due to a rain delay. The band’s 2023 album, Cartwheel, was one of the best indie rock records of the year and I was desperate to hear how its distorted melodies would soar above a festival crowd. And while there’s no shortage of bands currently mining ’90s alternative rock for inspiration, Hotline TNT’s take—a little My Bloody Valentine, a dash of Midwestern emo—coheres into an immediately infectious whole, giving Cartwheel the feel of an album that could get stuck in your car’s six-disc CD changer and you’d be glad it did. One of the songs I have my fingers crossed for the band to play when they open for Wednesday on Tuesday at the 9:30 Club is “Out of Town,” which takes the syrupy jangle of the Lemonheads and runs it through J Mascis’ Marshall stacks to create two minutes of pure, fuzzed-out bliss. Hotline TNT, opening for Wednesday, play at 8 p.m. on Jan. 23 at the 9:30 Club, 815 V St. NW. 930.com. Sold out. —Matt Siblo

Wednesday: Oliver Tree at The Anthem

Oliver Tree is living his best life. Leading into the North American leg of the musician’s Alone in a Crowd world tour, named for the album he dropped in September, he played a DJ set aboard a luxury vessel navigating Antarctica and scaled the Great Wall of China. In some ways, such feats are tame compared to his usual antics riding the world’s biggest scooter or wrestling Bobby Lee on the comedian’s podcast—whatever it takes to go viral. Tree seems to acknowledge the monster he’s created on the self-aware, acoustic-turned-synth-pop track “Strangers.” There he bemoans: “I turned into what I hated/ But I can’t escape my own fate/ In the mirror I’m betrayed, when I am staring at my own face/ It’s hard to believe, the more friends you have the better/ It’s never what it seems, I feel more alone than ever.” Tree’s artistic endeavors have given rise to a Cerberus comprised of three eccentric, often volatile personas, one for each of his albums: scooter boy Turbo, cowboy Shawney Bravo, and now fashion designer Cornelius Cummings. Each will be on display at Tree’s performance, which he’s described as a cross between a movie, TV show, concert and play complete with wrestling, standup, motivational speaking and, yes, scooter stunts. Rather than making a scene, Tree is aiming for a spectacle and showing another side to himself in the process. Alone in a Crowd includes a love song, “Essence”, a rarity for the artist with funk elements that hints at a new creative wellspring. Only time will tell what fresh persona emerges from the ether. Oliver Tree plays at 8 p.m. on Jan. 24 at The Anthem, 901 Wharf St. SW. theanthemdc.com. $45–$85. —Dave Nyczepir