Newsday Critic's Picks

May 30, 2004

Glenn Gamboa's Pop Music Picks

Madonna (June 16-17, 20-21, 23-24 at Madison Square Garden; July 7-8 at Continental Airlines Arena). Madonna, the musical Mother of Reinvention, is poised to strike again. Her last tour, The Drowned World Tour, was serious and artsy, focusing on grand themes and elaborate experimental dance numbers.

May 30, 2004

Ariella Budick's Art Picks

Lee Bontecou: A Retrospective (July 30). Bontecou made it big in the '60s with the wall reliefs she cobbled together from canvas laundry conveyer belts and steel pipes. Besotted critics likened them to airplane engines, female private parts or abstracted monsters.

May 30, 2004

Justin Davidson's Classical Music Picks

Music Festival of the Hamptons (begins July 9). There's not much in the way of pastures left on the East End, but the Music Festival of the Hamptons, already a fixture in its seventh year, colonizes a bucolic field in Bridgehampton for a couple of weeks each July, serving cocktails and chamber music beneath a civilized tent.

May 30, 2004

Linda Winer's NYC Theater Picks

Much Ado About Nothing. Free Shakespeare in Central Park this summer begins previews June 22 and opens July 13, with Kristen Johnston as Beatrice and Jimmy Smits as the woman-hating Benedick. Want more big names? Sam Waterston, who was a stage creature years before "Law & Order," returns to Shakespeare, this time with his daughter, Elisabeth Waterson, as Hero.

May 30, 2004

John Habich's Dance Picks

No "virtual orchestra" for the kaleidoscopically inventive choreographer Mark Morris. His Brooklyn-based Mark Morris Dance Group will give its 600th consecutive performance to live music with the world premiere of his "Seven Visions," a work for 15 dancers.