sundry items

If you've been to see The Lady in the Van, and you're in an Alan Bennett frame of mind, BBC 4 Extra is running the 1994 radio version of An Englishman Abroad, with Penelope Wilton as the actress Coral Browne and Michael Gambon as the spy Guy Burgess.

Sure, it's March, you could go see any of a gazillion fine but inevitable Irish bands, or you could check out one of the finest setar/shurangiz players extant, Iranian multi-instrumentalist Sahba Motallebi, who'll be playing this Friday at (le) poisson rouge. Show starts with our local heroes KoriSoron at 7:30pm ET, and for those beyond NYC it will be live streamed somewhere here.

A decade or so and many a touring mile from the first time we saw it at Vergennes town hall, a reworked and expanded Hadestown, Anaïs Mitchell's telling of the Orpheus myth, opens in late May, waaay downtown at New York Theatre Workshop. Here's what it looked like five years ago at the aforementioned lpr