Hartwood Acres Hosts Guster; ‘Everybody’ Onstage at 12 Peers (Sun., 8/4/19)

1) Local trio Meeting of Important People open for Guster as part of the Allegheny County Summer Concert Series at Hartwood Acres Park Amphitheater. Meeting of Important People is celebrating 10 years since releasing its debut LP and playing a cardboard city. Guster may be from Boston, but the band loves Pittsburgh. Mayor Bill Peduto joined the members on stage for an impromptu song at the 2016 Dollar Bank Three Rivers Arts Festival. They have been active since 1991, scoring hits which you may know by ear if not by name. (“Satellite,” from 2006’s Ganging Up on the Sun, is one.) 2019’s Look Alive is their latest studio LP. Free. 7:30 p.m. 4070 Middle Rd., Allison Park. (CM)

2) Remakes in live theater are not like remakes in the movies. Typically the original is over 100 years old, sometimes much older. Most modern remakes keep the plot outline and major characters but essentially create a new play, and many are very good. Recent highlights in Pittsburgh theater have included Stupid Fucking Bird (from Chekhov’s The Seagull), The Liar (from Corneille’s 1644 comedy of that title), and An Octoroon (from the 1859 race melodrama). Now comes a new version of a real oldie.  Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, the New York-based playwright and Octoroon remaker, has one called Everybody. This is an update of Everyman, the morality play that was popular in the 1500s, when many people weren’t particularly interested in repenting but would watch it being done on stage. Like the original, Everybody is allegorical. Characters include God, Time, Friendship, Stuff, and Death. Unlike the original, Everybody was a finalist for the 2018 Pulitzer Prize, and it is existential and experimental. Are you ready? 12 Peers Theater presents Everybody in the Richard E. Rauh Studio Theatre in the Cathedral of Learning. 2 p.m. Performances continue through August 18. 4200 Forbes Ave., Oakland. (MV) 

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