The Frick Exhibiting ‘Fast Cars and Femmes Fatales’; ‘One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest’ at Barebones (Wed., 4/27/16)

Sky boys: young Gérard Willemetz and Lartigue’s son Dani, 1926.

1) If you’ve ever found it fascinating to leaf through albums of old photographs, try the exhibit now on the walls at the Frick Art Museum. Fast Cars and Femmes Fatales is a rare major showing of photos by Jacques Henri Lartigue, the late French artist whose high-flying lifestyle featured those two pursuits, among others. Lartigue was an early master of candid on-the-scene photography, and not only are his pictures artistically striking, they tell intriguing stories. The photos displayed here span the opening decades of the 1900s—times of rapid change like our own—so that strolling the exhibit is like a trip through version 1.0 of the modern world emerging. There are pix of young folks thrilling to the hot new sport of “motoring.” Aviation was a very risky extreme sport, as other scenes attest. And Lartigue’s photos of women, taken at times from the corsets-and-frills era through the Roaring Twenties and beyond, show more than how fashions were changing. They show how women were starting to change. Admission to the Frick Art Museum is free. 10 a.m. – 5 p.m. Through May 15 at 7227 Reynolds Ave., Point Breeze. (MV)

2) What would happen if the inmates really tried to run the asylum? Ken Kesey posed that question memorably in his 1962 novel One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. The wild story unfolds in a psychiatric hospital similar to the place where Kesey, early in his writing career, had worked as a night-shift aide—and where he was introduced to LSD in a CIA-sponsored study of the use of drugs for mind control. The movie version of Cuckoo’s Nest (starring a young Jack Nicholson, above) is a classic but the stage play, by Dale Wasserman, has a unique power of its own: When live actors perform this drama, you feel as if you’re right there in the ward with them. Pittsburgh’s barebones productions is reviving One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, a tale that remains as hilarious and ultimately hair-raising as ever. 8 p.m. Continues through May 7. At the New Hazlett Theater, 6 Allegheny Square East, North Side. (MV)

3) Batman vs. Superman: Dawn of Justice – I know what you’re thinking, aren’t Batman and Superman supposed to be the good guys? What in the world do they have to fight about—cape envy? But I’m sure thousands of fanboys are frantically sending me abusive texts to set me right; in the last Superman, movie Man of Steel, ol’ blue eyes saved the planet but in the process destroyed most of Metropolis and alienated the populace. (People are ungrateful wretches, aren’t they?) Meanwhile somewhere in Gotham City Batman is watching and starts to worry that Superman is getting a little too big for his spandex britches. So for reasons that only make sense if you work in the film industry, the two start fighting with each other.

Need more? Lex Luthor shows up with a new killing machine so Clark and Bruce have to kiss and make up and give Lex the heave-ho … with the help of Wonder Woman. (Oh, did I forget to mention that Wonder Woman’s in it too?) It may sound like a bunch of hooey, but heavens they’ve certainly lined up a cast of heavy hitters: Henry Cavill, Ben Affleck, Gal Gadot, Amy Adams, Diane Lane, Jesse Eisenberg, Michael Shannon, Jeremy Irons, Holly Hunter, and Laurence Fishburne. If you ask me, the real superhero is the poor schmuck who drew up all those contracts. Check Fandango for screens and times. (TH)

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