Best Bets the Week of August 21-27, 2025

Kids are back in school, and we’re well on our way to fall, even if it doesn’t feel like it temperature-wise. You can still beat the heat and avoid the rain with our mostly indoor best bets. This week, we’ve got world premiere dance works, bravura filmmaking, and live music. Keep reading for these and more below.

NobleMotion Dance returns to the MATCH tonight, August 21, at 7:30 p.m. with Pressure Point, a program featuring four world premieres and returning fan favorite KinkyKool Fan Blowing Hard. Andy Noble, NobleMotion’s co-artistic director with wife Dionne Sparkman Noble, recently told the Houston Press, “It moves quickly from one section to the next, and it gives you a taste of how we play with structure and form, how we play with line, how we play with a little bit of humor and being a little irreverent, how we play with metaphor, and how physical we want our dances to be. It showcases all of that in 12 minutes.” Additional performances are scheduled for 7:30 p.m. Friday, August 22, and Saturday, August 23. Thursday night’s performance is pay-what-you-can (minimum $5), with tickets to the other performances priced at $20 to $35. Tickets are available here.

Though the exact origin of the word mariachi is unknown, the “music is an unmistakable symbol of Mexico and Mexican culture throughout the world,” born from a long history “of revolution, urbanization, industrialization, yearning for the past, and the quest to forge a uniquely Mexican national identity.”  On Friday, August 22, at 7 p.m., you can hear some of the best mariachi musicians from across the state and some of the best ballet folklórico dancers when Performing Arts Houston opens the 6th Annual Mariachi Festival. Mariachi Imperial de America, Mexico en Danzas Grupo Folklórico, University of Houston Mariachi Pumas, and the Mariachi High School All-Star Group will open the three-day festival, with tickets available here for $29 to $149. The festival continues at 7 p.m. Saturday, August 23, and 3 p.m. Sunday, August 24.

If Magic Mike and Chippendales are your only points of reference for male exotic dancing, get a different perspective, one from South Central Los Angeles in the late 1980s until the early 2000s, in Name of the Game, a 2023 documentary directed by William Forbes and Douglas Skinner. The film is now making its way around art house theaters, including River Oaks Theatre, where it will screen on Friday, August 22, at 7:15 p.m., followed by a special Q&A with the filmmakers and documentary participants. Of the film, Skinner has said, “This is Black male exotic. It’s a little different. There’s not really a category or a lane for this. So, we said we’re going to be the ones to spearhead this and get this out.” Tickets to the screening can be purchased here for $16.

A host of special guests, including Houston Poet Laureate Emeritus Deborah D.E.E.P. Mouton, members of Houston Ebony Opera Guild and Houston Chamber Choir, will join Apollo Chamber Players at Miller Outdoor Theatre on Friday, August 22, at 8 p.m., when the ensemble presents With Malice Toward None. The program that will pull works from its 2021 album of the same name and newer pieces from their upcoming album BAN: Stories of Censorship, which will also be released Friday. The performance is free, and you can reserve a ticket here starting at 10 a.m. today, August 21, or you can plan to sit on the Hill, where no ticket is required. If you can’t make it out to Miller, the concert will be livestreamed on the Miller Outdoor Theatre website, YouTube channel, and Facebook page.

Houston leader Donna Fujimoto Cole went from a divorced 27-year-old with a young daughter and only $5,000 in the bank to the president and CEO of a company with revenues exceeding $80 million. Cole inspired Mandala, a trio choreographed by Nao Kusuzaki, a former Houston Ballet soloist and current executive and artistic director of Creative Minds Collaborative. On Saturday, August 23, at 2:30 p.m. at the MATCH, the organization will present Essays in Motion, a dance program also featuring a duet from Hayden Stark of Houston Ballet and dancer-choreographer Shohei Iwahama; a reworked version of Jennifer Mabus’s Tuning to Grace, originally created for 6 o’Clock Dance Theatre; and Kusuzaki’s world premiere She, Unfolding. The program will be performed a second time on Saturday at 6:30 p.m. Tickets can be purchased here for $20 to $30.

Saturday Night Live cast member Marcello Hernández made his first appearance as “Domingo” on the long-running sketch comedy show back in October and quickly went viral, with his “other man” character even popping up during SNL50: The Anniversary Celebration in another viral sketch featuring the likes of Sabrina Carpenter, Bad Bunny, and Pedro Pascal. Hernández continues to ride the wave of pop culture popularity with a recent role in Happy Gilmore 2 and a soon-to-be filmed Netflix stand-up special in his hometown of Miami, Florida. But if you can’t wait, on Saturday, August 23, at 7 p.m., you can enjoy Hernández’s stand-up set when he performs at Cullen Performance Hall. But if you want to see the show, you have to be quick: Only a few tickets remain here for $51 to $115.

When Akira Kurosawa’s High and Low made it to American shores in 1963, The New York Times declared it “one of the best detective thrillers ever filmed,” a sentiment that has not changed over the last 60 years (see Spike Lee’s recent reimagined Highest 2 Lowest with Denzel Washington and A$AP Rocky). Kurosawa’s film, adapted from an American pulp novel, finds the family of a wealthy Japanese industrialist the target of a kidnapping scheme, with the result “a model of its genre, pegged on a harassed man’s moral decision, laced with firm characterizations and tingling detail and finally attaining an incredibly colorful crescendo of microscopic police sleuthing.” The film will close the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston’s Akira Kurosawa: The Eternal Master series on Sunday, August 24, at 5 p.m. Tickets can be purchased here for $7 to $9.
Since its release in 2003, Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code has sold over 80 million copies and launched a three-film series starring Tom Hanks as protagonist Robert Langdon that has “made a combined $1.47 billion in worldwide box office.” On Sunday, August 24, at 6 p.m., you can catch the Harvard symbologist’s most popular adventure, which finds him going from a murder in the Louvre to a conspiracy with a secret about the Holy Grail at its heart, on the big screen when the Alley Theatre and Houston Cinema Arts Society present The Da Vinci Code at River Oaks Theatre. Tickets for the screening are available here for $16. And don’t miss The Da Vinci Code on stage when the Alley opens the play on Friday, September 19. You can learn more here.