Your weekly guide to staying entertained any day of the week

July 3, 2025

Welcome back to The Big To-Do. You’re not imagining things — the newsletter is arriving a day early to help you make the most of the long Independence Day weekend. The holiday weather forecast looks spectacular, followed by a dry weekend. Remember those? This is a good time to make some plans for the rest of the all-too-short summer, and you’ll find tons of suggestions in the Globe’s Summer Arts Guide and Summer Reading Guide.

Fourth of July

A view of the Boston Pops Fireworks Spectacular at the Hatch Memorial Shell along the Charles River Esplanade on July 4, 2024. Danielle Parhizkaran/Globe Staff

New England’s second-best holiday (#TeamPatriotsDay) kicks off the year-long countdown to the 250th anniversary of the United States. On the Esplanade, the Boston Pops Fireworks Spectacular caps off a concert headlined by LeAnn Rimes and Leslie Odom Jr. The Globe’s Matt Juul has the scoop on everything from “how to watch from home to tips to seeing the festivities live.”

“We design oohs and ahhs,” says fireworks designer Matt Shea of Pyrotecnico. This week’s Working Artist has concocted the Mugar Family Fireworks since 2000, nine years after he caught fireworks fever. “Pyromusicals were new, and I started working with clients on their music. Then it became understanding the scripting side,” he tells Globe correspondent Cate McQuaid. “I fell into the design part just because I was on the ground floor.”

The fireworks over the Charles are indeed spectacular, but joining the throngs on the Esplanade isn’t for everyone. To find pyrotechnics closer to you, check out this list of summer fireworks displays in Massachusetts compiled by Globe correspondent Sarah Mesdjian (July 3 listings start on page 4).

Beyond the Pops and fireworks, keep an eye out for “sharks, fiddles, smash burgers, velociraptors.” Starting with Boston Harborfest, Globe correspondent Lauren Daley finds “a smorgasbord of fun this weekend in Boston and beyond.”

Movies

Eva Victor in “Sorry, Baby.” A24

“Sorry, Baby” earns 4 stars from Globe film critic Odie Henderson, who calls it “funny, poignant, and one of the year’s best films.” Writer-director-star Eva Victor’s debut feature is the story of Agnes, an academic coping with the effects of being sexually assaulted by her adviser. “Told in chapters that highlight a specific year of events, the film drifts back and forth in time, capturing little moments that register long after you’ve left the theater.”

The latest Jurassic Something-or-Other movie, “Jurassic World Rebirth,” “takes a great [Steven] Spielberg movie and betrays it with an inferior piece of fan service.” Scarlett Johansson plays a mercenary, Henderson writes in a 2-star review, though not as well as Mahershala Ali. And “they’re both upstaged by [Jonathan] Bailey, who brings a refreshing take on the science geek.”

In “The Old Guard 2,” Uma Thurman “is again making mayhem.” The “Pulp Fiction” and “Kill Bill” star chats with the Globe’s Mark Shanahan about her upbringing in Western Mass., realizing early in her career that “I was going to have very limited options if I didn’t really learn how to be a character actress,” and working with Charlize Theron (“it’s people like that who are trailblazers.”)

The new “Superman” movie, starring David Corenswet and Rachel Brosnahan, opens July 11. Writer-director James Gunn, also co-chairman and co-CEO of DC Studios, has been a Superman superfan since childhood. “I know that, when I do something my way authentically, that it is always going to be its own thing, it’s not going to be somebody else’s Superman,” he tells the Globe’s Matt Juul.

TV & Streaming

Kevin Hart as Gordon "Chicken Man" Williams and Taraji P. Henson as Vivian Thomas in "Fight Night: The Million Dollar Heist." Fernando Decillis/PEACOCK

In the shadow of series like “The Last of Us” and “The White Lotus,” lower-profile shows are delivering high-quality entertainment. Some big names — Taraji P. Henson, Cate Blanchett, Kevin Hart, and Kevin Kline among them — have found their way to the small screen lately. Globe correspondent Chris Vognar selects “a dozen recent shows that might have slunk under your radar, from documentaries to sci-fi dramas to surrealist comedy.”

“Jaws” is 50, and the fuss over the anniversary has left few angles unexplored. But “[l]ittle attention has been paid to the twofold role television played in its massive success,” writes the Globe’s Mark Feeney. Its unconventional marketing plan “meant that Hollywood wasted little time adopting TV advertising as its preferred method for publicizing high-profile releases.” And TV “provided the training ground for its young director,” one Steven Spielberg.

The Big Day

Somerville residents Grant Schleifer and Nathan Alexander wed on June 6, at the Boston Public Garden. Jeff Smith

The Globe’s weddings column, The Big Day, tells stories of how couples found each other, fell in love, and said “I do.” Grant Schleifer and Nathan Alexander matched on Tinder in 2023, when Grant was a medical resident with a jam-packed schedule. Before long, they were sharing candlelit dinners and mid-shift meals, and barely a year after their first date, Grant proposed. “Nathan is so special, and so unique, I knew I could make that commitment to him,” he says. They married in May in the Public Garden, and Globe correspondent Rachel Kim Raczka has the heart-warming details.

To apply to be featured, recently married and engaged couples (vow renewals and commitment ceremonies, too!) with ties to New England can click here for the application form.

Music

Dropkick Murphys' Ken Casey performs at Boston Calling on May 26, 2023. Erin Clark/Globe Staff

The new Dropkick Murphys album, “For the People,” drops Friday. It includes some songs “written in better times,” frontman Ken Casey tells the Globe’s Matt Juul, but also extensively addresses “the most serious moment that has arisen since a band that speaks out politically has been around.” To those who prefer their music without politics, the Milton native says, “This is what Dropkick Murphys has been about from the very start.”

Topping Billboard’s classical album chart is the soundtrack to the video game “Clair Obscur: Expedition 33.” Yes, really. “The composer behind most of the music is French guitarist Lorien Testard, a self-professed game music fanatic who had never created music for a major game before,” writes the Globe’s resident expert on video-game music, A.Z. Madonna. A fascinating exploration of an unexpected phenomenon.

Cover bands “share one common denominator: good vibes.” Surveying the “thriving network of cover bands in and around Boston,” Globe correspondent James Sullivan finds the best “regional bands that function like live-action jukeboxes.” Says Run for Covers singer Matt Corona, “We get an itch to write a new song once in a while, but it goes away.”

A gorgeous historic property maintained by The Trustees makes “a unique setting for guests in search of fresh air, family-friendly entertainment, or a break from cramped club shows.” Globe correspondent Victoria Wasylak, writing for Sound Check, offers a look at concert series like the one at the Crane Estate in Ipswich, which Entrain drummer and founder Tom Major calls “a favorite of the band and our fans.”

Theater

Ali Ewoldt (Guenevere) and the ensemble of "Camelot." Daniel Rader

By virtue of “sheer dynamism,” Barrington Stage Company’s “Camelot” attains “a level it would not otherwise reach.” Credit Ken Wulf Clark (King Arthur), Ali Ewoldt (Guenevere), and Emmett O’Hanlon (Lancelot), who “sing with power, clarity, and, when suitable, beauty,” Globe theater critic Don Aucoin writes from Pittsfield. It’s a worthy addition to the company’s tradition of “injecting fresh energy into golden-age musicals.”

The latest play in Mfoniso Udofia’s nine-part Ufot Family Cycle brings the Boston Arts Academy and Wheelock Family Theatre into the city-wide endeavor. “Kufre n’ Quay,” the fifth play in the cycle, opens next week, with Levi Mngomezulu of Newton and BAA student Ngolela Kamanampata in leading roles. “The youth, they’re like lights,” Udofia tells Globe correspondent Christopher Wallenberg. “They bring me so much joy.”

As the movie that inspired it turns 40, “Back to the Future: The Musical” heads to Boston. The Broadway hit takes advantage of the new genre. “One of the things that we were very resolute about was that we did not want this stage production to be a carbon copy of the movie,” says Bob Gale, who co-wrote the 1985 film and co-developed the musical. Ahead of Tuesday’s opening, Christopher Wallenberg has a preview.

Blue Man Group concludes its run in Boston on Sunday after 30 years. The Globe’s Meredith Goldstein, who had never seen the show, ventured to the Charles Playhouse last week “to say hello and goodbye at once.” Over the years, “I always noticed that even when people made a joke about Blue Man Group — the way people joke about anything when it becomes mainstream — they never suggested it wasn’t good or worthy of being seen.” A lovely look back.

Museums & Visual Art

Benjamin West, "Penn's Treaty with the Indians," 1771–72. Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia

“Making History,” at the Peabody Essex Museum, spans 200 years in just 86 pieces from the collection of the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts. The exhibition “can’t offer much more than a skim of a complex and fractious national narrative still being fought over — and maybe never more than right now — but it’s a meaningful one,” writes Globe art critic Murray Whyte.

In “Wild Flowers of New England,” at the Boston Athenaeum, the ephemeral subjects “are so precise and exactingly rendered as to give each specimen a nearly geological heft.” Edwin Hale Lincoln (1848-1938) “once described himself as ‘a pretty good photographer but a poor botanist,’” writes the Globe’s Mark Feeney. “[A]nyone looking at these images can see how modest he was being about his artistry.”

“Falling Apart Conceptually” spotlights diverse work by eight contemporary artists, united by the way “our perceptions create a completely different lived experience from person to person.” Gallerist Renee Anderson tells Globe correspondent Jeffrey Kelly, “Much of this exhibition is about finding comfort and humor within that ambiguity.” At Anderson Yezerski Gallery in the South End.

Books

Sophie Elmhirst and the cover to her book “A Marriage at Sea.” Sophie Davidson/Penguin Group

“A Marriage at Sea: A True Story of Love, Obsession, and Shipwreck” is about Maurice and Maralyn Bailey, a British couple whose yacht capsized in the Pacific Ocean in 1973. Author Sophie Elmhirst “has fashioned it into a fascinating narrative,” writes Globe reviewer Laurie Hertzel. “She divides the book roughly into thirds — their lives before the journey, their four months on the water, and their lives afterward.” Four months!

Narrating “Vera, or Faith” from the perspective of the 10-year-old title character, Gary Shteyngart “brilliantly apes the agile, almost hyperactive, sponge brain of a child.” Set in a near-future world “that grows dismayingly nearer with each passing day,” the novel “looks at growing up in a country born out of the past decade’s political and psychological turmoil,” writes Globe reviewer Cory Oldweiler.

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