July 15 - 21 - NYTimes.com IN 1980 the director Francis Ford Coppola - having weathered the logistical ordeal of shooting "Apocalypse Now" in the Philippines - was ready for a change. His next project, " ONE FROM THE HEART" (1982), playing Sunday at the Museum of the Moving Image as part of its indispensable See It Big! series, was a complete reversal: a deliriously fantastical confection, evoking MGM musicals and reveling in studio artifice. The production designer Dean Tavoularis recreated a glittering Las Vegas Strip; the brilliant Vittorio Storaro ("The Conformist") was the cinematographer; Kenny Ortega ("High School Musical") choreographed dance sequences; Tom Waits sang with Crystal Gayle on the soundtrack and composed the lush, Oscar-nominated score. The story - a working-class couple (Teri Garr and Frederic Forrest) bicker and separate (naturally, it's Independence Day), then reconsider - may be thin. But Ms. Garr, Raul Julia (as a dashing Latin lover) and Nastassja Kinski (as a beguiling circus acrobat) are in top form. Audiences stayed away, evidently not in a romantic mood. Don't make the same mistake. Catch this gem on a screen worthy of its scale. 3 p.m., 36-01 35th Avenue, Astoria, Queens; (718) 777-6888, movingimage.us. THE members of ALARM WILL SOUND, a dynamic new-music chamber orchestra formed in 2001 by graduates of the Eastman School of Music, trace their involvement with John Cage's circuslike magnum opus "Song Books" back to their student days. Now they are mounting an elaborately staged version of the work - conceived, designed and directed by Nigel Maister with musical direction by Rob Haskins - to conclude this year's River to River Festival. Sunday, Schimmel Center for the Arts, 3 Spruce Street, Lower Manhattan, (212) 219-9401, rivertorivernyc.com; free. Occupying what might be the opposite end of the aesthetic spectrum, "I Capuleti e i Montecchi," Bellini's version of the Romeo and Juliet story, has a relatively rare outing as part of the BEL CANTO AT CARAMOOR series. As ever, the conductor Will Crutchfield has assembled an estimable company: Eglise Gutiérrez as Giulietta, Kate Aldrich as Romeo, Leonardo Capalbo as Tebaldo and, behind it all, the Orchestra of St. Luke's. Saturday, 149 Girdle Ridge Road, Katonah, N.Y., (914) 232-1252, caramoor.org; $15 to $100. FOR fans of musical theater the summer has been mostly dispiriting, with an onslaught of closings on Broadway, the brilliant Audra McDonald on leave from "The Gershwins" Porgy and Bess" for extended vocal rest (she has now returned to the show) and only the imminent arrival of "Bring It On" to brighten the immediate horizon. So perhaps a road trip is in order, for the eagerly anticipated "FAR FROM HEAVEN," from the creative team behind "Grey Gardens." The Williamstown Theater Festival is hosting what is being described as a preview production of the musical, based on the Todd Haynes movie that paid luscious homage to the heavy-breathing 1960s melodramas of Douglas Sirk. The score is by the "Grey Gardens" team of Scott Frankel and Michael Korie, and Michael Greif once again is directing. Kelli O'Hara plays the central role of the 1950s housewife who finds her orderly life suddenly fraught with peril. "Far From Heaven" is already on the docket for the coming season at Playwrights Horizons - but can die-hard musical-theater lovers really bear to wait? I'm betting not, although you'd better act quickly: there are only 13 performances. Thursday through July 29, 1000 Main Street (Route 2), Williamstown, Mass., (413) 597-3400, wtfestival.org; $30 to $65. FOR Carol Channing, "the safest place in the world to be is center stage." And that's where she was determined to stand from childhood when, delivering The Christian Science Monitor to San Francisco theaters with her mother, Ms. Channing realized she was "walking on hallowed ground." In "CAROL CHANNING: LARGER THAN LIFE," Monday at 6:30 p.m. on Showtime, the filmmaker Dori Berinstein worships at the altar of the theatrical funny girl, now 91, who soared to stardom in 1949 as the diamond-loving Lorelei Lee in "Gentlemen Prefer Blondes" and performed her signature role, the widowed matchmaker Dolly Levi, which she originated in the Broadway hit "Hello, Dolly!," more than 5,000 times. The documentary also chronicles the genesis of the public persona - a madcap human bobblehead doll with saucer eyes fringed in fake lashes, outsized lips and a megawatt smile, and that voice, somewhere between Betty Boop and a fog horn - that spawned a thousand imitators. "You're the best Carol Channing I've ever seen," a stranger once told her, assuming she was a drag queen, before asking who she really was. "A truck driver from Toledo," came Ms. Channing's reply. THERE are Russians, and then there are Russian ballerinas from the Kirov. So observes the narrator in "The Cranes Dance," Meg Howrey's new novel about an emotionally unhinged soloist in a New York company. Ah, Americans and our fascination with dancers from the great European houses. You could replace "Russian" with "French" and "Kirov" with the "PARIS OPERA BALLET" and the sentence would work just as well, no? Especially as New Yorkers are now enjoying a marvelous treat: the Parisians have arrived at the Lincoln Center Festival (which has been on an international ballet kick; last year it was in fact the Kirov). You have one last chance, on Sunday, to catch the program of 20th-century French ballets by Serge Lifar, Roland Petit and Maurice Béjart. Then you have your choice of full-lengths. The (relatively) new is Pina Bausch's dance opera "Orpheus and Eurydice," which was first performed by the Parisians in 2005, and the (very) old is, what else, "Giselle," choreographed by Jean Coralli and Jules Perrot almost two centuries ago for the Paris Opera Ballet. Hmm. You might have to see both. Through July 22, David H. Koch Theater, (212) 721-6500, lincolncenter.org. THE NEW MUSEUM is always at its best in group theme shows, at least if the curator Massimiliano Gioni has anything to do with them. Last summer his show "Ostalgia," a survey of contemporary art from former Soviet-bloc countries, was one of the best exhibitions in the city in 2011. This summer's "GHOSTS IN THE MACHINE," which opens Wednesday and runs through Sept. 30, could have comparable status. Covering a half-century of work by some 70 artists, largely from Europe and the United States, it considers the interrelationship of humans and machines. For the occasion Mr. Gioni and his co-curator, Gary Carrion-Murayari, will give physical form to imaginary devices cooked up by the likes of Kafka and Roussel. They will assemble some of the components of the outsider artist Emery Blagdon's healing environment, originally built on his Nebraska farm. And they will consider the many varieties of optical experience that went into the creation of Op Art. Given the dominance of digital technology today, an exhibition theme that might have sounded science-fictional a few decades ago seems completely reality-based now. 235 Bowery, at Prince Street, Lower East Side, (212) 219-1222, newmuseum.org. The name is goofy, and not helped by the long nomenclature shadows cast by more successful bands like Foster the People and Cage the Elephant. Its performance at the 2011 MTV Movie Awards was a bit - shall we say? - unfocused. It was something like watching icebergs shear off into the sea with a huge splash, a combination of wow and oh dear. In 2010 Young the Giant released its self-titled debut album (on Roadrunner), and it's been oozing along under its own steam, every now and again squeezing out a single - a couple, like "Cough Syrup," sticky and great - slowly earning its keep. But the truth is this: Of bands with that absurd name structure, of newish major-label rock bands, of bands who crib shamelessly from the mopers of the late 1980s and early 1990s, Young the Giant is one of the finest. The Smiths and the Cure bubble up through this band's slick, downcast arrangements, which at their most polished recall the Killers, and at their most scuffed, suggest the Walkmen with a bigger budget. And obstacles be damned, it's working: the group's built enough momentum to headline SummerStage. Maybe it can finally get around to being a critic's darling now. 6:30 p.m. Monday, Rumsey Playfield, Central Park, midpark at 70th Street, (212) 360-2777, summerstage.org; sold out.