Mark Morris Dance Group, The Hard Nut. Finally on DVD, the 1992 TV version of Morris’ modern-dance Nutcracker, a postmodern, pop-inflected rethinking of the Tchaikovsky ballet. Don’t be fooled by the campy touches: The Hard Nut is funny, touching, deeply felt, and choreographically ingenious to the highest degree (TT).

Hangover Square/The Lodger. The first DVD release of John Brahm’s much-admired but infrequently screened mid-Forties thrillers, both featuring first-rate scores (Bernard Herrmann scored Hangover Square, Hugo Friedhofer The Lodger) and spectacularly sinister performances by Laird Cregar. The three-disc package also includes a third Brahm film, The Undying Monster, and a wealth of interesting bonus features. Splendid stuff (TT).

The Dining Room (Clurman, 410 W. 42, closes Saturday). A lovely revival by the Keen Company of A.R. Gurney’s 1982 play–it’s really a string of interlocking sketches–about the decline and fall of the American WASP. Most of the sketches are comic, but the effect is intensely elegiac, for Gurney has mixed feelings about the upper middle class that spawned him, and he isn’t afraid to let them show. The six actors in the excellent cast play a total of fifty-seven people, all of them portrayed with telling exactitude (TT).

Erin McKeown, Lafayette (Signature Sounds). Our favorite rocker, live at New York’s Joe’s Pub in January of 2007 with a smoking-hot band. If you’ve never seen McKeown on stage, this CD will give you a very good idea of what you’ve been missing all these years. I was there, and this is exactly how it was (TT).

Alex Ross, The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century (FSG, $30). A major new history of modern classical music, written from a passionately anti-ideological point of view by a critic-blogger with a lively style and an above-average endowment of common sense. By far the best and most reliable account of musical modernism ever to be published (TT).

Sunshine. Its influences are myriad and apparent–from Tarkovsky to Kubrick to Ridley Scott–but Danny Boyle’s space-set thriller synthesizes them deftly and adds enough inventions of its own to carve out a distinctive aesthetic. Of all the destinations cinematic space voyagers have set their sights on, the sun has to be the one with the most raw power to exhilarate the imagination; Sunshine has visual
potency to match (OGIC).

The New Friends of Rhythm: 1939-1947 Performances (Hep). This delectable CD contains the complete commercial recordings–never before reissued in any format–of one of the wittiest chamber ensembles ever to cut a 78. Alan Shulman, a cellist with Toscanini’s NBC Symphony and a part-time composer of no small accomplishment, penned a series of lightly swinging versions of such familiar classics as the Marriage of Figaro Overture (“The Barber’s Hitch”) and the first movement of the Tchaikovsky Violin Concerto (“Fable in Sable”), all scored for harp, string quartet, and jazz rhythm section, with clarinetist Buster Bailey sitting in on three sides. Now they’re available on a CD, augmented by five 1939 radio broadcast performances. Even if you don’t usually go in for jazzed-up classics, these ultra-rare recordings will charm your socks off (TT).

Kate Christensen, The Great Man (Doubleday, $23.95). The latest from the author of Jeremy Thrane is a smart, sly tale of two would-be biographers who duel over the corpse of a famous painter, aided and abetted by his wife, mistress, and sister. Some of the trompe l’oeil effects (like the introductory New York Times obit) are a little out of focus, but the book proper is an impressive and entertaining piece of storytelling that adds further luster to Christensen’s reputation as one of New York’s most interesting young novelists (TT).