Nathan Weinbender

“The Ladies Foursome,” directed for the Modern Theater Spokane by Dawn Taylor Reinhardt, is a show that remains winsome and buoyant in the face of weighty, potentially melodramatic themes.

Damien Jurado didn’t initially set out for any of his albums to follow a narrative arc. Over the course of his last three records, the Seattle singer-songwriter has told a loose, impressionistic story of self-discovery and spiritual reawakening during a long cross-country expedition.

“The Ladies Foursome,” which opens Friday at the Modern Theater Spokane, is about a group of women who have been golfing together for many years, and it begins shortly after one of them has died. That makes it sound sad. Relax. It’s a comedy.

If you’re familiar with Pauly Shore, it’s likely because the comedian was briefly inescapable in the early to mid-’90s. Shore’s loud thrift store wardrobe and curly, shoulder-length hair made him a standout personality on MTV, as did his surfer dude patois, which inserted extra syllables into nearly every word.

When the two members of Portland alt-rock band the Helio Sequence entered the studio to record their sixth album, they took it as a challenge. Songwriters Brandon Summers and Benjamin Weikel gave themselves only two months to produce as many songs as they could, an approach they had never tried in their two decades of working together.

Mikal Vollmer is obsessed with the pop culture artifacts of his childhood – the action figures, comic books, trading cards, even the vintage cereal boxes. His art captures the aesthetics and attitudes of a bygone era, and his upcoming First Friday exhibition specifically taps into our adolescent fascination with the macabre.

The Spokane Symphony wraps up its 69th season this weekend, and the orchestra is going out with some musical fireworks. Titled “Blockbusters,” this Classics program features a trio of pieces that conductor Eckart Preu says could carry entire programs by themselves.

More summer music festivals announce lineups

Andy Mineo’s new album is titled “Uncomfortable,” and it’s a descriptor the New York-based rapper wears as a badge of honor.

P.I. Tchaikovsky’s 1878 Violin Concerto is as renowned as it is difficult, an oft-performed piece that requires tremendous dexterity and skill. It’s hard enough to play with both feet on the ground, so consider the challenge of performing it while being hoisted a hundred feet into the air. That’s the task of violinist Veronica Gan, who will play that great Tchaikovsky composition this weekend as part of the touring musical circus troupe Cirque Musica. The concert, which will also feature the Spokane Symphony, marries acrobatic movement with famous pieces of classical music.

Prince’s “Purple Rain” returns to the big screen

Legendary crooner Johnny Mathis hits the stage at the INB Performing Arts Center on Sunday, the latest stop on a tour celebrating his sixth decade in show business. Mathis, who turned 80 last year, doesn’t have any plans to retire or slow down, and you get the sense that he’s still something of a perfectionist: He even says that he would have preferred that some of the long lost tracks on his latest singles collection had remained lost.

Richard Stoltzman is generally considered one of the most accomplished clarinetists working today, and the Grammy-winning musician will appear with the Gonzaga Symphony Orchestra on Monday. Under the direction of conductor Kevin Hekmatpanah, Stoltzman will be performing Aaron Copland’s Clarinet Concerto, Benny Goodman’s signature tune “Goodbye” and a medley of songs from the musical “West Side Story.”

Samuel D. Hunter’s “A Bright New Boise” is likely going to play differently for Coeur d’Alene audiences than it did when it ran in New York and L.A. The play is set in the break room of a Hobby Lobby craft store in Boise and it deals with themes of fundamentalist religion while also developing a comic portrait of 9-to-5 retail drudgery.

Hearing the details of the journey that led Jeremy McComb to a full-time music career, you almost feel like you’re listening to one of his country songs. The Idaho native performs on Friday at Nashville North, a country music club in Stateline, Idaho, that he co-owns. It’s a location that plays heavily into McComb’s upbringing, much of which was spent in venues and concert halls where his musician father, Bob McComb, played gigs every week.

Mixi Demner formed her band Stitched Up Heart after enduring her own personal heartbreak. The project was something of a coping mechanism, but she also wanted it to serve as an antidote to the mostly downbeat, glowering metal that seemed to be everywhere. The L.A. band will perform at the Knitting Factory this weekend, part of a jam-packed lineup in the ongoing Too Broke to Rock concert series.

The Thermals have been performing and touring since the early 2000s, but the band played for perhaps its largest crowd just last month. During a rally for presidential candidate Bernie Sanders in the band’s hometown of Portland, the indie rock trio took the stage with an acoustic version of their 2009 “Now We Can See” for a crowd of nearly 12,000 people. The Thermals return to Spokane to play the Bartlett this weekend, where they last performed there in early 2014, just a few months after the venue opened.

Written by Ken Ludwig and slickly directed for the Civic by Wes Deitrick, “The Fox on the Fairway” comfortably takes on the form of a classic farce: It combines the witty social satire of “The Importance of Being Earnest” with the in one door, out the other physical comedy of “Noises Off,” with a dash of “Fawlty Towers” thrown in.

The members of Rabbit Wilde all grew up in Mount Vernon, Washington, a town of about 32,000 that sits an hour north of Seattle. But the four-piece neo-folk outfit didn’t officially form until three of its members had moved to New York City. Miranda Zickler’s bandmates are brothers Zach and Nathan Hamer, and they began performing as a trio in 2012; cellist Jillian Walker, a childhood friend of Zickler’s, joined the group in 2013. Rabbit Wilde takes the stage at the Big Dipper this weekend, and the concert will serve as a fundraiser for community radio station KYRS.