Hudson Hall’s newly announced fall season reaches across music, theater, visual art, and community programming, but three events carry particular voltage: an evening with boundary-demolishing performer Taylor Mac, a 50th-anniversary celebration of the magazine that gave punk its name, and the Hudson debut of mentalist and theater artist Vinny DePonto.
Mac opens the season September 26 alongside longtime collaborator Matt Ray with “An Evening from the Queer Songbook.” The pair are best known for “A 24-Decade History of Popular Music,” their audacious, Pulitzer Prize-nominated, 24-hour excavation of American history through song. Their Hudson Hall appearance coincides with the publication of Bark of Millions, an illustrated songbook collecting Mac’s lyrics and Ray’s music from their theatrical work of the same name.
The performance offers another chance to see Mac close to home. The MacArthur Fellow, who lives locally, opened Ancram Center for the Arts’ 2026 season in collaboration with fellow MacArthur Fellow Heather Christian. At Hudson Hall, Mac and Ray will look backward and forward through queer history, drawing on a creative partnership that has spent years pulling apart the American songbook and rebuilding it in more unruly forms.
The fall’s visual-art centerpiece, “50 Years of PUNK,” opens October 17. Curated by Ki Smith and PUNK magazine cofounder John Holmstrom, the free exhibition marks half a century since the publication first appeared in 1976 and helped codify the imagery and attitude of New York’s downtown scene.
Founded by Holmstrom, Ged Dunn, and Legs McNeil, PUNK championed the Ramones before their debut album arrived and covered Blondie early in the band’s ascent. Its mash-up of interviews, comics, photography, satire, and hand-drawn graphics supplied an aesthetic vocabulary for a movement that distrusted polish on principle. The exhibition brings together five decades of covers and artwork by contributors including Roberta Bayley, R. Crumb, Shepard Fairey, GODLIS, Chris Stein, Joey Ramone, and Holmstrom. It remains on view through November 29.
On December 12, LaGrangeville resident Vinny DePonto brings “Mind Reader” to Hudson Hall. The show combines audience participation, psychological techniques, and theatrical illusion to investigate attention, suggestion, and how readily the mind can be steered. (We profiled DePonto last year.)
“Mind Reader” also occupies an important place in DePonto’s artistic development. While touring the show in 2016, he connected with producer Eva Price and began imagining a more narrative-driven production. That project eventually became the acclaimed “Mindplay,” which blended feats of mentalism with DePonto’s personal experiences of anxiety, grief, and memory and toured nationally before an Off-Broadway run. His return to “Mind Reader” offers Hudson audiences a look at the work from which that larger theatrical vision emerged.
Elsewhere, Hudson Hall’s season includes the ninth Hudson Jazz Festival, October 2–4; the Hudson debut of Kaleidoscope Chamber Collective; countertenor Aryeh Nussbaum Cohen; and California bluegrass band AJ Lee & Blue Summit. December brings the student exhibition “Community Canvas” and the annual Kwanzaa Umoja Community Celebration with Operation Unite NY.
Tickets go on sale August 16 at 10am at Hudsonhall.org.
