Things to do in new york september 2022

Looking for something to do in New York? Follow Gabe Mollica on a journey into his past, or let Omari Wiles draw you inside New York’s underground ballroom scene.

Comedy | Music | Kids | Dance | Theater | Art

Comedy

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Gabe Mollica

Through Nov. 12 at SoHo Playhouse, 15 Vandam Street, Manhattan; sohoplayhouse.com.

Gabe Mollica grew up in Garden City, N.Y., but his first time telling jokes onstage happened thousands of miles away in Edinburgh. Mollica recounts this seminal moment in his one-hander, “Solo: A Show About Friendship,” which was at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe this summer and is now making its Off Broadway debut at SoHo Playhouse.

The New York Times critic Jason Zinoman saw Mollica in September at Q.E.D. and tweeted that his show was “sweet not sappy, intricate, Birbiglian storytelling.” It’s an apt description for “Solo,” in which Mollica wonders why he has more bros than friends at age 30, investigates his school years in search of answers, and uncovers more than he bargained for. Each night’s performance will begin with an opener; the comedians assuming that duty this weekend are Alison Leiby (Friday) and Raanan Hershberg (Saturday). Tickets for the shows, which run from Wednesday to Saturday at 9 p.m. through Nov. 12, are $30 and available through SoHo Playhouse’s website. SEAN L. McCARTHY

Music

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Pop & Rock

Let’s Eat Grandma

Nov. 4 at 8 p.m. at Webster Hall, 125 East 11th Street, Manhattan; websterhall.com.

When Let’s Eat Grandma released its first album, the duo behind it — Jenny Hollingworth and Rosa Walton — were both 17. The combination of their youth and the whimsical bent of their lyrics led some to regard them as a novelty act, an interpretation that overlooked the complexity and vibrancy of their music, which they then described as “psychedelic sludge-pop.” Now 23, Hollingworth and Walton are on tour behind their group’s third album, “Two Ribbons,” a collection of 10 songs released in April that hones their vision of grand, glimmering electro-pop. With lyrics that wade through evolving friendships and the loss of loved ones, the record provides an apt soundtrack for both dancing and crying.

Come prepared to do both on Friday when Hollingworth and Walton will play their first New York show in four years at Webster Hall. Their label mate, the indie-pop singer Julien Chang, will open. Tickets start at $26.50 and are available at axs.com. OLIVIA HORN

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Classical

Music Future Vol. 9

Nov. 5 at 7:30 p.m. at Zankel Hall, 881 Seventh Avenue, Manhattan; carnegiehall.org.

On Saturday night at Zankel Hall, the Japanese composer, pianist and conductor Joe Hisaishi — famed for his original scores for films by Hayao Miyazaki — will oversee the U.S. premiere of his “2 Dances for Large Ensemble.” Also on the bill will be “Roots, Pulses,” a piece for chamber orchestra by the American composer Nico Muhly, who, in addition to operas, concertos and chamber music, has also written music for films like “The Reader” and “Gift of Fire.”

Musicians on hand will include members of the Bang on a Can All Stars, as well as alumni from its summer festivals. (And, along with the violist Nadia Sirota, Muhly will play piano on selections from his piece “Drones & Viola.”) Even if you haven’t been keeping up with Muhly’s prodigious catalog — or streaming Hisaishi’s past collaborations with Miyazaki on HBO Max — this evening will offer a chance to admire composers who are mutually gifted in the art of the soundtrack. Tickets start at $59 and are available at Carnegie Hall’s website. SETH COLTER WALLS

Kids

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‘Menagerie Matinee’

Nov. 5 at 2 p.m. at the David H. Koch Theater, Lincoln Center, Manhattan; davidhkochtheater.com.

Insects and four-legged creatures can be marvelous movers, often fast on their feet. So are the members of the Paul Taylor Dance Company, who will salute — and sometimes embody — parts of the animal kingdom on Saturday.

That’s when young audiences can enjoy “Menagerie Matinee,” featuring music played by the Orchestra of St. Luke’s. During Taylor’s “Gossamer Gallants,” shiny green female bugs entice unwitting male houseflies. (Gender dynamics in the insect world don’t usually favor the guys.)

Several more species will be celebrated next in Prokofiev’s musical tale “Peter and the Wolf,” narrated by the actress Vanessa Williams. Then “Diggity,” another Taylor classic, will conclude the program, as the performers gambol (and finally bark) among metal cutouts of dogs, designed by the artist Alex Katz.

An optional after-party will include face painting, refreshments, meetings with the dancers and the opportunity to learn some signature moves. Tickets to the performance start at $15; after-party reservations, sold separately, at $40.

Musical exploration will also await children on Saturday at Carnegie Hall, where the Weill Music Institute will offer its free Fall Family Day: String Fling. LAUREL GRAEBER

Dance

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Les Ballet Afrik

Nov. 5-6 at 7:30 p.m. at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, 1071 Fifth Avenue, Manhattan; guggenheim.org.

The acclaimed 1990 documentary “Paris Is Burning” offered an outsider’s portrait of the lively New York drag ball scene, created and inhabited primarily by Black and brown gay men and trans women. It also introduced many viewers to the competitive, improvisational dance form known as voguing. In a nod to that film, but now from an insider’s perspective, the choreographer and longtime ballroom denizen Omari Wiles presents “New York Is Burning,” commissioned by the Guggenheim’s Works & Process series, on Saturday and Sunday.

The exuberant members of Wiles’s company, Les Ballet Afrik, vogue with wit, flair and dramatic vitality while incorporating additional house dance styles and retaining voguing’s political essence, as a vehicle of self-expression for a marginalized community. The work was set to open in 2020 and has evolved in the two and a half years since the pandemic began. This premiere is long overdue but well worth the wait. Tickets start at $5 and are available on the Guggenheim’s website. BRIAN SCHAEFER

Theater

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Critic’s Pick

‘A Strange Loop'

At the Lyceum Theater, Manhattan; strangeloopmusical.com. Running time: 1 hour 45 minutes.

In Michael R. Jackson’s surreal and comic Pulitzer Prize winner, which won the 2022 Tony Award for best musical, a young, Black, queer artist working as a Broadway usher wrestles with the myriad thoughts in his head — about sex and acceptance, religion and identity — as he tries to write what he calls a self-referential musical. Starring an endearing Jaquel Spivey in his Broadway debut. Read the review.

Critic’s Pick

‘Hadestown’

At the Walter Kerr Theater, Manhattan; hadestown.com. Running time: 2 hrs. and 30 min.

Anaïs Mitchell’s jazz-folk musical about the mythic young lovers Eurydice and Orpheus won eight Tonys in 2019, including best musical, and picked up a cult following along the way. Rachel Chavkin’s splendidly designed production takes audiences on a glorious road to hell. Read the review.

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Critic’s Pick

‘Six’

At the Brooks Atkinson Theater, Manhattan; sixonbroadway.com. Running time: 1 hour 20 minutes.

The half-dozen wives of Henry VIII recount their marriages pop-concert style — divorces, beheadings and all —in Toby Marlow and Lucy Moss’s upbeat musical, which has an all-female cast and an all-female band. It also now has a 2022 Tony Award for best original score, and another for Gabriella Slade’s instantly iconic costumes. Read the review.

Critic’s Pick

‘Into the Woods’

Through Jan. 8 at the St. James Theater, Manhattan; intothewoodsbway.com. Running time: 2 hours 45 minutes.

Lear deBessonet’s buzzy revival of James Lapine and Stephen Sondheim’s fairy-tale mash-up was a triumph at New York City Center Encores! this spring. Its cast teems with Broadway stars, including Brian d’Arcy James as the Baker, Sara Bareilles as the Baker’s Wife, Phillipa Soo as Cinderella, Patina Miller as the Witch, Gavin Creel as the Wolf and Joshua Henry as Rapunzel’s Prince. Fan favorite in the making: the winsome cow puppet Milky White. (Onstage at the St. James Theater. Limited run ends Oct. 16.) Read the review.

Art & Museums

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Last Chance

‘Bernd & Hilla Becher’

Through Nov. 6 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1000 Fifth Avenue, Manhattan; metmuseum.org.

This fascinating, frankly gorgeous retrospective of a German couple who made some of the most influential art photos of the last half-century gives an overall impression of lightness, of delightful order, even sometimes of gentle comedy, though the subjects of the hundreds of images on display include cooling towers, blast furnaces and manufacturing plants. By parroting the grammar of technical imagery, without actually achieving any technical goals, their photos seem to loosen technology’s moorings. By collecting water towers the way someone else might collect cookie jars, they cut industry down to size. What made the Bechers different from their peers is that they did their mimicking from the inside: They used the language of advanced photographic technology to inhabit the technophilic world they portrayed. The just-the-facts-ma’am objectivity of their images is only achieved through serious photographic artifice. Read the review.

Critic’s Pick

‘Really Free: The Radical Art of Nellie Mae Rowe’

Through Jan. 1 at the Brooklyn Museum, 200 Eastern Parkway; brooklynmuseum.org.

If you’ve paid any attention to that roiling mass of talent variously known over the past century as folk, naïve, primitive, Art Brut, self-taught or outsider, chances are you’ve come across the infectious creations of Nellie Mae Rowe. They rivet the eye with bright, dense colors, ingenious patterns and thickets of line and buoyant, sometimes bulbous figures and animals. The full force of her achievement is revealed as never before in “Really Free,” the most extensive survey of her work yet realized. With over 100 of her paintings on paper, several sewn dolls (and one chewing gum sculpture) as well as two amazing reimaginings (not replicas) of her home and yard recently constructed for a hybrid documentary-feature, the show fills the museum’s Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art. Altogether, it propels Rowe’s art into the upper echelons of the self-taught canon with the likes of Martín Ramírez, Bill Traylor and James Castle, where female artists are rare. Read the review.

Critic’s Pick

‘The Tudors: Art and Majesty in Renaissance England’

Through Jan. 8 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1000 Fifth Avenue; metmuseum.org.

Delayed two years by the pandemic, “The Tudors” is handsome, classical, full of prestigious loans, and maybe a little royalist for its own good. Portraits by mostly foreign artists, Hans Holbein first among them, chart England’s most mythologized dynasty from Henry VII, who won the crown at the Battle of Bosworth in 1485, to Elizabeth I, whom we see transform from a marriageable young monarch to a white-faced virgin queen. More compelling than the paintings are the tapestries, furniture and metalwork of the same era: a massive bronze candelabrum commissioned by Cardinal Thomas Wolsey, giant tapestries of religious strife that Henry VIII commissioned from Antwerp, and intricate cloaks and field armor embellished with the Tudor rose. Read the review.