‘Grandiloquent’
Via Feb. 8 at Lucille Lortel Theater, 121 Christopher Road, Manhattan; lortel.org.
Wordplay might be enjoyable, humorous, even punny. However Gary Gulman takes it to a different degree with an acuity that few different stand-ups can match. Anybody who noticed his 2016 efficiency on “Conan” during which he imagined a documentary on how the states bought their abbreviations can attest to that.
Gulman’s consciousness of himself and the world round him can also be fairly peerless, as seen in his specials “The Nice Depresh,” from 2019, and “Born on third Base,” from 2023. For his new Off Broadway present, “Grandiloquent,” he combines his expertise to supply a kind of Rosetta Stone to what makes him tick as each a comic and an individual. Over the course of 75 minutes, he explores his love of language, delves into his relationships with buddies, household and strangers, and probes the nervousness beneath all of it.
To get tickets, which begin at $58, and showtimes for this five-week run, go to the theater’s web site. SEAN L. McCARTHY
Pop & Rock
Pahua
Jan. 10 at 8 p.m. at Public Information, 233 Butler Road, Brooklyn; publicrecords.nyc.
Throughout her profession, the singer and producer Paulina Sotomayor has fed an omnivorous, culture-spanning musical urge for food. The Mexico Metropolis native realized to sing within the regional Mexican custom of mariachi and carried out with the folk-rock band Jefes del Desierto. She later teamed up along with her brother Raul, a producer and percussionist, to create digital dance music inflected with the syncopated rhythms of Colombian cumbia and Peruvian chicha. Now performing solo below the identify Pahua, Sotomayor synthesizes her influences in richly textured folktronica, anchoring fluttering woodwinds and polyrhythmic percussion with thudding, dance-floor-ready beats.
At Friday’s efficiency, organized by the nonprofit World Music Institute, Pahua will share a invoice with Willy Soul, a founding father of the globally minded, funk-forward celebration collection Funky Seshwa. Tickets are $30.90 on cube.fm. OLIVIA HORN
Jazz
Winter Jazzfest
Jan. 9-15 at varied places in Manhattan and Brooklyn; winterjazzfest.com.
Now in its twenty first yr, Brice Rosenbloom’s Winter Jazzfest has grown right into a city-spanning showcase and celebration as restlessly expansive because the music itself. Merely put, there’s no technique to catch all of it, particularly throughout this weekend’s marathon nights in Manhattan on Friday and in Brooklyn on Saturday.
One ticket covers units at myriad golf equipment, and pleasures abound each nights. On Friday, Nublu hosts the British tuba star Theon Cross (10:45 p.m.), Efficiency House presents the singer Michael Mayo (7:30 p.m.) and the bassist and bandleader Linda Could Han Oh (11 p.m.), and Metropolis Vineyard is the place to see favorites like Jenny Scheinman (5:15 p.m.) and Orrin Evans’s Captain Black Massive Band (10:15 p.m.). On Saturday, Loove Labs in Williamsburg places on the cream of the downtown avant-garde, together with Darius Jones (9:15 p.m.) and the Matthew Shipp Trio (10:30 p.m.). Close by on the Music Corridor of Williamsburg, you may absorb crossover joys like Arooj Aftab (9 p.m.) and Makaya McCraven (midnight).
Marathon passes are $85 per evening and begin at $155 for each nights. You should buy them, in addition to stand-alone tickets to the competition’s different live shows, on Winter Jazzfest’s web site, the place there’s extra info on all of the performances. ALAN SCHERSTUHL
‘Winter Surprise: The Northern Lights Categorical at Rockefeller Heart’
Via Jan. 19 at HERO, 610 Fifth Avenue, Manhattan; hero-nyc.com.
Many households visiting Rockefeller Heart recently have been gazing overhead — the 74-foot-tall Christmas tree is on show via Saturday. However the location additionally gives vacation charms beneath their toes.
HERO, an occasion website on the middle’s decrease degree, is presenting “Winter Surprise,” a multimedia play area that evokes a journey to the North Pole.
Open Tuesdays via Fridays from midday to eight p.m., and weekends from 11 a.m. to 7 p.m., “Winter Surprise” presents ticket holders seats on the Northern Lights Categorical, a passage furnished like a luxurious practice automobile, the place the home windows characteristic shifting imagery of snowy landscapes. Vacationers disembark to stroll via areas just like the glittering Wishing Woods and the Ice Caves, whose gentle nooks embrace audio folklore, animated illustrations and fashions of Arctic animals.
Little ones can frolic within the Snow Bounce room or in a pit of faux snowballs within the Northern Lights part, the place representations of the aurora borealis drift above.
The set up’s Gingerbread Workshop, which invitations youngsters to brighten complimentary picket ornaments or Hanukkah dreidels, additionally hosts Snowflake Saturdays and Sundays, with face portray and storytelling from 11 a.m. to 1 p.m.
Timed tickets begin at $19.96 on weekdays and $28.81 on weekends; youngsters 2 and below are free. On-line reservations are suggested. LAUREL GRAEBER
Modern Dance Competition: Japan + East Asia
Jan. 10-11 at 7:30 p.m. at Japan Society, 333 East forty seventh Road, Manhattan; japansociety.org.
Japan Society’s brief however reliably sharp and incessantly shocking Modern Dance Competition is a stellar technique to begin the yr in dance. Since 1997, it has additionally been an vital springboard for a lot of East Asian artists, and this yr’s program continues that mission with a lineup that encompasses a pair of U.S. premieres and the encore of a current firm debut.
The Taiwanese choreographer I-Ling Liu, who beforehand danced with Invoice T. Jones/Arnie Zane Firm, presents the duet “… and, or …,” which explores the various sides of relationships and their boundaries. The South Korean dance-maker Dae-ho Lee, working with the corporate C.Sense, brings “Trivial Perfection,” a quartet that builds like a mosaic, piece by piece, right into a sweeping work that mixes trendy dance, hip-hop and martial arts.
And Ruri Mito from Japan contributes “The place we had been born”; carried out by eight members of Mito’s firm, it illustrates the physique’s infinite complexity. Every evening within the theater foyer at 7:05 p.m., Mito furthers her investigation of the human type’s symbolic layers with a 15-minute solo that’s free and open to the general public.
Tickets are $43 on Japan Society’s web site. BRIAN SCHAEFER
Movie
A.I. From ‘Metropolis’ to ‘Ex Machina’
Jan. 3-23 at Movie Discussion board, 209 West Houston Road, Manhattan; filmforum.org.
The Movie Discussion board collection A.I. From “Metropolis” to “Ex Machina” is subtitled “… or How the Films Have Been Warning Us for Practically 100 Years.” It’s true: In Fritz Lang’s 1927 “Metropolis” (on Jan. 20), the rabble-rousing robotic that impersonates Maria (each are performed by Brigitte Helm) confirmed early on how circuitry might deceive the lots. However, what’s so poignant in Steven Spielberg’s “A.I.” (on Thursday and Jan. 23), from 2001, is simply how a lot David (Haley Joel Osment), all circuits, yearns to be human.
And do you know {that a} Spencer Tracy-Katharine Hepburn car opens by thanking I.B.M. for its help? In Walter Lang’s “Desk Set” (on Tuesday and Wednesday), from 1957, Tracy performs an engineer who plans so as to add a pc to the analysis division the place Hepburn’s character works. He quickly finds that she isn’t too shabby with calculations herself. Phoebe and Henry Ephron (mother and father of Nora and her sisters) wrote the script. BEN KENIGSBERG
Final Probability
‘Stereophonic’
Via Jan. 12 on the Golden Theater, Manhattan; stereophonicplay.com. Operating time: 3 hours 10 minutes.
David Adjmi’s riveting rock drama with songs by Will Butler, previously of Arcade Hearth, was the hands-down golden ticket throughout its Off Broadway run at Playwrights Horizons. Now it has received 5 Tonys, together with for greatest play and greatest course. Set within the mid-Seventies inside a pair of California recording studios, it follows a British American band on the cusp of fame via the fragile, drawn-out, drug- and sex-fueled course of of constructing their new album. At simply over three hours, the play is virtually epic size, however each second of Daniel Aukin’s drum-tight manufacturing, which transferred with its impeccable authentic solid, is well worth the time. Learn the evaluation.
Critic’s Decide
‘Oh, Mary’
Via June 28 on the Lyceum Theater, Manhattan; ohmaryplay.com. Operating time: 1 hour 20 minutes.
Channeling the deliriously outrageous, emphatically queer downtown spirit of Charles Ludlam and his Ridiculous Theatrical Firm, this comedy by Cole Escola (“Tough Folks”) started as a fizzy Off Broadway hit. Escola stars as a sozzled, stage-struck Mary Todd Lincoln — a really free cannon largely ignored by her husband (Conrad Ricamora), the president, who’s in any other case occupied with assorted sexual exploits and the bothersome Civil Battle. Learn the evaluation.
Critic’s Decide
‘Hell’s Kitchen’
On the Shubert Theater, Manhattan; hellskitchen.com. Operating time: 2 hours half-hour.
Alicia Keys’s personal coming-of-age is the inspiration for this jukebox musical, which received two Tonys. Studded with Keys’s songs, together with “Lady on Hearth,” “Fallin’” and “Empire State of Thoughts,” it’s the story of a 17-year-old woman (Maleah Joi Moon, the winner for greatest actress) within the Hell’s Kitchen neighborhood of Manhattan, rising into an artist. Directed by Michael Greif, the present has a guide by Kristoffer Diaz and choreography by Camille A. Brown. Learn the evaluation.
‘The Outsiders’
On the Bernard B. Jacobs Theater, Manhattan; outsidersmusical.com. Operating time: 2 hours 25 minutes.
Rival gangs in a musical who aren’t the Sharks and the Jets? Right here they’re the Greasers and the Socs, pushed by class enmity simply as they had been in S.E. Hinton’s 1967 younger grownup novel and Francis Ford Coppola’s 1983 movie. Set in a model of Tulsa, Okla., the place guys have names like Ponyboy and Sodapop, this new adaptation is the present with the rainstorm rumble you’ve heard about. It received 4 Tonys, together with greatest musical and greatest course, by Danya Taymor. With a guide by Adam Rapp with Justin Levine, it has music and lyrics by Jamestown Revival (Jonathan Clay and Zach Probability) and Levine. Learn the evaluation.
Critic’s Decide
‘Egon Schiele: Dwelling Landscapes’
Via Jan. 13 at Neue Galerie, 1048 Fifth Avenue, Manhattan; neuegalerie.org.
This stirring, deeply engrossing present of about 60 works acquaints us with a long-hidden a part of Schiele’s profession. At a time when the Austro-Hungarian empire was in its last years, he turned to panorama as if to reconstitute a disintegrating world. It’s telling that he conceived of his scenes in clearly delineated horizontal bars that give sky, earth and the Danube River an unshakable, marble-like solidity. The world that lay forward of him didn’t seem like Cézanne’s Arcadian scenes of bathers or Matisse’s views of sunny lodge rooms in Good. It didn’t assist the modernist perception that artists might create a brand new world and think about historic change as an indication of progress. The world that was coming was darkish, unrelievedly so, and Schiele deserves credit score for refusing to fake in any other case. Learn the evaluation.
Critic’s Decide
‘Elizabeth Catlett: A Black Revolutionary Artist and All That It Implies’
Via Jan. 19 at Brooklyn Museum, 200 Jap Parkway; brooklynmuseum.org.
This expansive and exhilarating retrospective, which traces Elizabeth Catlett’s exceptional life and profession, locations her radical politics entrance and heart. There are different methods to border the artist and activist — as an example, that she by no means bought her due from the mainstream artwork world — however the organizers go to the essence, focusing with out euphemism on her mission as she understood it. Throughout her work, we get eyes and fists raised, moms cradling youngsters, portrayals of heroes like Sojourner Reality or Frederick Douglass; but additionally sharp angles, volumetric contrasts, eerie unfavourable areas. Learn the evaluation.
‘Siena: The Rise of Portray, 1300-1350’
Via Jan. 26 on the Metropolitan Museum of Artwork, 1000 Fifth Avenue, Manhattan; metmuseum.org.
This magnificent glow-in-the-dark exhibition is a visible occasion of pure 24-karat magnificence and a multileveled scholarly coup. On each counts, we’ll be fortunate if the season brings us something like its equal. It’s uncommon in different methods too. As a serious survey of early Italian spiritual artwork, it’s a sort of present we as soon as noticed routinely in our huge museums, however now not often do. Learn the evaluation.
