‘Grandiloquent’
Through Feb. 8 at Lucille Lortel Theater, 121 Christopher Street, Manhattan; lortel.org.
Wordplay can be fun, funny, even punny. But Gary Gulman takes it to another level with an acuity that few other stand-ups can match. Anyone who saw his 2016 performance on “Conan” in which he imagined a documentary on how the states got their abbreviations can attest to that.
Gulman’s awareness of himself and the world around him is also pretty peerless, as seen in his specials “The Great Depresh,” from 2019, and “Born on 3rd Base,” from 2023. For his new Off Broadway show, “Grandiloquent,” he combines his skills to offer a sort of Rosetta Stone to what makes him tick as both a comedian and a person. Over the course of 75 minutes, he explores his love of language, delves into his relationships with friends, family and strangers, and probes the anxiety underneath it all.
To get tickets, which start at $58, and showtimes for this five-week run, visit the theater’s website. SEAN L. McCARTHY
Pop & Rock
Pahua
Jan. 10 at 8 p.m. at Public Records, 233 Butler Street, Brooklyn; publicrecords.nyc.
Across her career, the singer and producer Paulina Sotomayor has fed an omnivorous, culture-spanning musical appetite. The Mexico City native learned to sing in the regional Mexican tradition of mariachi and performed with the folk-rock band Jefes del Desierto. She later teamed up with her brother Raul, a producer and percussionist, to create electronic dance music inflected with the syncopated rhythms of Colombian cumbia and Peruvian chicha. Now performing solo under the name Pahua, Sotomayor synthesizes her influences in richly textured folktronica, anchoring fluttering woodwinds and polyrhythmic percussion with thudding, dance-floor-ready beats.
At Friday’s performance, organized by the nonprofit World Music Institute, Pahua will share a bill with Willy Soul, a founder of the globally minded, funk-forward party series Funky Seshwa. Tickets are $30.90 on dice.fm. OLIVIA HORN
Now in its 21st year, Brice Rosenbloom’s Winter Jazzfest has grown into a city-spanning showcase and celebration as restlessly expansive as the music itself. Simply put, there’s no way to catch it all, especially during this weekend’s marathon nights in Manhattan on Friday and in Brooklyn on Saturday.
One ticket covers sets at myriad clubs, and pleasures abound both nights. On Friday, Nublu hosts the British tuba star Theon Cross (10:45 p.m.), Performance Space presents the singer Michael Mayo (7:30 p.m.) and the bassist and bandleader Linda May Han Oh (11 p.m.), and City Winery is the place to see favorites like Jenny Scheinman (5:15 p.m.) and Orrin Evans’s Captain Black Big Band (10:15 p.m.). On Saturday, Loove Labs in Williamsburg puts on the cream of the downtown avant-garde, including Darius Jones (9:15 p.m.) and the Matthew Shipp Trio (10:30 p.m.). Nearby at the Music Hall of Williamsburg, you can take in crossover joys like Arooj Aftab (9 p.m.) and Makaya McCraven (midnight).
Marathon passes are $85 per night and start at $155 for both nights. You can buy them, as well as stand-alone tickets to the festival’s other concerts, on Winter Jazzfest’s website, where there is more information on all the performances. ALAN SCHERSTUHL
‘Winter Wonder: The Northern Lights Express at Rockefeller Center’
Through Jan. 19 at HERO, 610 Fifth Avenue, Manhattan; hero-nyc.com.
Many families visiting Rockefeller Center lately have been gazing overhead — the 74-foot-tall Christmas tree is on display through Saturday. But the location also provides holiday charms beneath their feet.
HERO, an event site on the center’s lower level, is presenting “Winter Wonder,” a multimedia play space that evokes a journey to the North Pole.
Open Tuesdays through Fridays from noon to 8 p.m., and weekends from 11 a.m. to 7 p.m., “Winter Wonder” offers ticket holders seats on the Northern Lights Express, a passage furnished like a luxury train car, where the windows feature moving imagery of snowy landscapes. Travelers disembark to walk through areas like the glittering Wishing Woods and the Ice Caves, whose soft nooks include audio folklore, animated illustrations and models of Arctic animals.
Little ones can frolic in the Snow Bounce room or in a pit of fake snowballs in the Northern Lights section, where representations of the aurora borealis drift above.
The installation’s Gingerbread Workshop, which invites children to decorate complimentary wooden ornaments or Hanukkah dreidels, also hosts Snowflake Saturdays and Sundays, with face painting and storytelling from 11 a.m. to 1 p.m.
Timed tickets start at $19.96 on weekdays and $28.81 on weekends; children 2 and under are free. Online reservations are advised. LAUREL GRAEBER
Contemporary Dance Festival: Japan + East Asia
Jan. 10-11 at 7:30 p.m. at Japan Society, 333 East 47th Street, Manhattan; japansociety.org.
Japan Society’s short but reliably sharp and frequently surprising Contemporary Dance Festival is a stellar way to start the year in dance. Since 1997, it has also been an important springboard for many East Asian artists, and this year’s program continues that mission with a lineup that features a pair of U.S. premieres and the encore of a recent company debut.
The Taiwanese choreographer I-Ling Liu, who previously danced with Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Company, presents the duet “… and, or …,” which explores the many facets of relationships and their boundaries. The South Korean dance-maker Dae-ho Lee, working with the company C.Sense, brings “Trivial Perfection,” a quartet that builds like a mosaic, piece by piece, into a sweeping work that combines modern dance, hip-hop and martial arts.
And Ruri Mito from Japan contributes “Where we were born”; performed by eight members of Mito’s company, it illustrates the body’s endless complexity. Each night in the theater lobby at 7:05 p.m., Mito furthers her investigation of the human form’s symbolic layers with a 15-minute solo that is free and open to the public.
Tickets are $43 on Japan Society’s website. BRIAN SCHAEFER
Film
A.I. From ‘Metropolis’ to ‘Ex Machina’
Jan. 3-23 at Film Forum, 209 West Houston Street, Manhattan; filmforum.org.
The Film Forum series A.I. From “Metropolis” to “Ex Machina” is subtitled “… or How the Movies Have Been Warning Us for Nearly 100 Years.” It’s true: In Fritz Lang’s 1927 “Metropolis” (on Jan. 20), the rabble-rousing robot that impersonates Maria (both are played by Brigitte Helm) showed early on how circuitry could deceive the masses. On the other hand, what is so poignant in Steven Spielberg’s “A.I.” (on Thursday and Jan. 23), from 2001, is just how much David (Haley Joel Osment), all circuits, yearns to be human.
And did you know that a Spencer Tracy-Katharine Hepburn vehicle opens by thanking I.B.M. for its assistance? In Walter Lang’s “Desk Set” (on Tuesday and Wednesday), from 1957, Tracy plays an engineer who plans to add a computer to the research department where Hepburn’s character works. He soon finds that she isn’t too shabby with calculations herself. Phoebe and Henry Ephron (parents of Nora and her sisters) wrote the script. BEN KENIGSBERG
Last Chance
‘Stereophonic’
Through Jan. 12 at the Golden Theater, Manhattan; stereophonicplay.com. Running time: 3 hours 10 minutes.
David Adjmi’s riveting rock drama with songs by Will Butler, formerly of Arcade Fire, was the hands-down golden ticket during its Off Broadway run at Playwrights Horizons. Now it has won five Tonys, including for best play and best direction. Set in the mid-1970s inside a pair of California recording studios, it follows a British American band on the cusp of fame through the delicate, drawn-out, drug- and sex-fueled process of making their new album. At just over three hours, the play is practically epic length, but every moment of Daniel Aukin’s drum-tight production, which transferred with its impeccable original cast, is worth the time. Read the review.
Critic’s Pick
‘Oh, Mary’
Through June 28 at the Lyceum Theater, Manhattan; ohmaryplay.com. Running time: 1 hour 20 minutes.
Channeling the deliriously outrageous, emphatically queer downtown spirit of Charles Ludlam and his Ridiculous Theatrical Company, this comedy by Cole Escola (“Difficult People”) began as a fizzy Off Broadway hit. Escola stars as a sozzled, stage-struck Mary Todd Lincoln — a very loose cannon largely ignored by her husband (Conrad Ricamora), the president, who is otherwise occupied with assorted sexual exploits and the bothersome Civil War. Read the review.
Critic’s Pick
‘Hell’s Kitchen’
At the Shubert Theater, Manhattan; hellskitchen.com. Running time: 2 hours 30 minutes.
Alicia Keys’s own coming-of-age is the inspiration for this jukebox musical, which won two Tonys. Studded with Keys’s songs, including “Girl on Fire,” “Fallin’” and “Empire State of Mind,” it’s the story of a 17-year-old girl (Maleah Joi Moon, the winner for best actress) in the Hell’s Kitchen neighborhood of Manhattan, growing into an artist. Directed by Michael Greif, the show has a book by Kristoffer Diaz and choreography by Camille A. Brown. Read the review.
‘The Outsiders’
At the Bernard B. Jacobs Theater, Manhattan; outsidersmusical.com. Running time: 2 hours 25 minutes.
Rival gangs in a musical who aren’t the Sharks and the Jets? Here they’re the Greasers and the Socs, driven by class enmity just as they were in S.E. Hinton’s 1967 young adult novel and Francis Ford Coppola’s 1983 film. Set in a version of Tulsa, Okla., where guys have names like Ponyboy and Sodapop, this new adaptation is the show with the rainstorm rumble you’ve heard about. It won four Tonys, including best musical and best direction, by Danya Taymor. With a book by Adam Rapp with Justin Levine, it has music and lyrics by Jamestown Revival (Jonathan Clay and Zach Chance) and Levine. Read the review.
Critic’s Pick
‘Egon Schiele: Living Landscapes’
Through Jan. 13 at Neue Galerie, 1048 Fifth Avenue, Manhattan; neuegalerie.org.
This stirring, deeply engrossing show of about 60 works acquaints us with a long-hidden part of Schiele’s career. At a time when the Austro-Hungarian empire was in its final years, he turned to landscape 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 ahead of him did not look like Cézanne’s Arcadian scenes of bathers or Matisse’s views of sunny hotel rooms in Nice. It did not support the modernist belief that artists could create a new world and view historical change as a sign of progress. The world that was coming was dark, unrelievedly so, and Schiele deserves credit for refusing to pretend otherwise. Read the review.
Critic’s Pick
‘Elizabeth Catlett: A Black Revolutionary Artist and All That It Implies’
Through Jan. 19 at Brooklyn Museum, 200 Eastern Parkway; brooklynmuseum.org.
This expansive and exhilarating retrospective, which traces Elizabeth Catlett’s remarkable life and career, places her radical politics front and center. There are other ways to frame the artist and activist — for instance, that she never got her due from the mainstream art world — but the organizers go to the essence, focusing without euphemism on her mission as she understood it. Across her work, we get eyes and fists raised, mothers cradling children, portrayals of heroes like Sojourner Truth or Frederick Douglass; but also sharp angles, volumetric contrasts, eerie negative spaces. Read the review.
‘Siena: The Rise of Painting, 1300-1350’
Through Jan. 26 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1000 Fifth Avenue, Manhattan; metmuseum.org.
This magnificent glow-in-the-dark exhibition is a visual event of pure 24-karat beauty and a multileveled scholarly coup. On both counts, we’ll be lucky if the season brings us anything like its equal. It is rare in other ways too. As a major survey of early Italian religious art, it’s a kind of show we once saw routinely in our big museums, but now rarely do. Read the review.
